An equally significant problem, the solution of which determines the development of education in recent centuries, is the problem of freedom. And therefore it is necessary to consider this problem both in general and in relation to spiritual and moral education.
Analyzing the problem of freedom of education, it should be noted that it should be analyzed on its own, without any opposition: scholastic - free education; scholastic - real education, etc. And it should also be borne in mind that, of course, the decision on freedom of education will be largely determined by the space of ideological choice. For example, if atheism does not see the problem of sin, then it does not solve it in education, although it distinguishes between the concepts of good and evil. For liberalism, on the contrary, there is no difference between good and evil, for it not only there is no concept of sin, but sin itself is very often good. Hence, freedom is the freedom of choice as sin and virtue are equal, and moreover, today this is open propaganda of sin, this is the purposeful education of a person to sin. In Orthodoxy, freedom is an unambiguous avoidance of sin and the pursuit of good.
Reflecting on the countless number of works devoted to the problem of freedom in education, we can say that this concept has different meanings and meanings, different sides and aspects: for example, the freedom of a child is one thing, the freedom of a teacher is another. Freedom of the school is one thing, freedom of the education system as a whole is quite another. An abstract theoretical fundamental solution to this problem is one thing, and a completely different thing is the solution to the problem of freedom of a specific student. Therefore, when speaking about freedom in education, we must note, firstly, that this is truly a fundamental characteristic of education; secondly, that it is a historically developing phenomenon.
In the history of education, several main stages in the development of freedom can be distinguished.
I. stage. Creation of an educational institution as a form of professional training, primarily for officials and priests. To what extent at this stage we can talk about freedom of education is a big question. Apparently, only about freedom itself as a phenomenon inherent in education in general.
II. The transformation, and this is already in ancient times, of education from a form of professional training (official or priest) into a relatively free institution, into a way of human development in general, more or less regardless of one or another future professional activity.
This transformation, which can actually be traced in all ancient schools at a certain stage of their historical development, gave a huge degree of freedom to education as a whole, and above all relative autonomy from other social institutions, including regarding the future professional activity of a person. This was expressed most obviously in the content of education: why would a future Chinese official need a refined literary and musical education, or a Babylonian need to solve second-degree equations? This can be further traced in the organization of education, in a certain, sometimes even complete independence from the authorities, especially in Ancient Greece; in the school's desire to teach students to think independently, or, in modern parlance, creatively. Finally, in the nature of the relationship between teacher and student, there is greater respect for the student’s personality and greater independence. But along with this, in a number of schools, especially religious ones, a completely different system of gaining personal freedom is being formed - the system of novitiate. Its essence is that a person, in the process of education, by getting rid of, overcoming, “eradicating” his bad habits, ideas, passions, gains colossal spiritual freedom.
And already in ancient times, there was a serious understanding of the problem of freedom of education; the works of Plato and Aristotle are especially important here. In Plato's teachings, free upbringing (education) is proposed to be given to the upper classes (soldiers and rulers) of his ideal state; in Aristotle, free upbringing (education) is intended for the children of free citizens of actually existing Greek states; all the rest are either artisans, professionals, specialists, or slaves, for whom there could be no upbringing other than a professional one by definition. (We emphasize once again that for Plato and Aristotle the concept of freedom is the prism through which they analyze all education as a whole.)
III. Christianity. The most important idea that Jesus Christ proclaimed is the idea of freedom. Every person is free. This meant a radically new view of man, since it affirmed the concept, the idea that every person is a person, not a slave, not a talking tool, not a barbarian, but a human being.
And the second, no less, and perhaps much more significant idea given by Jesus Christ is that every person is free to the extent that he lives according to the commandments of God and to the extent that he is free from sin. Departure from these commandments is sin and submission to sin.
This became not only the greatest truth for all of humanity, but also a task for all of humanity for the rest of its life, including education and upbringing. The entire subsequent history of education is the implementation of this idea: in the history of different nations, in the history of every person involved in Christianity. Of course, in different Christian countries it was implemented in its own way.
Since freedom in education is currently analyzed mainly using the example of Western European civilization and education, we will consider this problem using the example of the history of Western Europe.
Unlike Byzantium, which directly continued its development on an ancient basis, in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, cultural and pedagogical development decreased significantly. And therefore, many centuries passed before Western Europe reached a certain level of development of its education. The foundation of this new “system” of modern education was the Carolingian revival, when the folk (parochial), “learned school” and “higher school” were created.
