Academic cheating and imitation in at higher school as an ontological challenge to the education of the XXI century

the problem of academic cheating and the practice of implementing imitations of educational activities in higher education are considered as a fundamental social problem and an ontological challenge that requires rethinking of the essence and significance of education in the XXI century. The purpose of the article is to classify imitative educational practices that take place in a university, to clarify the problems of the causes and consequences of these phenomena, and to determine the possibilities of responding to these challenges both at the level of semantic grounds and in the aspect of practical measures to prevent them. Based on the analysis of Russian and English literature in the field of pedagogy, sociology, social philosophy, social psychology, philosophy of education and other humanitarian disciplines, a conclusion is made about the global nature of imitation practices in higher education in a post-industrial society. There are also attempts to classify and determine the ontological origins and historical and cultural foundations of various types of academic cheating: ghostwriting, compilation of scientific texts, the “copy-paste” phenomenon, artificial methods for increasing the originality of texts, etc. The author relies on an interdisciplinary approach, methods of sociological analysis, principles of humanitarian methodology, structural analysis and application of the methodology of content analysis of texts on social, humanitarian and pedagogical topics.