Philosophical foundations of educational development in Mongolia

Abstract

There has been growing needs to encourage competing thoughts, debates, cooperation and research works that support critical thoughts, ideas, concepts, approaches, doctrines, and philosophies on development of education in Mongolia.
Nowadays, system inquiry is often regarded as systematic approach for educational development. System inquiry consists of three inter-related components including system theory, system philosophy, and system approach. System philosophy explains the universe from system view and employs system thinking as an approach to theoretical and real life problems.
Itgel and his colleagues (2018, 2023, 2024) published serial articles, which put forward solutions to develop education in system approach. One of the main findings of these articles identified Mongolian education vision, values, learners’ profile employing qualitative and quantitative approach. Hence, the current article attempts to give a philosophical explanation to the above-mentioned findings.  
We Mongolians place greater emphasis on the beginning and root of anything as we attempt to identify its true meaning and nature. This can be easily observed in our language, culture and way of thinking. As it is traced back to the beginning of philosophy, we can find three concepts namely “ethos, eidos, praxis”.
This study identified 47 possibilities for interactions of these three concepts. As it is conceptually mapped, “Mongolian education vision” can be coined as “ethos”, “Mongolian education values” can be coined as “eidos” and Mongolian learners’ profile can be coined as “praxis” as they are structured to contain one another. 
Although Mongolian education vision, values, and learners’ profile are identified having their own special characteristics, they are exactly consistent with the topological structure of the global education paradigm. 
Finally, the article offers three possibilities to expand the ideas of this study.