In the economy

Back to the future

December 7, 2009 Anatoly Bershtein

The state for once was anxious. President Medvedev in the message to the Federal Assembly paid special attention to the our new school project, focusing that it is not just a departmental prerogative, but also the “case of the whole society”. And Prime Minister Putin, taking part in a meeting of the organizing committee on the conduct of the Teacher of the Year, announced the support of young teachers by the state and about the allocation of thousands of grants for half a million rubles for two years. First of all, encouragement may affect those who, after the institute, will go to work on the outskirts of our still immense homeland. This is essentially stimulating distribution. Previously, it was mandatory, although they rode both for "fog and the smell of taiga." Now, it is believed that you can lure “long” or, as they said, a “miner ruble”.

I myself once worked as a teacher, having left for distribution to the remote edges. Voluntarily. These were the best pedagogical years of my life. Moreover, the factor “for range” in these places did not apply to teachers. But they loaded for hours. In the first year I led the history, the foundations of the Soviet state and law (there was such an subject in the eighth grade), literature, English, physical education and singing. Therefore, there was enough money. Although I had to pay for housing myself, otherwise - a free diploma, which was a dream for many, but for me it was the biggest fear and shame: how can you, having left such a pomp, immediately return home and turn into a laughing stock?

Why is this a personal remark? Only to what I know: young teachers left for distribution, not because they went for earnings. Again, I naively note that before and now (although, possibly, to a lesser extent) there are professions in which they go by vocation. These are doctors, teachers, lawyers ... Of course, not only, but I distinguish those that are directly related to the direct help of people.

If the school will remain only for money, go to the distant lands only for a grant, nothing will change significantly. Temporary workers with money will come, constantly glancing at the clock and frantically tearing the calendar sheets, trying to accelerate the end of the deadline. It is the deadline. Suitable word. They will leave him - and go home. And in another profession. Here the money on the grant, God will give, and come in handy.

Why can't people with technological brains understand what can and should be stimulated, creating not only material conditions, but also a creative atmosphere for work, or even simply without interfering? ..

All the teachers and directors of the schools with whom I specially talked to write this article, without saying a word, complained to the arbitrariness of officials, for exorbitant loading of no one needs, which requires a lot of time, for incompetent control. One of them suggested by law to ban information at school. There is one document - a certificate of its end - that’s the whole reporting.

And now every day at least 25 different instructions from various departments come to the e -mail of the school, mainly directly from the educational authorities or from local authorities. For example, there is such a wonderful document “Standard Basic Software Package” (SBPPO), a person specially combined for this at school fills dozens of pages of a special shape about the activities of all equipment at school.

Teachers said (mainly Moscow Hymnasium Teachers) and about the overload of students. In the age of the Internet, it is necessary to change the programs, remove a lot of optional information from there and leave both teachers and students to learn to operate on existing information sources.

The textbooks are full of figures for the production of cast iron and steel, for the production of tanks and rifles, unnecessary actual details, the names of people who have influenced the history of the country are lost in a lot of optional, “elective” names. The student manages to report only in what and how it happened, but there is no time to discuss the question of “why” remains. This is me about history, but approximately the same situation with other objects.

The third problem is personnel. “There are school workers, but there are few teachers,” one of my interlocutors complained. "How do they differ?" - I asked to clarify. And he received the answer: "The teacher, unlike the employee, grows the child, and the subject for him is nothing more than a means." The opinion is probably controversial. In any case, a teacher with almost 35 years of experience immediately objected to: “To educate kindness? This is exactly what the education bursts. Children simply do not know how to think. They do not have a primitive skill of working with facts, they do not know how to retell, establish causal relationships, dispose of space, apply a scale, write competently, after all ... "

This dispute is endless. I remembered him to emphasize: the school is a living, self -developing organism, it is not necessary to load it with regulations.

The school needs not so much modernization as, oddly enough, the return of its status, teachers - their dignity, students - the meaning of education. And grants will always be useful ...

In any branch of “modernization” we will face the same thing: people will be smoked less competent and decent than those who have to directly execute their instructions. Gradually intractable professionals will become replaced and replaced by loyal amateurs and conjuncturers.

How to avoid such a development of events? I do not presume to paint the technological chain of events. But it is clear to me that you need to change the system as a whole. It should be such that the famous “Peter principle” does not work: “In the hierarchical system, any employee rises to the level of his incompetence.”

One of the experts has already called proposals for the “new school” “liberalization of education”. It still seems to me that the liberalization of education can take place not inside the “conservative” model with vertical control-this is still not the “island of Crimea”, but only in parallel with the liberalization of the entire socio-political system.

And this means that somehow the functions and the spirit of bureaucracy should change, which should from now on the process, and not only to control and inspect it.

We must give the school more rights to the responsibility of directors. To date, all planned documentation, staffing, tariffing, curriculum - everything is agreed in the educational authorities, where the number of officials is already more than teachers in a single school.

In fact, modernization is a return to such sophisticatedly open reforms of the 90s, only taking into account the mistakes made, once: the lack of professional examination of pedagogical experiments, innovations, and teaching aids.

There are no universal schemes for the school, there is no one and the same recipe for education and upbringing, there is no one thing that is equally necessary for different people.

For some, the school is a “temple of knowledge”, and for someone a “second house”. For some parents, it is important that their child is well taught and not give a descent, for others-to be addressed humanly, helped to teach to communicate, for the third-a “storage chamber” and the like. They also look for the first teacher - either strict or good. Ideally, when it connects in one person. But we know that this is extremely rare.

Each school has its own strengths, its own special traditions, its own atmosphere: getting along in one, the child can feel extremely uncomfortable in the other.

Each school has a reputation, and let parents choose - this is, in the end, their child, not a state.

The choice is the basis of liberalization. Choice and responsibility for it.

Photos of RIA Novosti