Semiotics and meaning in the aims of education in Greece
pp. 107-120
in: Inna Semetsky (ed), Edusemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
The crisis pertaining to values appears to pervade the world, and in the midst of this crisis education is called upon to undertake a significant task of promoting a positive transformation of culture. Education based on values needs to become a top priority worldwide. The chapter presents the research demonstrating a semiotic approach to the relationship between the aims of education in Greece and, specifically, paideia as cultural education. Three texts are analyzed: two Greek legal texts and the Delors Report to UNESCO. Given the nature of the texts, the chapter follows some current approaches to legal semiotics as influenced by Greimas' model of structural semantics and sociosemiotics. A sociosemiotic perspective is not limited to the formal analytical approach, but examines texts as an integral part of the larger group of material, socioeconomic, and political factors. The texts represent two different meaning systems and two different communication systems as being situated in two different socioeconomic and political contexts. The research findings discover the existence of correspondences between the texts in terms of the relations of transformation.