New trends in the manifestation of freedom emerged in education from the 12th century, when, along with church schools, a kind of “secular schools” began to open, that is, schools of different levels, largely autonomous from the church and state. Particularly famous are universities that have become the personification of the culture of this time, the birthplace of such a form of theoretical knowledge as scholasticism. This area of knowledge took upon itself the solution of the grandiose and latest problems of its time, the tasks of a holistic understanding of the world.
Education, especially university education, receives significant freedom at this time. This is manifested in the freedom of theoretical research, albeit with a certain eye on the church, and in the freedom in the organization of universities, right down to student administration and their own courts, etc.
The Renaissance, which proclaimed the cult of man, proclaimed his freedom as its most important characteristic and integral attribute. Freedom is the favorite theme of all humanists. Look at the works of any humanist, including Erasmus of Rotterdam. Based on the fact that it was man who was proclaimed to be the measure of all things, freedom became a quality that made man even independent of God.
Schools corresponding to the idea of free education were also organized. Of course, humanistic schools were proclaimed as such.
However, and this is paradoxical, having created a class-lesson system, to the theoretical justification and improvement of which Ya.A. Comenius, they locked the student into a rigid framework of equal development for everyone. By the way, Y.A. himself Comenius believed that such a system was correct, since it pulls up the weak and does not allow the capable to develop excessively and prematurely.
The problem of freedom became even more significant during the Enlightenment. And although, due to some misunderstanding, she is associated mainly with the name J.-J. Rousseau (maybe because Rousseau’s teaching was called “free education”, or rather, that’s what he himself called his teaching, making the problem of freedom the central problem of “Emile”), this problem was solved by all the major scientists of that time.
At the same time, perhaps the most important thing in the huge mass of solutions to this problem is that the geniuses of the Enlightenment themselves realized that boundless freedom threatens upbringing and education. Hegel writes: “Therefore, playful pedagogy should be considered a complete perversion of the matter, which would like to present serious things to children under the guise of play and which demands from educators that they descend to the level of childish understanding of their students, instead of raising children to the seriousness of the matter.” K.D. also warned about the same thing. Ushinsky.
Consequently, already the Age of Enlightenment, both in the practical development of education and even more so in theory, reached the limit beyond which freedom turned from a condition for the successful development of education into a mechanism that destroys it. And therefore, the Age of Enlightenment actually posed the problem of not just freedom, but the measure of freedom.
In the last quarter of the 19th century. The pedagogy of free education, today called reformist pedagogy, begins to develop in the world. The idea of a free school, originally formulated by E. Kay, very quickly grew into a huge theoretical and practical movement. Within the framework of this pedagogy, and these are almost all significant scientists of that time - from S. Hall and D. Dewey in America to S.T. Shatsky and K.V. Ventzel in Russia, the problem of freedom of education was solved as the most important pedagogical problem. And never and at no time has freedom acquired such significance and such hopes for radical transformations of education as in reformist pedagogy.
Its main principle: the freedom of the student is the lever that will solve all the problems of education. With what pathos almost every scientist argued that the student should become the sun around which everything in the school, and the school itself, should revolve. But did the leaders of reform pedagogy manage to solve the tasks that were set and fulfill the promises that were made?
Certainly not. Very soon, if scientists organized their own schools, they became convinced in practice that freedom in itself does not solve a single pedagogical problem. Moreover, it turned out that unlimited freedom simply destroys the educational process, education, and makes normal school life impossible. And that is why almost all scientists, if not in theory, then in practice, were looking for their ideal version of the optimal relationship between freedom and discipline. In a word, unlimited freedom, on which all the teacher-reformers placed so much hope, did not become the desired lifesaver.
Modern "liberal education". Although its theorists consider the concept of liberal education to be the last word in pedagogical science, in fact modern liberal pedagogy itself is a continuation of the development of reformist pedagogy without the big problems that it posed and the great hopes that the reformers saw if their ideas were realized. By and large, being already tertiary, that is, a continuation of reformist pedagogy, which is a continuation of educational pedagogy, it does not solve a single fundamental pedagogical problem.
Accordingly, while continuing to solve the problem of freedom of education in line with reformist pedagogy, liberal pedagogy turns freedom into some kind of independent phenomenon, and not a property, of this or that educational system, of this or that educational institution. But is it even possible to consider the property of a thing as its absolute characteristic? And if the property of a phenomenon becomes the substance of the phenomenon itself, then understanding of the phenomenon is lost.
Thus, the problem of freedom in upbringing and education is a complex, multidimensional problem that requires a truly systemic solution at all its levels, starting from its initial fundamental meaning; and then - an understanding of the freedom of the purpose of upbringing (education), its content, legislation, organization of education, freedom of the teacher and student, freedom of parents, freedom of educational institutions and education systems in general. At the same time, it is fundamentally important to understand the measure of freedom, the optimum of freedom in education as a whole and in all its components.
