Reduction and seal

Senior Lecturer, Department of the Universal History of Kaluga State University. K.E. Tsiolkovsky Anton Baryshnikov told a three-hobby about the problems of teaching history in universities in the light of undergoing reforms of science and education. The author leads the popular science blog http://inromfoot.blogspot.ru/ , is a member of the Russian Association of Anti-Councils and the British Society for Promotion of Roman Studies.

For six years, I have been teaching the history of the ancient world at Kaluga State University. During this short period, the university’s life was filled with events: he ceased to be pedagogical, began to prepare bachelors, fell into the notorious list of “ineffective universities”, but corrected and got rid of “ineffective” signs. Together with the university, the faculty also changed, the now obviously outgrown format of the highly specialized direction of training: now we teach not only teachers of history, but also “pure” historians, and besides them, lawyers and specialists of customs.

The background for these entertaining metamorphoses has become not too pleasant processes of strengthening formalism, rejection and bureaucratization of education. But the most sad phenomenon of recent years was a decrease in the real volume of auditorial hours in the learning process. I can judge how the changes that are happening to the auditor's load are, I can judge from my own teaching experience.

For many years, our faculty has been training teachers of history and social studies, on a slightly smaller scale, this activity continues to this day [1]. The course of the ancient world rightfully occupies an important place in the subject training of the future teacher - on the one hand, he is necessary for the development of basic abilities (analyze sources, work with scientific literature, think critically, etc.); On the other hand, it is the first “brick” to study the subsequent periods of world history. Without scientific ideas about the history of the ancient world, it is impossible to be either a normal historian or a teacher of history.

At the same time, the “ancient world” traditionally turns out to be quite difficult to study and understand the subject. This should not be surprised - to the study of many historical plots and problems included in the course of the ancient world, the freshman begins "from the clean sheet", with the mind, not burdened by residual knowledge. These circumstances imposed additional responsibility on us: how our cooperation with students develops, the final result of their training at the faculty largely depends.

In order for the history of the ancient world to leave a deep and indelible mark in the soul of the student, an approach to teaching, which can be called “systemic” [2], is used. According to him, the student had not only to attend lectures and work at seminars, but also to independently perform a number of various tasks. They included the written critical analysis of monographs (the so -called “reviews”), the notes of the most important and “fresh” publications, filling out contour maps, reading monuments of ancient literature (from Gilgamesh from Sinha to Ovid with Tacitus).

Tasks for independent work were evenly distributed during the school year and were constantly checked. Individual analysis of errors required a lot of effort and time, but it was worth it-the student really developed, as a result, he approached the final exam with the rating formed on the basis of his seminar and independent work, and a certain circle of skills suffered in knowledge battles. It was somewhat upset that the control of independent work did not always reflect in the load of the teacher, and when he found, his prescribed volume was several times less than the volume of real work [3]. However, this disorder was insignificant, since it was not a shame for the results of cooperation with students.
With the transition to the standards of the new generation and the emergence of undergraduate, the situation with the study of the history of the ancient world began to change. It is easy to guess which way.

First of all, lectures were injured: if in 2010 the first part of the course for specialists, including the primitive society and the ancient East, two lectures per week (only 68 hours) were allocated, then for 2011 - for bachelors, their number was halved. The second, “Greco-Roman” part of the course, where in four years, the volume of lectures has decreased from 52 to 24 hours suffered even more. All this was accompanied by periodic stories that the time came for new forms of presentation of the material, that “the traditional lecture is a thing of the past” [4].

Meanwhile, a reduction in lectures is not just a decrease in numbers in the curriculum line, it is a rejection of knowledge. It is unlikely that for someone it will become news that a self-respecting teacher prepares lectures for more than one day and at the proper level; In the case of teaching the ancient world at a provincial university, a lecture is often the only chance to introduce a student to the latest achievements of historical science. Reducing hours in such a situation means reducing the information received by the student, narrowing his horizons and reducing the general level of training.

