Vyacheslav Glazychev. The indestructible spirit of enlightenment

Among attempts to define culture, I prefer the one given by Lotman : “culture is a machine designed to preserve old meanings, but due to its fruitful disorder, it generates new meanings.” Few would argue that education is an element of the cultural machine, but its disorder can hardly be called fruitful - the enveloping culture has to compensate for this.

1. Reading the selection in Expert and the responses to it, I can’t help but feel awkward. One could agree with almost every judgment individually, but taken together, in my opinion, they don’t seem to be about that. It’s not about that because the conversation is conducted as if in vitro, regardless of the difficult realities of life.

According to a long-standing, Renaissance tradition, the conversation about education is conducted with a countdown from a more or less intelligible ideal. I prefer to conduct this conversation, firstly, in the plural - not about education, but about formations, and secondly, by ascending from realities. By realities, I mean the actual quality of the educational process, which indeed leaves much to be desired in the sublunary world, and primarily for the reason that the question “why?” remains unanswered.

Why universal secondary education?

Let us leave aside the intellectual self-confidence that education is valuable in itself. Apart from the small number of individuals for whom this is true, education has a clearly defined value, the nature of which is determined by public demand. This demand is naturally differentiated. Roughly speaking, seven-tenths are producers (and at the same time consumers) of goods and services, from whom the ability to: respect a citizen and taxpayer, honor state institutions, manage a family and household, read signs and instructions for using machines and devices is expected. and drugs, monitor the meaning of advertising and soap operas, communicate with others in accordance with generally accepted norms.

Exactly in this sequence.

At the same time, the conviction that it takes 10 or even 12 years to learn all these important things, despite the fact that children in our time begin partly adult life at 13-14 years old, is so deeply rooted that anyone who would dare to say that even eight years would have been enough would have been declared dangerously insane. If we combine supply and demand into a single mental figure, the conclusion will be simple: it really doesn’t matter what kind of school it will be. The school may be old European or American, based on a system of punishments and assessments or on a system of voluntariness and cooperation with the teacher, try to hammer thirty academic subjects into the student, or limit itself to teaching him to use atlases and reference books.

It doesn’t matter which school, but only if the remaining 30% are provided with the opportunity to borrow from the school somewhat more than the required minimum. Then, only to provide three out of ten with a chance of self-realization, and since in the general case it is not known in advance who exactly these three out of ten are, redundancy of the school in relation to the body of basic demand is necessary. This is where the school’s algorithm matters, and we have to admit that the weak American school has an advantage over the stronger European one. By placing the main emphasis on educating citizens and initially giving up on seven out of ten, the American school provides three with much better conditions for personal self-development. Or rather, it could provide it if it were supported by the intellectual resources of the family 1 , as is the case in Russia and partly in Europe, which allows us to still compensate for the idiocy of the school curriculum, overloaded beyond all measure with the products of academic senility. Since in the United States there is usually no such support in the family, importing brains remains the only way out of the situation.

When discussing our subject, it is advisable not to forget that at school one way or another a certain education is given, while almost all learning takes place outside of school: if not in the family, then among peers. Of course, such learning, being voluntary-forced (environmental norms), is much more effective than any attempts to imitate it in classrooms, even if we are talking about competent school methods and teachers who know how to use them.

2. Society or, if you like, civilization places, roughly speaking, a special demand on 20% of the population, and from every three out of ten 2 it expects the ability to easily carry out productive communication with characters representing a different culture, be it the culture of another people or another generation . To do this, it is necessary to master a certain universal language of culture, which we somewhat gradually call global. Relatively speaking, it is assumed that the words “Apollo” or “Luther” evoke approximately similar chains of associations in all members of the group. This group is also subject to an additional requirement - to be able to quickly master new rules of the game both in the productive process and outside it, while maintaining the integrity of the layer or, if you like, belonging to the class.

Higher education is needed to satisfy this demand first and foremost.

Higher school is necessary, first of all, for the reproduction of the national elite, people of “long will”, capable of thinking about a personal career in the context of the fate of the country, which requires long-term socialization, and therefore developed club relations. In our Palestines, Phystech came closest to such a model in its time, which is proven by the successful careers of its graduates in the post-perestroika period.

To ensure this function with some necessary redundancy, three out of every hundred would be enough, and not out of every ten, however, since it is not known in advance who these three are, the democratization of a university is not only a consequence of the spread of democratic mythopoetics, but also a pragmatic expediency. The rigidity of a Western university, where the entire emphasis is placed on the student’s independent work 3 , is ideal in this regard.

Our university, with few exceptions, is absurd. Every sane person has long known that training in functional responsibilities in a particular organization takes place within that organization itself, after receiving a diploma. It is clear that every change of functional position in the same or in a different organization requires retraining. Consequently, modern humanitarian training, capable of attuning a young organism to the relativity of knowledge, to the flexibility of restructuring ideas, is in greatest demand. However, although there are exceptions in our open spaces, general humanities education is lame on all fours, not only in natural science or technical universities, but also in universities.

3. Civilization has a special demand for 10% of the population 4 , needing all types of creative energy: from entomology or nanotechnology to advertising design and ballet. Those few out of a hundred who achieve results feed on the energy of the others and therefore need them, their peers and classmates, first of all. These few will get theirs completely (well, almost completely) regardless of what the school is, especially since there is no school in which there would not be a place for a master eager for self-realization in transmitting his skills to potential followers. If it turns out that in one school there is a place for several masters at the same time and they do not want mutual extermination, such a school comes to the fore - for a while.

I cannot understand why there is a special crisis. All over the world there are unreasonable hopes for education as the key to a career, and there is only one way to temper such hopes - to give higher education to everyone. In our country this will happen even earlier than in the West, since the number of study places is about to equal the number of applicants. Everything happens in the only possible way: since students also have to work, since teachers who are worth anything also have to work outside of higher education in order to ensure a minimally decent existence for themselves, the time spent on all sorts of formal nonsense has been reduced. And this is good. The informal hierarchy of schools based on their quality will finally receive formalized expression - one way or another.

It is more difficult to deal with the ability of a secondary school to provide a certain minimum of education in conditions of the numerical predominance of a degraded family over a normal family. It is all the more difficult that, out of desperation, those in power are trying to rush through this thankless task of the church, whose pedagogical abilities I allow myself to doubt. There is no crisis here yet, there is a certain gloom of the situation, but somehow the general temperature in the hospital can be changed only by one thing - the support of everything that rises above the squalor. This is a feasible task, although thankless.

Notes:

1 At this point, I consider it my duty to take off my hat to the heroism of those teachers who, in spite of everything, do everything to compensate for the lack of constructive participation of the family in the upbringing and education of children, without hope of reward - this was and is, and not so much in the capitals , how many in all sorts of Ruzaevki or Vurnars, which I know firsthand.

2 Not a reservation, since there is another 10%, which will be discussed further.

3 If we consider that in most Western universities there are up to 40 students per teacher, which turns communication between master and apprentice into a farce, then it is quite obvious: the vast majority of students are consumables, necessary to replenish the university budget and are satisfied with receiving diplomas in the second and beyond hundreds of graduates.

4 10% is a convention, of course, in reality it is significantly less, but redundancy here is just as necessary as in the case of the elite.