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In the post-Soviet space, you can everywhere find highly qualified engineers, teachers, philologists or lawyers who work anywhere, but not in the field to which they devoted five years of their lives to study. But in the USA the situation is completely opposite. How do Americans achieve this? To find out, we suggest you familiarize yourself with the features of career guidance in the American educational system.
Probably, in childhood, adults asked each of us out of curiosity: “What do you want to become when you grow up?” Do you remember how easy it was to answer this question - as an astronaut, TV presenter, football player? However, at school, it was apparently explained to each of us that only a few could become an astronaut, there are only 8-10 in-demand and popular TV presenters on each channel, and only 22 players take to the football field (not to mention the fact that leading football players You can count it on your fingers). So when the time comes to choose direction of training at the university, schoolchildren are lost and for a long time cannot decide on their future direction of activity.
After all, many of them understand that they are making a kind of fateful choice, which determines what disciplines they will study in the next five years, without much opportunity to change anything, and how useful the knowledge and skills acquired over the years will be to them in the future studying at a university.
Agree that this is quite a difficult challenge for 17-18 year olds, who, in most cases, are very difficult to call fully formed and developed. As a result, in the post-Soviet space you can everywhere find highly qualified engineers, teachers, philologists or lawyers who work anywhere, but not in the field to which they devoted five years of their life to study.
But in the USA the situation is completely opposite - almost all university graduates In the future, they work throughout their lives in the specialty they chose during their school years, and extremely rarely regret the choice they made. How do Americans achieve this? To find out, we suggest you familiarize yourself with the features of career guidance in the American educational system.
Career guidance in practice: it’s all about personal experience
A huge difference between Russian education and education in the United States is the possibility of choosing individual educational programs - in America, students can personally choose academic disciplines. That is, if you are interested in a certain course, you can first ask students who have already chosen it about it. They can describe the material covered in this course, the desired background that is needed for this course, and even advise which professor teaches the chosen discipline best. Moreover, in American educational institutions As a rule, one course is taught in parallel by two professors at once.
If you still have questions about whether this course will be useful and feasible for you, you can discuss this issue directly with the professor who teaches the discipline. Quite often, a professor suggests that a doubtful student take a preparatory or alternative course that covers basic material, or allows him to choose a free form of study (in other words, the student can attend classes and listen to lectures, without subsequent participation in exams and receiving grades).
Another interesting thing about American education is that students have the opportunity to change their major during the learning process. You are absolutely not tied to any institute, department or group, and you can try yourself in different areas of knowledge. And American education is ideal for this.
Presentation of acquired knowledge is the basis of professional training
Much attention in American education focuses on students' ability to process, critically analyze, and present information. The final part of most training programs is the so-called “Literature study”, in which the student must work through scientific articles related to the material being studied during the course and present it to his classmates.
Again, students have complete freedom to choose the topic of their presentation. As a rule, students choose topics related to their scientific work or delve deeper into the material from the course that interested them most. To prevent students from wanting to do their work “for show,” American universities practice awarding points, the number of which depends on the activity of fellow students in discussing the prepared material (that is, the more classmates are awake during your presentation, listen to you attentively and ask reasonable questions). questions on your report, the more points you will receive).
Also, quite often the final exam in the discipline being studied contains a question from a student presentation, so in the process of preparing for testing, students are forced to take part in group discussions and regularly repeat educational material.
University offices are an integral part of professional training
One of the key problems Russian education Apart from, of course, corruption and bureaucracy, there is the inability of universities to use their main resource - students. Students in the USA have many opportunities to “Work on campus” - to work for the university. The university has a number of offices where they not only earn money for the university, but also hone their professional skills.
For example, if you study computer engineering or have skills in this industry, you can work in a computer service center, philologists can work in the international relations department of a university, mechanics can repair and maintain university equipment. This is exactly how the best specialists in the world are trained at American universities by solving practical problems, starting from the university desk.
This approach to learning allows students to be convinced of the correctness of choosing a profession long before graduation from university or become disillusioned with it and quickly retrain. In addition, working in a university office allows a graduate to position himself as an experienced specialist, which allows an American student to immediately apply for the position he dreamed of immediately after receiving his diploma.
Instead of a conclusion
After studying the features of the American education system, we can draw an unambiguous conclusion: without global changes in the Russian education system, which will ensure the freedom of choice of disciplines for our students, and proper management by university leaders, the potential of our country cannot be fully realized. And ours is huge!
