Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of the academic and existential problems of students during the pandemic. The authors conducted sociological surveys among first- and second-year students of a higher educational institution, where they analyze students’ attitudes towards distance learning and identify the most pressing existential problems of students. The authors concluded that during the quarantine period, learning has lost its semantic basis. The reason for this is the inability of the education system to respond to the challenges of the new educational format, as it develops in accordance with the modern technology, as modern pedagogy develops, as a rational system of objective knowledge, and as it does not take into account the internal, value-based meanings of education itself. The authors see a solution to this problem in shifting the emphasis from transferring knowledge to helping students find personal meanings that coincide with the objectives of philosophical practice. The authors give examples of how the techniques of philosophical practice could unlock students’ potential in understanding and solving existential problems.