THE ETHICS OF THE PONTOON: THE ECOLOGICAL PARADIGM AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES OF EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF PERMANENT CRISIS

Abstract

Background. The article addresses the question of what sustains the viability of education under conditions in which crisis has ceased to be an exception and has become the everyday backdrop to the existence of educational systems. The classical modern model of education was built upon the logic of the wall — a stable institution whose strength rested on the immovability of its supports; yet it was precisely this immovability that turned into fragility in the face of pandemics, climatic shifts, and the devastations of war. In response to this limit, the author proposes the image of the pontoon — a temporary crossing whose stability derives not from a foundation but from the mutual interlinkage of equal elements. The research problem emerges at the intersection of two paradigms that are usually examined separately: the ecological paradigm of education, which conceives of learning by analogy with complex social-ecological systems, and the democratic tradition, which emphasises participation and distributed responsibility. The aim of the article is to provide a conceptual grounding for the ethics of the pontoon as a principle that unites an ecological understanding of resilience with a democratic understanding of value. Methods. The methodological basis of the study combines a philosophical-hermeneutic approach with the conceptual apparatus of the theory of social-ecological systems. The hermeneutic lens makes it possible to interpret education as a space of meaning-making, in which resilience is inseparable from a community's capacity to jointly interpret its own experience. The theory of social-ecological systems supplies the conceptual framework for describing the adaptability, feedback loops, and emergent restoration of educational systems. The ethical component of the analysis draws on the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, for which the common good and responsibility towards others constitute a form of human self-realisation. This threefold combination forms a perspective that allows the inner unity of the ecological and democratic dimensions of education to come into view. Results. The study has shown that the model of education as a protective wall has exhausted itself, since its stability rested on resistance to change rather than on adaptability. The logic of the pontoon, by contrast, construes resilience as a dynamic property that arises from the connectedness of participants and is formed in the process of passing jointly through trials. The analysis revealed that the pontoon structure holds together by the same principle as a democratic community — through the distributed mutual responsibility of many equal elements. Democratic values thus appear not as an external norm but as an internal condition of the ecological resilience of education, without which adaptability degenerates into a purposeless technical adjustment. The Ukrainian experience of education under the conditions of war, and in particular the phenomenon of displaced universities, has lent empirical weight to these constructions, demonstrating that the bearer of educational continuity is the bond between people rather than the physical support of an institution. Conclusions. The proposed concept of the ethics of the pontoon makes it possible to overcome the disciplinary separation of the ecological and democratic traditions of conceptualising education, showing that they describe the same reality from different sides. Education in an age of permanent crisis retains its viability when it is arranged as an ecologically adaptive and democratically connected system of distributed responsibility. The ecological and the democratic in education prove to be not merely compatible but mutually necessary: resilience without participation is devoid of purpose, while participation without resilience lacks support. The principal limitation of the study is its predominantly conceptual character, which entails the need for further empirical verification of the proposed model. Promising directions include the development of indicators of pontoon resilience, a comparative analysis of different crisis contexts, and the elaboration of the question of institutional design, which is especially relevant for the post-war reconstruction of education in Ukraine.