We know firsthand about traditional education: lessons, assignments, exams, Unified State Exam. We already know about alternative education. Now let’s get acquainted with another “scandalous” educational trend of the 21st century - free education.
Under free education is understood This form of organizing the learning process, the main principle of which is the principle of freedom of choice - place, time, duration, forms, methods, teaching aids, etc. Term "free learning" is characterized by a multiplicity of interpretations due to its novelty and insufficient level of knowledge of the issue (as well as the lack of Russian-language literature on the topic).
Free learning seems to be a promising direction in education, especially since some educational institutions in England and the USA are actively introducing this method into their educational programs. Let us note that the testing of free learning should be based on certain soil, namely: a student or student who does everything “freely” must initially decide on the choice of courses and seminars that would be not only interesting to him, but also useful in relation to professional guidance. This means that the student must be conscious, thoughtful, purposeful, responsible, because tomorrow he will have to make a choice that will determine his future fate. In addition, free learning implies self-control and huge willpower: when you choose your own time and activity, you really want to miss a couple or two, right? But this cannot be done: responsibility for everything lies with the one who made this choice, and not with the class teachers and methodologists.
Surely, this form of education in Russian schools will not appear in a mass format soon: we have a strong tendency for the student to depend on the teacher and program, on the schedule, school, homework, etc. This is a tradition that few will dare to break.
A striking example of the successful implementation of a free learning project is English school Summer Hill- the oldest and most famous free school. Summer Hill is a private boarding school where all decisions are made only by teachers and students– neither parents nor other representatives of children have anything to do with school affairs and concerns. This school is extremely popular, first of all, for its scandalousness: films and TV series are made about it, books, articles and essays are written. Meanwhile, the school didn’t open yesterday, she is over 90 years old! This means that the trend of modern education is not so young.
The ideas of free schools were tried to be implemented in other countries - back in the last century. But the dominance of totalitarian regimes, which perceive school as part of their ideology, prevented the development of such projects. In second half of the 20th century free schools began to open and develop quite actively, but, lacking a powerful, effective platform, they were unable to transform from individual communes and small private schools into educational institutions of a more “global” scale.
90s brought with them a third wave of the creation of free education schools, this time with political overtones: term appears "democratic education". It was at this time that the basic principles of the movement were formed.
Thus, free schools see the educational institution not as a place where the student must receive a fixed set of specific knowledge, but as an independent community where the child has the right to vote. Any decisions in such schools are made based on voting: one child – one vote. In this regard, all schools are different. But one line unites them: The student himself decides what, when, where and with whom to teach.
Today free schools are perceived by the majority as 
protest against traditional education. But, taking into account the inviolability and eternity of tradition, we note that it’s probably time to change a lot of things: doesn’t tradition overly standardize its students - the same tests, uniform, set of items, etc.?
Due to the impossibility - for now - of accepting such education, the state often refuses to support such schools: they either close, become illegal, or turn into expensive private boarding schools. For example, the first 5 years of its existence free school in Freidburg(Germany) “lived” illegally: its students had to formalize home schooling and “clandestinely” attend their school. It seems that the 21st century is not a century of such extreme measures.
In other words: this trend has a right to exist, but how to treat it is a personal matter for everyone. But we should not forget that many of the greatest discoveries were initially perceived as nonsense and heresy.
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POINT OF VIEW__________________________
FREEDOM IN EDUCATION: ESSENCE, REALITIES AND PROSPECTS
E.V. Ivanov, Associate Professor, Department of Pedagogy, Institute of Continuing Pedagogical Education, Novgorod State University. Yaroslav the Wise
The article presents some materials from the author's own research and reasoning on the problem of freedom, its general scientific and pedagogical essence and the possibilities of implementation in the practice of teaching and upbringing. The scientific novelty and practical significance of the content of this work lies in the disclosure of the theoretical essence of freedom as a pedagogical phenomenon, the identification and characterization of its main levels in the current practice of teaching and upbringing, as well as the possibility of using the presented analytical calculations for a new understanding and adaptive instrumental development of the principle of freedom in the process modern innovative search based on humanistic and cultural priorities.
The article presents the author's views on the concept of freedom, its scholarly and pedagogical essence and ways of implementation in educational practice. Freedom is viewed as a pedagogical phenomenon; characteristics of its main levels in current practice of education are given, the ways of implementation of the analysis results are presented.
The peculiar situation that has developed in the national education system in the post-perestroika years is characterized by the search for new paradigms for the development of pedagogical science and practice based on humanistic and cultural priorities, the central, unifying core of which is the phenomenon of freedom, dating back from time immemorial, which has long proven its vitality and is constantly growing in strength and relevance today.
