Shareware education

The topic of free education, already discussed in recent years, finally came to the fore by the end of the week.

We were once again assured that education was, is and will be free.

I think there is no reason not to believe this. And my faith is based not only on the regulatory framework (education is a duty, how can the fulfillment of the obligation also be paid?), but also on an understanding of how this free education will actually be built.

It will be free with one slight amendment to the meaning of the term “free”, free – that means shareware.

To be fair, we note that education has always been free of charge, including in the Soviet Union. In the end, society still paid for it.

However, the vector of free development at that time was set in the direction of reducing the conditional element and expanding the free element. The conditionality was manifested in indirect rather than direct payment for education. In relation to the latter, it became more and more personally free, independent of personal investments.

The milestones of the long journey that immediately come to mind are the abolition of tuition fees in high schools and the transition to free textbooks. It is quite possible that if perestroika had not come, we would have lived to see the abolition of the voluntary-compulsory three-hour allowance for repairs, to free uniforms and something else like that.

Nowadays it's the other way around. While still collecting money from society, Russian education strives to become more shareware for every Russian family, that is, to become essentially double-paid.

And this fact of conditional freeness with an emphasis on the term “conditionality” is supported by the bureaucracy.

When we use the word “free,” we seem to forget that this concept has not only a formal, but also a substantive connotation. Free means not only quantity, but also quality. Free means not only the number of pieces and volume, but also the quality content of these pieces and volume.

If a child is allocated a seat at a desk, the free seat must guarantee the quality of this seat and its compliance with sanitary and epidemiological standards. If a child is studying a certain subject, then he should be guaranteed high-quality education (moreover, this quality should be based on a body of methodological principles, the achievements of pedagogy and psychology, and not on “what the child and parents like”). The quality of education is made up of many components (clear standards, high-quality textbooks, good organization of the educational process itself, professionalism of the teacher, a strict, clear and common-sense legal framework). The quality of training presupposes that it allows it to be continued at a subsequent higher level. Education cannot be called free and of high quality if, upon completion, it requires special and significant financial investments for reasons not related to the individual characteristics of the student. Free and high-quality education should not require any tutors, competitions and all that other stuff in order to move to the next level.

That is, being free actually requires a lot of cost and effort. This is not just a place behind a bench for another Philip. This is a whole system of measures, this is an enormous amount of work that must be accomplished.

But now there are great doubts about the existence of this work.

If only because the concern for this quality content for free is not visible in any way.

If only because free education is not considered as a sufficient level for education in itself.

The basis for such a conclusion, justified or not, the reader will judge, is given not only by the commercial model of organizing education, but also, for example, by yesterday’s meeting with the participation of Degtyarev, Golodets and Kuzminov, at which significant figures in this regard were announced.

75% of Russians are ready to give up what is necessary for the development of their own children, 62% are in favor of special schools and the expansion of additional education - this is such a serious application for conditionally free education, for building, next to the legally free demo version of education, a powerful structure of education that is actually paid .

At the same time, in Soviet times, especially late Soviet times, there was no talk of additional education. We were talking about clubs, circles and sections in which the abilities and inclinations of schoolchildren were developed, but not about the development of their education. For what? At school they gave everything anyway, the textbooks were simply perfect, the process was fine-tuned to perfection.

Nowadays we have to talk about additional education, and, naturally, for an additional fee. Why, why? Yes, because the process of learning at school itself is poorly organized. Because in a Russian shareware school it becomes impossible to learn anything (Zakhar Prilepin wrote about this very vividly not so long ago in the now defunct Russian Life).

Another sign of conditionally free education is the inflated focus on the provision of individual educational services, since these are services, unlike education, they are for money. As a person who cooks in the cauldron of our education, I can say that what today is an exception and a bonus for a fee will become commonplace and widespread tomorrow. Thus, paid higher education and postgraduate studies, which fifteen years ago looked more like an exotic, an exception than a rule, are now perceived as commonplace. The psychological effect is important here. People were taught and are now finally accustomed to the very idea of ​​payment, as something natural. After this “unobtrusive” personal service, the very concept of “free” began to be considered only as formal, existing only as a statement of good intentions.

The specialization of the school is also a condition for the flow of free education into conditionality. By creating profiles on paper, officials do not create, and sometimes objectively cannot create, any real conditions for their implementation in specific schools. By destandardizing education, increasing variability, warming up in parents a focus on an individual approach and differentiation of education, they are driving them into the dead end of the real cost of education while it is formally free. “You want your child to have special treatment? You want everything to be okay with him?” Who doesn't want to? And these good intentions are followed by the rustle of banknotes.

In general, there are many options for creating conditions for shareware education, if only because while declaring its subjective rejection at an abstract level, objectively, at the level of concrete practice, people are moving towards it at full speed.

So, having heard about free education, like it or not, you will start asking, following Homer Simpson: “Free? How much does it cost?”