Translated material
Apple trees on Mars
Without changing the content of education, talking about reforms is simply indecent. Without an answer to the main question: WHAT to teach at school?
The paradox is that everyone, almost every parent, understands that the School teaches things that are of little use. Teachers understand too. But... But the Myth about the Good Old School, about the best education system in the world, does not let us go.
In the summer I was in Balaklava near Sevastopol. A real city is carved into the rock: a repair base for submarines. Kilometers of tunnels, passages, chambers for nuclear warheads...
Of course, the entire city served only this base. How many of these Balaklavas are there in the entire Soviet Union? “The whole country worked for the war” is not a metaphor. And school too.
It is clear why the USSR had the “best school” in the world. And the teaching of mathematics is at the highest level. So that the submarines would sink under the water, and the missiles would rise into the sky - and reach the coast of the United States in 14 minutes.
The Cold War is over, the USSR collapsed, the boats are rusty, but we will not allow a revision of the Mathematics Program! Let's not let the myth of the best education system in the world be destroyed. This is our myth...
The program should be cut by half, or at least by a third. The argument is simple: ask any well-educated adult: up to what grade he is able to help his child in all subjects of the school curriculum. Until the seventh or eighth, as a rule. This is what remains in my head.
"Reduction" is not quite the right word. Reducing the volume of material is not to know less. To know differently. To have time for independent research work. So that you can go on excursions, watch films, talk with people, conduct experiments, communicate with each other... So that students can themselves come up with the things that are now presented to them in ready-made form. To have time to think.
“To know everything that humanity has accumulated” is from the realm of communist mythology. Just like the promise to build communism by 1981: the counters are empty, the streets are dirty, but the party solemnly proclaimed it - and the fairy tale became reality.
Let the Americans and French read textbooks with little text and a lot of pictures. Psychologists say that children at this age cannot absorb such a volume of information? Their children can’t do it, but ours can!
In the Soviet Union, not only did rivers turn back and square watermelons were grown, but they also raised children of a new formation - a new breed. And what the children of capitalist countries cannot do, ours can do! Necessary, not necessary, what's the difference?
And apple trees will bloom on Mars...
The myth of the Soviet School is alive. And even the most progressive parents, no, no, and they will be alarmed: But we studied... But we had discipline... And we wrote more carefully in notebooks...