Today, freedom has finally become one of the most significant individual and social values of humanity, as well as the goal and condition for the development of the civilizational process as a whole and its individual components, including the training and education of the younger generation. Meanwhile, this concept is very complex and, despite the centuries-old history of study, does not have an unambiguous scientific interpretation. Both before and now it is used very widely and is extrapolated to many life situations and processes, highlighting more and more new facets, which forces us to rethink previous ideas and theoretically based points of view.
Quite a few different words are usually used as key words in the definition of freedom, the most often being “conscious necessity”
© E.V. Ivanov, 2003
ability" and "opportunity". At the same time, both options are criticized by opponents. Opponents of the understanding of freedom as a “conscious necessity” quite reasonably say that there is a certain predetermination and givenness here. Those who do not agree with its interpretation as “opportunity” rightly draw associative parallels with arbitrariness and chance.
According to the author, the essence of freedom is most accurately reflected in the second option (“opportunity”). However, in order to protect it from confusion with the other above-mentioned concepts (“arbitrariness”, “randomness”), some clarifications are required. First, the opportunity must be recognized by those who have it. Secondly, by focusing attention in the pedagogical understanding of freedom not on one or two, but on all three of its main components (meaning freedom of will, choice and action), along with opportunity, one must always also mean a person’s ability to do this or that the embodiment of their wills. And thirdly, man himself must be understood and considered in all possible forms of his existence.
Taking into account the above, we can give the following definition of freedom: freedom is a conscious opportunity and ability to
the ability to choose and act based on internal motivations and needs determined by the characteristics of man as a natural, spiritual and sociocultural being. The child-oriented pedagogical interpretation of this formulation determines the focus on implementing the principle of freedom at the level of positive “freedom for” with the creation of conditions conducive to this at the level of negative “freedom from”, taking into account the specific individual and social essence of a growing person.
Analysis of the accumulated experience in understanding and implementing the phenomenon of freedom in education allows us to identify and see the common characteristic features of four possible levels of its manifestation: idealistic, the most realistically possible, rationalistic and totalitarian.
The idealistic level of freedom in education is close to the philosophical interpretation of this concept in both positive (“freedom to”) and negative (“freedom from”) dimensions. It exists only in theory. Attempts to fully implement it in practice fail, forcing teachers to seek a compromise between the ideal and the actually possible. If we turn to history, then, of course, the most striking pedagogical projection of freedom at this level in its negative understanding as “freedom from” is the theory of “natural education” by J.-J. Rousseau, which, as is known, was not implemented in its original form, although the methodological and methodological approaches contained in it were actively interpreted in various concepts and practical experience. The main, fundamental ideas for this level are Rousseau’s views on the nature of the child as ideal from birth and capable of self-development, but only in conditions of unlimited freedom of choice and action.
The mentioned practice-oriented concepts, which interpreted Rousseau’s theory in their own way, as well as others more or less successfully existed,
Higher educational models (starting with L.N. Tolstoy), which recognized freedom as the main principle of education and upbringing, form the maximum realistically possible level. In terms of its initial positions, in particular in the general understanding of the nature of the child and his freedom, it differs little from the idealistic one, however, in terms of practical implementation, it presupposes the demarcation of broad and flexible boundaries of freedom of choice and action, which, it must be said, do not always coincide in different institutions of this kind. This is due to the fact that, strictly following the pedo-centric postulate about pedagogy as “pedagogy emanating from the child,” the creators of free schools accumulate in their consciousness not only general, but also special, specific scientific, philosophical, psychological and pedagogical ideas, including and about the essence of man as a natural, spiritual and sociocultural being and the patterns of his development in childhood and adolescence. This mainly explains the diversity and sometimes external dissimilarity of educational institutions belonging to this level.
The next, third, level of freedom in education is rationalistic. Its essence lies in the fact that freedom of choice and action is dosed and varied with the help of external limiters in volumes dictated by pedagogical expediency. This expediency can be justified from a theoretical position and from the position of practical necessity and benefit, both in line with humanistic and in line with authoritarian pedagogical ideology in their moderate forms. The unifying point here is that even if the presence of good principles in the child’s nature is recognized, his ability for their self-development is denied and the need for direct external control and influence from adults is justified, both in the interests of the growing person himself and in the interests of society.
The last, totalitarian, level of freedom in education would be more accurate
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be called the level of denial of freedom, since it presupposes strict regulation of all school life activities, including the activities of teachers and students. Such theories and educational institutions are created on the basis of ideas about the child as a bearer of congenital and acquired destructive traits or as one of the links in the social mechanism of totalitarian regimes. A typical clear example of this is the traditional Soviet school.
