Alexandra Veselova. Hooligans, surgeons, or UNIVERSAL secondary education?

Hooligans, surgeons, or UNIVERSAL secondary education?
Alexandra Veselova

Date of publication: September 18, 2000

The professor at the department is preparing
not specialists, but educated people.

From a letter from A.N. Veselovsky to E.A. Gin

Why do our children go to school? More precisely, why do we send them there? First of all, of course, so that they do not behave hooliganly on the streets. However, they will still be hooligans, and we know this very well. So, do we want something else from school?

Rotating among his peers, a normal child acquires the knowledge that helps him to be a full-fledged member of the children's community. Scary stories , rhyming teasers and answers to them, words incomprehensible to adults constitute a specific language, as necessary for communication as the ability to make water bombs and spitting tubes with chewed paper. But there is another community. This is a community of adults. And to survive in it, you need to know not only the rules of the road and using the subway. This is why school exists , which gradually introduces the child into the world of adults over the course of ten years. The definition of a school in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia states: “A secondary school is an educational institution aimed at providing students with systematized knowledge of the fundamentals of science, as well as the relevant skills and abilities that are necessary for further professional training and higher education.” . It is “systematized knowledge of the fundamentals of science” (let’s pay attention to the plural) that constitutes the very language of the adult community, into which quotations from literary works, references to historical events and various kinds of terminology are included as organically as in the children’s “greedy-beef, empty chocolate." And only having mastered this language, you can proceed to the next stage of adaptation, that is, “further professional training . ” But this is all an encyclopedia. And although it is big, it is Soviet, and therefore, apparently, it is not a decree for us. Since in practice the situation is somewhat different.

Once upon a time, our secondary education, which only the lazy did not criticize, was truly general . Specialized schools were a rarity, presented in two varieties: language and physics and mathematics. What are they offering to schoolchildren now? What they don’t offer... Schools (or classes) with environmental, economic, biological, humanitarian and other “biases”. Each school considers it its duty to provide children (especially ninth-graders) with a choice of, at a minimum, physics, mathematics and humanities classes , and sometimes also biology, chemistry, medicine, etc. In this way, schools ensure that their classes are “full,” and therefore the workload for teachers. Needless to say, the demographic, as well as economic, situation at the moment is difficult, no improvements are expected, and in order to survive, the school must somehow attract students. With what? The quality of education? But it’s much easier to negotiate with some faculty about the so-called “combined exams” (final exams that count as entrance exams). And of course, in such an intense competition for a student, schools prefer this path. Therefore, they strive for specialization as narrow as possible in order to guarantee admission to a university, at least for only one, even the most unpopular specialty. Here schools meet, first of all, the wishes of parents, who certainly want to see their child at the institute.

To be completely honest, there is another problem here, from a different department. In the current situation in our country, not a single normal parent wants his son to join the army. However, normal sons themselves don’t want either. Because the state of war, I would like to believe, is still unnatural for humans. Leaving aside talk about who is the true son of the fatherland, we admit that there is a problem and it must be solved. Shouldn't we push back the conscription age by at least a year, so as not to force graduates in droves to enter universities, necessarily with a military department, regardless of their own interests?

However, I am not the president or even his advisor. I'm a school teacher. And from my own experience I was convinced that there are few truly talented and brilliant children. And that such real talent will pave the way for itself. But a simply capable child, of which there are many, most often turns out to be capable in several areas at once, if not in all. And we deprive him of the opportunity to demonstrate these abilities, that is, in essence, we deprive him of the opportunity to develop. How many children at 13-14 years old can clearly identify one area of ​​activity that interests them most? And how many of these few can choose one profession even more clearly? Have you ever seen a person who since childhood dreamed of becoming, for example, a systems engineer? It's like dreaming of becoming a champion hurdler. I don't want to say that this is an uninteresting profession. But in order to choose it, you need to know a little more about it than an ordinary student might know. Therefore, in reality, the choice is usually made by parents. And their principle is simple: if you get a “C” in mathematics, it means you’re a humanist, if you get a “C” in the Russian language, it means you’re a mathematician or, at worst, a biologist. Meanwhile, the school curriculum is designed for an average, not an outstanding child, and a “C”, and even more so a “D” in a subject most often just means a lack of interest in this subject, but not ability.

We live in an amazingly beautiful world. Each science expands our knowledge about this world and gives an idea of ​​its beauty and diversity. School subjects cannot be viewed in a narrowly pragmatic way. Mathematics teaches us to comprehend the beauty of logic, and philology teaches us the beauty of illogicality. A foreign language is not only “the opportunity to communicate with foreign partners,” as they say in advertisements for various courses, but also, above all, the knowledge that there is another culture and another, equal, way of communication. From chemistry lessons, a child should learn not only the ban on ingesting sulfuric acid, but also an understanding of the complexity of the world order. In biology lessons - to understand your place in nature, in astronomy - in the entire Universe, in history - in time. Each science is its own area of ​​the unknown, and familiarity with the secrets of the world makes it attractive. A teenager fascinated by these secrets, by the way, is unlikely to want to voluntarily part with this world.

We should also not forget that general biology differs from botany, and Russian literature of the 19th century from the literature of the 20th . And a subject that was not of interest in the 7th grade may become a favorite in the 10th grade. Or it may not happen if in the 10th year they replace it with a course of higher mathematics, where the students will be presented with the university program without any pretense, in the process ensuring them boredom for at least the first two semesters at the institute.

Why do we deceive ourselves and our children by giving them a surrogate specialization, instead of the general education indicated in the matriculation certificate?

After all, this is really a surrogate, because, with rare exceptions, schools do not have a real material and methodological base for more or less professional training. Therefore, they resort to the simplest method - mechanical redistribution of the number of hours. Do we need chemists who cannot write in Russian? Philologists who don’t know what “valency” is? Will it be superfluous for a mathematician to know the history of his country and the content of the novel Anna Karenina ? Should geography become a driver's science?

How many children finish school and, with the help and support of familiar teachers, having difficulty passing combined exams, enter a department they obviously hate, then graduate from that too and go to work in a hated specialty. And all this is done by inertia, because it’s a pity for the wasted time, because it’s scary to take risks and change what you don’t like, but know, for the unknown. But it remained unknown due to the fault of the school and parents.

It seems that there is a way out of this situation. I see it as a return to the system of general education, in the literal sense of the word, institutions, in the restoration of the once quite ramified system of clubs and electives, which died out after the Soviet regime. I would like to believe that we will return to it soon. The school should not prepare a narrow specialist, it should strive to graduate an educated person. And what Academician Veselovsky said about the university department is even more relevant for the school. Because it is not difficult to make a good specialist out of a well-educated person, but it is possible to make an educated person out of a bad specialist only through surgical intervention, because such a specialist is like gumboil.