Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего (Тематический выпуск, 2022)/Positive changes. Education. The school of the future (Special issue, 2

Where rebellious physicists and lyricists, engineers and innovators of the Soviet industry once stood, now we see hipsters and IT people of the 21st century. The demand has sprung up not only for technology specialists, but also for artists, writers, designers, musicians. It is no longer the world of confrontation, it is the world of cooperation without borders, which is turning into an Internet model. There are no countries and no language barriers, all information is open and accessible, education can be obtained in any part of the world, you can travel anywhere.

IDEAS OF DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

How is our education changing to meet the needs of the new era? Slowly, by a narrow margin, but it is changing.

I will briefly dwell on two teachers, two school principals who tried to employ new approaches in their schools and revolutionized all ideas about the pedagogy of the time: Alexander Tubelsky and Mikhail Shchetinin.

Alexander Tubelsky. In the 1990s he became the principal of the Moscow-based "School of Self-Determination", where he tried to put into practice all the ideas of democratic education, which became more popular at the end of the century. His school has many clubs and extracurricular activities for children, democratic elections, special relationships between teachers and students, a lot of freedom for experiments. There are exercise machines in the school corridors so that students can play sports during breaks and just have fun. Friday is a free day when there are no lessons, you can do what you want guided by teachers who teach the subject of your interest, regardless of your age and grade.

The industries the military-industrial complex depended on were unequivocally successful. Accordingly, teaching the respective disciplines at schools and universities was honed to perfection.

The main slogan of the Tubelsky School is: "School should be interesting, the child should be happy to go to school." Please note that for Tubelsky, Amonashvili, Makarenko, it is not only knowledge that matters, it is the students’ and teachers’ emotional state that matters. Education should be joyful! I have repeated this many times and I will say it again.

In 1994, Mikhail Shchetinin’s school was opened in the Krasnodar Krai, near the village of Tekos. The full name was "Boarding School for the Complex Formation of the Personality of Children and Adolescents." Shchetinin’s methods seem quite extreme even now. There is a lot to be told about this school and a lot to learn from it. It was closed quite recently — in 2019.

Shchetinin went the farthest. There were no lessons in his school, there were no classes, students of different ages studied together. The main method of teaching was immersion in the subject. That is, you study continuously, every day for many hours immersing yourself in only one subject. Lessons could take place anywhere, not necessarily in the classrooms. School teachers could not necessarily be teachers, but people passionate about their work. Shchetinin erases all boundaries, removes everything that seemed unshakable and irreplaceable: lessons, classes, teachers, ideas about education in general. I think it was a big leap into the new age of education.

THE NEW AGE OF EDUCATION

The beginning of the new age was the beginning of the active influence of parents on education. Actually, this was what Makarenko, Amonashvili and other innovative teachers called for. And now we listen with enthusiasm to the lectures of Dima Zitser and Lyudmila Petranovskaya, who, in fact, promote the same ideas of parental responsibility for education. Not only the state, but also parents have the right to determine how their children should be educated. The school’s monopoly on education is ending soon. This is what causes many parents to have a growing interest in family education. Family schools (schools created by parents), democratic schools, Montessori schools, Waldorf schools began to appear. The TIPS is now recognized not by a narrow group of specialists, but by many teachers even in public schools.

Please note that for Tubelsky, Amonashvili, Makarenko, it is not only knowledge that matters, it is the students’ and teachers’ emotional state that matters. Education should be joyful!