Global socio-cultural changes of the last decade and a half, covering all spheres of the country’s life and aimed at liberation from the negative totalitarian legacy, have led to the emergence in the public consciousness of views on man as a subject of his own development and on Russia as part of the world community, which is subject to universal laws of evolution and universal human values. All this could not but affect domestic education, whose leaders were actively engaged in developing new ways of its development.
The stage of pedagogical searches and discussions found its first most significant logical conclusion in the Law of the Russian Federation “On Education”. It finally affirms the humanistic strategy, formulates the main principles and objectives, and outlines the main ways and mechanisms for updating the country's modern education. Meanwhile, while proclaiming the need to move away from authoritarianism, the main normative document does not provide for significant systemic changes, and therefore is somewhat declarative in nature, not proposing radical measures, but only focusing on a gradual movement from the possible in the indicated direction. Having elevated the phenomenon of freedom to the rank of the most important principle of state policy in this area, the law still requires teachers to take primary care in ensuring that each student masters the impersonal educational standards established from above, which, as a rule, are still achieved today.
netically connected with the traditional Soviet school with standard and impersonal forms, methods and techniques. In general, we can say that the state, taking into account the new realities of life, orients teachers to solve the problems facing them in line with humanistic ideology at the rationalistic level of freedom, but tries to do this on the old foundation of the authoritarian heritage, prolonging the agony of the basic educational paradigm of the past.
It is not surprising that, in contrast to the inert official school in relation to everything new, in modern Russia various experimental projects are beginning to be developed and alternative educational institutions are beginning to appear, striving to overcome emerging crisis phenomena, realizing the phenomenon of freedom at the highest possible level. However, by and large, they are all a “drop in the ocean” of traditional authoritarian pedagogy, which, despite criticism from all sides, continues to confidently occupy the main educational space of the country.
One of the most important and complex pedagogical and social problems that have not yet received proper theoretical understanding is the problem of the ever-increasing gap of alienation between the world of children and the world of adults. It has long historical roots and centuries-long evolution in the process of family and public education, being especially relevant today. Meanwhile, no real ways have yet been found for its complete resolution.
Without setting ourselves the task of a comprehensive consideration of this issue, we will focus only on the analysis of some of its causal aspects associated with various paradigmatic settings and problems of this article.
With subject-object relations in line with authoritarian pedagogical ideology, such a question, as a rule, does not arise, since what it is aimed at is considered a necessary condition.
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viem or the inevitable cost of educational activities. Denying children the right to fully realize their age-related needs and fighting their various “negative” manifestations, parents and teachers forcibly impose on the younger generation formal morality, rules and norms accepted in a particular society, thereby causing natural protest, expressed in hidden or obvious resistance and desire to isolate themselves within their own world, inaccessible to adults, with its special subculture, different from the official one.
As for humanistic paradigmatic attitudes, the existence of the named problem is not denied, and its solution is seen in the transition to subject-subject relations and recognition of the child’s right to free development and manifestation of his “self.” However, as accumulated pedagogical experience shows, the proclamation of the intrinsic value of childhood and “childhood” with a formal approach to the implementation of these ideas does not solve, but, on the contrary, sometimes even aggravates the situation, creating new artificial barriers. This is expressed, in particular, in the fact that a growing person (of course, not directly, but indirectly) is, as it were, told: “Live, be happy, enjoy your childhood, since there is still almost no benefit from you for the family and society, and your opinion about serious things does not interest us, because you are not able to say or do anything sensible until you grow up and gain the necessary knowledge and experience.”
In other words, both authoritarian pedagogical systems, which forcibly “place the head of an adult on the child’s shoulders,” and humanistic educational models, aimed at ensuring the pupil’s full enjoyment of each period of childhood in accordance with age and individual characteristics and needs, ultimately strive for one thing - temporarily (and this period is becoming longer and longer) to “isolate” the
emerging person from the adult world, if possible, “civilize” him and only after that allow him to actually participate in the affairs of society and the state. The role of this “temporary isolator” is assigned to the school, which from the moment of its inception has become, in fact, an official public institution, dividing people into two opposing camps: those who have not yet “matured”, i.e. did not become sufficiently full-fledged intellectually and socially, and those who received a matriculation certificate, having gone through many years of assimilation of standardized, but often divorced from life, knowledge, skills and abilities.
