The future as an educational product

One fine day a child comes into the world. For the time being, he is raised in the family. Then kindergarten is included in the education process, followed by school, and so on until the age of 17-18.

Question: what did he do during this most important period of his life? Answer: nothing more than mastering the basic programs of this very life - its meanings, codes, languages, cultural texts, values, norms. Ask a child: “What are you doing now?”, and he will answer: “walking,” “playing,” “watching TV,” “doing nothing.” But we know that while he is engaged in such seemingly frivolous matters, the process of developing his personality is latently going on.

Researchers have been trying for a century without much success to understand: what qualities are inherent in a person from birth, and what qualities does he acquire in the process of upbringing? But even if we accept the extreme point of view that personality is almost completely formed at an early age, it is unlikely that anyone will argue that the conditions in which a child grows up do not affect anything at all.

These conditions are formed, in particular, by the school, where the child is involved in a process with a goal... Here, as they would say in the era of romanticism, my pen freezes in powerlessness. I cannot finish the sentence: the goals of secondary education, which until recently seemed quite obvious, are blurring and losing clarity. There are so many of them that you can’t understand which are the main ones, and besides, one often contradicts the other.

But why until recently was the same school perceived as the norm? What suddenly happened?

The era has changed - the industrial era has ended, the post-industrial, information era has arrived, and traditional education has ceased to meet the needs of society. It turned out, for example, that it has become much worse at performing the function of a social elevator and does not contribute to the required degree to professional, career growth, and social adaptation. Holders of various kinds of educational certificates often find themselves unable to adequately respond to life’s challenges, which means that when choosing an educational institution at the time, they incorrectly assessed the situation or their own capabilities, and wasted time and money on getting the wrong education. Education itself has not become worse; economic and social conditions have changed and become different. As a result, the content of education and, more importantly, the people who received the education, ceased to meet these conditions.

The modern world is a free exchange of information, ideas, people, goods, and services. Millions and millions of people on the planet are already involved in such an exchange, whether they like it or not. Therefore, if the content of education corresponds to an old model of the world that is not adequate to today’s realities, then those who receive education are doomed to the same inadequacy.

General education in its current form does not meet modern requirements, if only because it is fixated on the so-called “standard school knowledge.” No one can explain why young people, whose active working age will be in 2020-2040, should all study these subjects and in such volumes. The question arises, what is the point of spending the golden years of childhood and adolescence practically in vain - on assimilating information that may become outdated tomorrow, and most importantly, the possession of which is unlikely to help a person in adulthood?

The market today requires from an employee not a standard set of knowledge, but creativity, determination, the ability to learn, work in a team, and much more that can only be acquired through personal experience - the educational process we are accustomed to does not provide any of this.

It is fundamentally important for a person from the very beginning not to make a mistake in choosing a goal, to correctly assess his strengths and capabilities. And here experience cannot be replaced by any knowledge. The richer and more diverse it is, the more adequate a young person’s ideas about himself and the world are, the more chances he has to realize himself. And the task of the educational system is to help the individual acquire such experience. Only it gives you the understanding that you are your own project, only it allows you to build your life consciously and responsibly. Total, “knowledge” education cannot replace it in any way. In general, it has long turned into an end in itself - as if it were telling the student: “I am what makes you a full-fledged person.”

It’s a paradox: we constantly talk about the need for lifelong education (the principle of LLL - lifelong learning) and at the same time stubbornly continue to view general education as a kind of single, monolithic, almost sacred complex. Although 99.99% of Russian citizens will never in their lives need to know the date of the burning of Jan Hus, the formula of the quadratic trinomial and the production technology of converter steel, all this is stubbornly shoved into the poor student’s heads - so that it will be.

Of the many possible answers to the question why a child goes to school, I prefer this: so that the school (certainly together with the parents) helps him find himself. Or rather, she helped him begin building, collecting his personality. That's all. Not more, but not less. The child’s goal is within himself, therefore the main subject of study should be the child himself and all the diversity of his sociocultural connections. Then education will be a necessity for him, and not a heavy burden.

In other words, it is necessary to abandon the total system of educational subject programs, reduced to a mechanical sum, in favor of maximum individualization of education, subordinating it to the task of developing a young person’s own social (in the broadest sense) experience.

Of course, I am not calling for giving up knowledge. But I want to emphasize that it is acquired, assimilated (made into one’s own) only if there is a living need for it. “Listen, people,” Vasily Rozanov wrote almost a century ago, “what is most convincing for us? Something that we ourselves saw, recognized, felt, smelled. Well, in a word: I know - and that’s it... Every person lives by a little knowledge, which is the fruit of his life, namely his experience, suffering, sense of smell and sight.”

The current school does not provide such social experience (and, it seems, cannot provide), since it describes and explains an artificial (i.e., modeled for educational purposes) world and completely ignores “parallel living life” with its non-educational, adult concerns. As one graduate put it, “school was the place where we were given answers to questions we didn’t ask.”

It is clear that it is impossible to teach at school (and even at university) everything that can be useful in life. And not only because the volume of such “necessary” knowledge is prohibitively large, but also because their necessity is by no means obvious. Today's schoolchild will have to change types of activities many times throughout his life and master new professional areas. Therefore, upon leaving school, he should have not “knowledge for growth,” but very specific qualities that cannot be reduced to formal education.