Seminars, at first glance, were seriously not injured from cutting: students were preparing for one seminar on the subject per week, and continued to do this. But this is only at first glance. The fact is that with the transition to new standards, the change “for the better” did not end. Since this year, the university switched to a modular form of training, and the module in our case actually turned out to be equal to the school quarter.

The result seems doubtful: with formal preservation (compared to previous years of undergraduate), their real volume has decreased. For high -quality preparation for the seminar, the student needs time that was enough when the practical lesson was once a week. In the new conditions, the number of seminars per week doubled, and the quality of training of students, in turn, decreased - the freshman simply does not have time to prepare.

As a result, part of the seminars takes place as an unsuccessful date: in an atmosphere of stupid awkwardness and tense silence. In addition, such a “compaction” of auditorium classes (both seminars and lectures) leads to the fact that it is difficult to compensate for them in case of loss - and classes, as you know, disappear with enviable regularity, because we have many holidays, open and round tables, cultural events, conferences and the like not to learn.

But most of all, the current system of independent work suffered from the transition to modular training - which looks like an evil irony in the light of often repeated slogans about the priority of students' independent activity. The previous variety of tasks that develop a variety of abilities of the freshman turned out to be impossible to fit into the Procrustean Module bed.

The student does not have enough time and effort to do half the tasks that his predecessors performed; The teacher does not have enough time to check them and disassemble the error with the student. By the way, the number of hours allocated to control independent work has not undergone serious changes and fits into such familiar (and not corresponding to real work) - 9 hours per module.
It is very difficult to get rid of the feeling that all the innovations of recent times could work if we were talking about an ideal university with ideal students. Such a university has complete access to the largest electronic resources, without which it is impossible to study the ancient world, there is a large library that regularly receives not only domestic, but also foreign publications. Freshmen of such a university know for sure that they need, motivated for effective studies (which you rarely meet at the age of 18), confidently speak at least one foreign language and can almost independently learn one more, are ready to devote several hours a day to independently study objects, have developed self -editing skills and go on the Internet not for entertainment, but in serious matters.

Perhaps there are such universities and students. I am glad if there are a lot of them. But this is not our case. In our (not the worst, honestly) university, for objective reasons, there is no access to those materials that would allow the student without a teacher to master the history of the ancient world. At our disposal there are also no students perfectly ready to teach, but there are very capable freshmen who need to work a lot with, so that they become smarter and learn to develop independently.

The general and inevitable result of the ongoing changes is a fall in the level of education or, expressed relevant bureaucratically, “decrease in efficiency”. A simple reduction in the auditor's load could be partially compensated by the system of independent work (only partly, of course): for example, if the teacher does not have time to give a lecture on the principal of Augustus, then the student can critically analyze the monograph on this topic, read Virgil and Horace, and thereby make an idea of ​​the problem on his own. The reduction, supplemented by the “seal”, is no longer possible to fix. A high -quality review course on the history of the ancient world is replaced by an ersatz -discipline, students' abilities remain insufficiently developed, and -what is the saddest, these are no longer possible to catch up.

1. In this note, we are only talking about the training of teachers. By the way, in comparison with the bachelor's history, they were still lucky - the latter, due to the originality of the educational standard, even less audit hours for the history of the ancient world. Thus, the history of the ancient East at the bachelors of history in 2013 fits in 9 lectures (18 hours).

2. Such an approach to training has been formed for a long time (thanks to the efforts of Ya.Yu. Mezheritsky and N.A. Bogodarova) and is realized by everyone who conducted and conducts courses in the history of the ancient world and the history of the Middle Ages.

3. The maximum number of hours for the KSR (control of independent work) is 11 per semester (according to the training plan for specialists from 2010). It takes 20-30 minutes for a high-quality check of one written work (two such work in the semester), for checking one card-10 minutes (six cards in the semester-six), for discussion with a student of the monument of ancient literature he read-15-20 minutes (four such discussions in the semester-four). The simplest operations with these approximate numbers show how far in this case the formal from the real.

4. I have repeatedly heard the statements of this kind and met on online resources. Perhaps this mixture of idealistic egoism found its optimal expression in the recently appeared material: http://vz.ru/opinions/2014/1/17/668252.html