Thus, from the above reasoning it is clear that the identified problem can only be resolved in line with humanistic pedagogical ideology by establishing truly trusting and respectful subject-subject relationships between the younger and older generations, for which it is necessary to maximally equalize the rights of adults and children and provide the latter with opportunities for free choice and action in the process of real, rather than formal participation in the creation and design of one’s own and the common (in the family, school, society) present and future. In practice, such a situation is very difficult to model and implement. However, the direction of pedagogical efforts emerges quite clearly: it is necessary to more actively socialize a growing person in various spheres of life in the conditions of a “fair community” and organize the educational process at the highest realistically possible level of freedom.
In the West, these and other problems of modern education have recently been trying to be resolved in line with the ideas of open learning. As for Russia, taking as a guide the model of an open civil society of the Western type, our country began to adopt its ideas in the field of education, which, as we know, are inextricably linked with the ideas of our own.
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fighting and dialogue of cultures. At the same time, the corresponding axiological priorities began to play a basic role in the process of organizing and implementing educational activities.
Modern domestic pedagogy, having freed itself from the tenets of communist ideology, emphasizes universal human values as the fundamental basis for educating the younger generation. The state, which has enshrined it in law and in the Doctrine of Modernization of Education in Russia, and most of the public generally agree with this approach. Meanwhile, there is still no complete clarity on this issue, since the problem concerning the content of the declared values and the specifics of their socio-cultural and personal acceptance has not been fully resolved.
It must be said that a similar situation with its specific characteristics is now characteristic of the West, where, like in our country, two irreconcilable positions are once again colliding, the representatives of which can be conditionally called “individualists” and “traditionalists.”
The ideas that the “individualists” defend, in their deepest essence, go back to the views of the ancient Greek philosophers and sophists and, like them, cause rejection among broad social strata, since they preach the relativity of certain social values. According to “individualists,” there is nothing uniquely good or bad in this world. Therefore, everyone has the right to make a free choice and act, guided by their own scale of values, based on a subjective worldview and attitude, limiting themselves only to what can harm others. On the pedagogical plane, a similar axiological interpretation is found in the concepts of both domestic and foreign supporters of “free education”, who idealize the nature of the child and his capabilities for self-discovery and self-development.
As for the “traditionalists,” both in Russia and in the West they adhere to
They live on this issue from a different, conservative point of view, recognizing and defending the objectivity and stability of the system of values created by humanity in the process of its historical and cultural development. All this is specifically reflected in their views on education, where the leading role in shaping the worldview and personal qualities of students is given not to nature and a properly organized environment, but to the teacher and the knowledge he teaches.
As can be seen from the above, neither in the first nor in the second case we can say that certain individually or socially recognized values are universal, since their content is always determined either by subjective, or historical, cultural and social values. political determinants. Then what is meant by the meaning of the word “universal” in this context, and in general, is it acceptable in relation to the category “value”?
If we analyze the situation in the world in recent centuries and decades, we cannot help but notice that axiological priorities formed in the West are increasingly becoming dominant. The way of life and thinking adopted there “occupies” other civilizations, including Russia, in various ways. Meanwhile, anthropological, cultural, psychological, and social research in recent years clearly shows that what is good for one culture is not always acceptable, and sometimes even destructive for another. Western values, among which one of the main ones is freedom in its negative understanding, can cause, if not complete, then partial rejection from other peoples, or, in the case of targeted or indirect instillation in the process of education, lead to the gradual loss of new generations of their cultural roots and identity. All this must be taken into account in the process of modernization of domestic education, because the desire to quickly become “our own environment”
di strangers,” recklessly recognizing and trying on “universal human” Western models, may result in the alienation of our children during their upbringing not only from adults, but also from the surrounding heritage of the material and spiritual culture of their native country.
The modern world is a multicultural integrative space in which different peoples, countries and civilizations coexist and are in a constant, multi-level and multi-channel dialogue. The role of the main channel in this case is given to education, which opens up access for a growing person to other sociocultural meanings and images. In turn, comprehending the content of various cultures and experiencing their influence, the cognizing subject certainly faces the problem of cultural self-determination, which is far from easy in conditions of openness and freedom.
The history of Russia shows that blind copying of foreign cultural models often leads to negative results. This fully applies to attempts to instill Western-type negative freedom on Russian soil. Unable to cope with its excess, our compatriots sometimes made the irrevocable choice of giving up freedom in favor of totalitarianism.
In recent years we have been experiencing a similar situation. Having failed to digest the first large portion of negative freedom (since the internal boundaries
freedom for the majority of Russian people brought up in Soviet times turned out to be external), our society and school, as its most important institution, began to balance on the line between old and new, leaning more and more towards the first.
