School: less logic, more religion

Recently, the number of hours of social studies in school has been increased, but this was done unwisely: they began to introduce it in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grade. But you cannot talk to a child about society until he has developed certain basic historical knowledge. It makes no sense to start studying history and social studies at the same time - the latter requires a historical base. Just like in biology, you first go through botany, zoology, and then general biology. First they talk to the child about stamens, pistils and finches, then about Mendel’s laws.

Otherwise, instead of learning, you get baby talk. Once I gave an open lesson in the eighth grade. His official curriculum theme was: "The Morningiest of Senses." According to the authors of the textbook, this is love, although most children insisted on feeling hungry. What branches of social sciences can you talk about, at least as a rough approximation, with a ten-year-old child? You can’t talk about sociology, you can’t talk about economics, you can’t talk about law. And why? When kids come to me in the 10th grade who have not yet studied social studies, but have already completed almost the entire history course, they are prepared to start talking about society at a conceptual level. And if from the fifth grade they learn that social studies is a kind of “foggy view and something,” then by the tenth grade it is extremely difficult to convince them of this.

The Internet, of course, greatly influences how children perceive information. Teachers of Russian and literature were the first to notice this. The changes are due to the fact that teenagers are accustomed to viewing a very large amount of information from the Internet during the day, and they perceive it at the level of news headlines. We are used to students being given several paragraphs to take home that they need to read and answer questions. Nowadays, a modern schoolchild is accustomed to reading 5-6 pages in no more than 10 minutes, looking through them very quickly. As a result, that same “something” remains in the head. And it will get even worse. The text is perceived as a set of keywords. This is not good or bad, it is an objective reality that must be adjusted to and used for learning purposes. I'm still finding my way to deal with this situation. For example, you can find a certain provocative text, a superficial reading of which gives one idea about the author’s position, and a thoughtful reading - another. You hand out such a small text, give it 30 seconds to read, then everyone writes down their impressions. Then we read the same text for 2 minutes. Has your impression changed? And as a result, many people say: the second time we realized that it was about something completely different.

Although the essence of teaching social studies does not change over time, a certain general line of the state and, accordingly, the content of the subject change all the time. The state is busy trying to solve some ideological problems. An example is the introduction of a subject about religious cultures. One might assume that this is done in order to instill religious tolerance in children, but in fact it turns out exactly the opposite. And it cannot be guaranteed that this subject will not become an additional basis for the already widespread division in society into “us” and “they”, that is, those who are different from us. Because the religious sphere is very far from reason, it is based on the category of faith and, due to this, is extremely intimate and personal; intrusion into it at the level of a school subject, taught often by incompetent people, will lead to frightening results.

A simple example: a very large number of people are irritated by the statement that we and monkeys are related in common. This can be seen very clearly on internet forums. We are two hundred years behind the West: they had the “monkey process” in the nineteenth century, we will have it in the twenty-first. The fact is that belief in the omnipotence of science is a passed stage. Until the mid-twentieth century, the Western world (which includes Russia as part of it - not geographically, but ideologically and intellectually) believed that science could do anything. They flew into space, artificial intelligence was invented. And now people perceive computers and complex technology not as a result of scientific progress, but as a given. Science has moved too far away from the average person. People have stopped connecting the question of the origin of the world with what happens in the computer. One thing happens in the computer, but God created the world in six days... Flat.

It would seem that the teacher should be happy about the increase in the load on his subject. But I—and, as I know, many of my colleagues—are not happy, just as a profanity backed by incompetent amateurs cannot please a professional who cares about his work.