Formal killer

For many Russians, June is now marked by the Unified State Exam. Schoolchildren are cramming and nervous, teachers are preparing for duty and testing and are also nervous, parents are simply nervous.

As soon as the first wave of passing the unified exam passes, publications appear that can be roughly divided into two opposite types. Materials of the first type are frankly revealing, describing the various defects of the unified exam, proving its inability to adequately assess knowledge. There are reports of corruption scandals, publication of results on social networks, various violations of procedure, even suicides. In articles of the second type, as a rule, the Unified State Exam is not criticized, drawing attention to how poorly modern schoolchildren pass it. For example, this article is on the website of RIA “New Region”. http://www.nr2.ru/chel/391606.html. South Ural schoolchildren did not do well in mathematics.

The ignorance of modern schoolchildren and students serves as an inexhaustible topic of wit or, on the contrary, tragic reasoning on the topic “Where is the nation heading?” True, what frightens me more is not the existing ignorance, but the developing reluctance to eliminate it, to learn anything, to comprehend, to discuss. I’m not talking about banal and understandable laziness, but about a principled position. “Why should we be distracted by unnecessary knowledge, we should study only what we need for a professional career.” This is how some particularly “advanced” students answer me when I try to explain a particular topic in sociology with an example from literature or cinema. Some time ago, discussions of literary and film characters, examples from history and life experience were the most important moments in lectures for students, provoked discussion, helped them remember and understand what was incomprehensible in strict academic material. Today, mandatory Unified State Exams, online exams as a form of knowledge control, and the point-rating system of assessments recently introduced in universities increasingly force students to think about how to overcome this or that control point, getting irritated if the teacher is distracted from preparing for the Internet. testing or from issuing the coveted points. Of course, I can still convince them; at worst, I can still cope with the student audience. But why should I deal with them, we are not enemies. We must be part of a common, surprising and exciting process of learning. But gradually we are being turned into producers” and consumers of “educational services”.

But what is the content of these services? Nowadays, wages are relatively high in those areas of activity where a higher education diploma is an absolute requirement. Whether you go to a bank, at least as a teller, or as a middle manager with limited powers, to advertising, to trade - you simply need a higher education diploma, but the set of knowledge that is required of you is minimal. Indeed, a lot of knowledge begins to seem superfluous, and the need for knowledge is replaced by the need for a diploma. This need can be realized by reducing the cost of acquiring knowledge, optimizing, quite in a market spirit, your “educational strategy”, choosing the one that takes the shortest route to the coveted crust. And teachers and teachers are increasingly burdened with the burden of reporting, which has nothing to do with their main teaching activities. We also have to “optimize”.

Gradually, the process of cognition itself is being squeezed out of education, replacing it with the implementation of formal, meaningless procedures. Professional responsibility and pedagogical enthusiasm are replaced by following instructions. The latter formalize the process of education, leaving everything except the actual formation of a thinking and cognizing individual. In such conditions, control also turns into a formality, which is often easier to bypass than to comply with all instructions. Sometimes they are simply impossible to complete: for example, test questions are often simply written incorrectly. In such conditions, it makes no difference what we use as a final control: the Unified State Exam, a water test or a spiritualistic seance. Therefore, you should not get hung up on the Unified State Exam, exposing the ulcers of modern education. It simply acted as a catalyst for transforming the educational process into a production process and obtaining a certificate about it, increasing the deviation of the goals of the participants in the process from the content. And in this regard, the Unified State Exam was in fact the killer of education. But - formally, they shot at the condemned, at the system poisoned by the market virus.