Abstract
The thesis aims to conceptualize the still underdeveloped issue of self-upbringing theory. Self-upbringing, as a central pedagogical topic and a target category of education, has been somewhat paradoxically marginalised in educational sciences for many years.
This paper analyses the possible historical and contemporary reasons for this state of affairs and suggests its likely implications for educational practice. The thesis attempts to alleviate this deficit by making an original contribution to the conceptualization of self-upbringing as an interdisciplinary category.
This conceptualization relates to the broader context of contemporary educational, psychological and philosophical discourse. Self-upbringing is grasped as a sui generis anthropological constant, and some of its specificities are analysed with the help of other anthropological constants, that are the likely cause of the problematic position of self-upbringing in our educational theory and practice.
One of the practically applicable outputs and contributions of this thesis is a comprehensive terminological and explanatory glossary of self-referential words (including their English equivalents), through which the concept of self-upbringing can be captured in a broad interdisciplinary context. This glossary will not only facilitate the study of primary and secondary literature on self-education, i. e. self-knowledge, self-concept, self-system, self-regulation, self-control and other phenomena, but above all it will enable creative work with these concepts, e.g. the creation of mental maps as a means to achieve a higher level of understanding of the complex connections between them.