Irina Samakhova. Education

Is education a secondary matter?
Irina Samakhova

Publication date: December 4, 2003

About the benefits of Oblomovology

Not long ago, at the Novosibirsk School of Physics and Mathematics at NSU, we conducted an express survey of high school students on the topic “The Role of V.I. Lenin in Russian History.” Young geniuses, collected through subject Olympiads from a vast territory from the Urals to the Far East, for the most part were unable to squeeze out anything more meaningful than “ Lenin was a friend of children .” And here the “genetic memory” of the confused parental generation was more likely to work.

Russian high school students, like aliens, for the most part know nothing about the commandments of the Lord, about the basic question of philosophy, about the Declaration of Human Rights, about “to be or not to be” and about “am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right?”

...I remember the expression of painful bewilderment on the faces of the members of the OblONO commission who checked the experimental class working according to the concept of V.S. Bibler "School of Dialogue of Cultures." The honored teachers were clearly embarrassed not so much by the fact that a seven-year-old student was freely talking about Socrates, but by the first words of the student, which determined the atmosphere of the lesson: “I believe...”

You have to be a big romantic or a hypocrite not to notice that the main purpose of school is not education at all, but the socialization of the younger generation. A certain type of society orders for itself a certain type of socialization.

Now so many of “our people” live in the USA and Canada that, based on their fresh impressions, it is quite easy to get an idea of ​​the American public order. They require citizens who are law-abiding but, on the other hand, active and independent. The first quality is reinforced in school in a way that is disgusting for the majority of “ours” - children are taught to “snitch” on offenders and violators of discipline. Activity and independence are also constantly exercised - Russian children in American schools are at first terribly surprised that teachers persistently solicit their questions. The education system, which requires constant independent writing of abstracts and essays on literally all subjects, at first very confuses “ours,” but they quickly adapt and en masse become the first students (which indicates the still very good genetic potential of the Russian people).

This is not to say that we should blindly copy the American system of school socialization.

It would be good to start by understanding which citizens are preferable for which Russia. Until this issue is clarified, it is necessary to resist with all our might the ongoing “Soviet” unification of the school and support the existence of the already established wide variety of educational institutions - from cadet corps to experimental sites that encourage this very “I believe.” Let parents, at their own responsibility, choose the type of socialization for their own offspring.

The content of education, which is discussed so much, is a secondary matter, no matter how blasphemous it may sound. A healthy and even not very healthy child can, in principle, learn anything, if only he had motivation and efficient teachers. A schoolchild needs a teacher in order to imitate authority - this is the most natural, natural way of transferring knowledge and experience. An adult, meaningful person, whom he wants to imitate, can make any school subject he teaches the main one. Soros, with his “Sorov teachers” program, opened phenomenal source schools in provincial Russia, which for years have been producing talented mathematicians, or chemists, or biologists from ordinary, unselected children (if you search, you will find such “sources” of artists, musicians or athletes). If you are lucky, then in the most ordinary and poor school you can learn something thoroughly, and if you are unlucky with the teachers, then after the elite ten years you will not even know “zhi-shi” and the multiplication table.

And this is just fixable. If necessary, a subject missed at school can be mastered in a few months of lessons with a tutor. The latter can generally be electronic if Russian programmers receive an order to transfer the best methodological developments of subject teachers to floppy disks.

Modern education, based on telecommunications, can be remote and personal - this has already been proven. But there is no way to make socialization “personalized”.

The school ceases to teach the main thing - methods of civilized interaction between the individual and society. General cultural knowledge and rules not instilled in school childhood leave irreparable gaps in the structure of a young person’s “I”.

"Past" history and literature, like secondary subjects, pass by these unfortunates. Moreover, caring people from the Ministry of Education decided to reduce the literature load in graduate classes to two hours a week. One of the Expert experts generally proposes to modernize the program on Russian literature by throwing out “ Oblomov ” from it. And if it were up to me, I would make “bummer studies” the main subject in high school. This is an unsurpassed encyclopedia of Russian non-life , which overcomes us all with terrible force.

Maybe at least the children would have been saved...

Novosibirsk