Translated material
What are we protecting them from?
They say that on the same day, Dmitry Medvedev, who traditionally mentors the creative intelligentsia, intends to meet with Russian children's writers, which indicates that the children's theme has already been raised to a sufficient height. Public opinion is ready to present a whole set of common cliches: art for children needs state support, the state should take care of the appearance of highly artistic works for children, and also in every possible way help children's festivals, theaters, publishing houses, writers and other creators who selflessly give their talent to the service of children , and everything will be fine. The truth of these statements is not in doubt and does not need to be verified.
At the same time, I am convinced that even if the president met with children’s writers, there would be no special large-scale and credible research into how today there is a sphere of consumption of art by children and their parents and what it is all about - art for children, and how a meeting with beauty works on the child's psyche, for this reason it would not have been carried out. All the basic basic concepts about the great role of art in educating the younger generation were made in Soviet times. Today in this area there are continuous questions.
Art for children is now considered low-prestige and, most importantly, not commercial. At the same time, the fact is somehow ignored that if people have even a little money, they first of all spend it on education, upbringing, and entertainment of their children: for example, children’s books are bought better than adults, toys and cartoons are an obligatory part of expenses families with modest incomes, even poor parents pay for lessons in music, languages, drawing, dancing, etc. Parents can't - grandparents get involved. Another thing is that the market for these services is very poorly organized. However, there is hardly any data that allows us to understand what part of the family budget modern parents allocate for all the leisure and educational needs of their children.
The same “Shrek” or “Pirates of the Caribbean” are box office leaders, despite the fact that these are films that children go to see or go to from the age of 12 until they are completely out of childhood and adolescence. Hollywood has long ceased to focus only on children - they make films for family viewing, but in our country many still live with the conviction that for children it is necessary to make films from “children’s life”, with the indispensable participation of the children themselves. Perhaps this is why our films, even if they appear, are doomed to vegetate in the most distant cultural orbits, but their creators persistently insist on the existence of a conspiracy, because of which real art is not allowed to the audience that thirsts for it.
The question remains open about the extent to which children generally perceive art as art, and not just as a set of life situations, because adults generally treat stories in films and novels as real, and simply do not understand aesthetically complex works. Who is involved in the aesthetic preparation of children, who teaches them to understand poetry and appreciate painting (not to mention contemporary art, with its complex language that requires intellectual effort)? In schools, as a rule, such disciplines simply do not exist; the famous music education is aimed at selecting super-professionals, and not at all at preparing enlightened listeners. Perhaps individual enthusiasts exist, there are clubs and schools, they could be listed, but programs for aesthetic development in society are not discussed even at such an amateurish level as religious education programs are discussed.
But this is not the worst thing. It is clear that art for children is, first of all, didactic and edifying. That is, he offers children examples from life, from which it becomes clear to the little ones what is good and what is bad... And this is really a disaster, because, on the one hand, who would dare to honestly tell their own children that, for example, “intelligence and conscience are valued lower in our time than in the last century,” except for the desperate Andrei Malakhov, who, incidentally, is the main educator of the majority of children in our country? On the other hand, why pretend? If adults want their children to succeed in this life, then they need to develop sense of purpose, the ability to be tough, suppress competitors, know their benefits and fight for a place in the sun. Remember how Carlson treated the Kid, who taught him good manners and said that if you choose one of two apples first, you must take the worse one. Carlson then asked the Kid what he would do in such a situation. “I would take something worse,” answered the well-mannered Kid. “Then why are you upset,” Carlson retorted, “that’s what you got!”
It must be said that under Soviet rule, children were really brought up with new values and, as a result, they were brought up - Soviet people formed a new social community, and we today, by and large, enjoy these results.
So we need to be especially careful with the content, that is, with the meaningful part of the message with which we want to address children.
I'm not even saying that the question of who we are raising our children for - for ourselves or for the state - is not addressed at all. Because if for themselves, then why should the state take care of their upbringing, and not the parents themselves? It’s quite natural to choose books for our children ourselves, and if we prefer serial works with bright pink covers, then we want to buy them for our still innocent children, and only then these children force us to throw more fuel into the maw of mass culture again and again. again... But if we are ready to give our children to be raised by the state, then it will prepare them for itself - as soldiers, workers, office workers...
Today you can often hear about a children's television channel, which the powers that be are threatening to open. But here’s what’s interesting: if you ask interested parties to create a rough grid for this channel, what will this channel be doing? What will they show on it, besides the classics and the quite nice “Smeshariki” and “Mountains of Gems”, which, although they are series, are still not endless. Old children's films about the main thing? Shall we revive Karatsupa and four tankers? Elusive Avengers? Are we filming Leo Tolstoy's children's stories? Or will cheap American cartoons take up most of the time? Children, if given a choice, would prefer American cartoons - by the way, we, too, during our Soviet childhood would have preferred them, just as we preferred the magical adventures of Angelica, the romance of Chingachgook and the tomfoolery of Louis de Funes to all the pioneering products of the Gorky studio. .
The conversation again returns to the same thing: if we want to do something, then it would be good to understand what exactly we want to get in the end.