To avoid such developments, it is necessary to carry out full-scale integration into the world community only after acquiring and realizing one’s own cultural identity. A true dialogue of cultures is not the imposition of one’s own or the blind copying of someone else’s experience and values, but equal mutual communication and mutual enrichment. Therefore, only by forming the internal, spiritual freedom of a person, characteristic of the domestic cultural tradition, will we be able to painlessly and with benefit for ourselves significantly expand the boundaries of external freedom.
Thus, we can say that pedagogy today faces the important task of helping a growing person in the process of acculturation of his personality through the humanization of the educational process, which involves the implementation of the phenomenon of freedom on a rationalistic level with a gradual transition to the most realistically possible. At the same time, one should rely primarily on one’s own cultural and pedagogical traditions, which, however, should not interfere with the creative use and adaptation of the best foreign models.
Recently, more than ever, all the media with different political orientations - left, legal and simply nowhere - and, especially, the Internet, which has become the property of almost every home and (unlike the central press and television) is available for expressing one’s painful and innermost thoughts, filled with alarming messages about the upcoming “innovation”, with which the Ministry of Education and Science, through the next law on education, is trying to enlighten and make its people happy. Most of all, teachers are pouring out their pain, the older generation of whom still remembers what a decent education was in our country in the recent past and what it became after the “innovative” reform. We also remember parents whose children could receive a free and good education not only at school, any university, but even at the University on Sparrow Hills - if they had the ability and the will to study.
Under the slogan of modernization and gaining freedom of education as a result of legislative manipulations over the past two decades, many difficult to correct mistakes have been made throughout the entire system of long-suffering domestic education. Any action is assessed by results, and the person himself is assessed by his deeds, and not by words borrowed from abroad and incomprehensible to many people: “modernization”, “innovation”, “variability” - and not by the beautiful-sounding phrase “quality of education”, with which seems to help improve the level of education. What are the results of educational “innovations”? Everyone knows about them - from young to old: a professor whose salary is barely enough for food (for example, a professor at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University receives less for his hard work than a trolleybus driver); and parents forced to pay for dubious educational services with their last, hard-earned money; and their children - schoolchildren and students, who very quickly felt freedom and freedom from education.
Many schoolchildren, intoxicated by the freedom from learning and diligence, stopped studying, stopped reading and listening to their parents and their teachers, especially those who, according to the good old tradition (and there are many of them) are trying to give the most precious thing - knowledge, and thereby show their love for to his students, and especially to those who were lost against their own will. And here we can name several reasons. The first reason is why study diligently at school, when without any problems you can enter any university, even some paid faculty of Moscow State University, which with great difficulty manages to maintain a high level of education. For this, knowledge is not needed at all, but money contributed by parents in the form of educational dues is needed. At the same time, only money wins, and not common sense and not a traditional competition, which, through the level of knowledge, is the only one capable of opening the way for the most knowledgeable and prepared applicants to higher education. Numerous “universities” and “institutes” that have grown like mushrooms after warm summer rains on “free” soil, fertilized with educational “innovations”, are ready to absorb all applicants with a guarantee of issuing a state diploma. They do not need the applicant’s knowledge, but money. And the leaders of many such “universities” are not at all interested in the fact that the money is paid by parents, who are most often not rich at all and are forced, to the detriment of their health, to work in different places and on more than one shift. The domestic education system also has budget funding, but it is dissolved in a commercial educational bacchanalia that has overwhelmed state universities.
The second reason for freedom from studying is that in order to study well, you need to work hard, you need to educate yourself daily and hourly. And who wants to strain, as it is fashionable to say now, and work tirelessly when there are so many temptations around: the Internet, which can drag young, fragile hearts into the pool of vices and passions, from which neither parents nor teachers can free them; and television, which elevates violence and debauchery to the rank of heroic deed. All this taken together stupefies and devastates the human soul, in which conscience, which in many ways distinguishes a person from an animal, is eradicated.
The third reason for disrespect for knowledge is that some smart and observant schoolchildren and students see with the naked eye that often those who make their way to power and seize the people's wealth are not those who studied well and diligently.
Everyone knows very well what all this leads to - television is trying not to miss a single educational sensation. In Moscow, where, it would seem, there should be all the conditions for a full-fledged education, a secondary school was recently closed due to the low quality of education. Instead of understanding and eliminating the cause, education officials followed their only “correct” path. Is it the fault of the school, teachers, students and their parents that they have to reap the fruits of a rich “innovative” harvest in education. Another sensation - free from conscience and physically stronger students beat their physical education teacher, and the egregious episodes filmed were posted on the Internet so that everyone could see that even in school there is a place for “feat”, that there are “heroes” in our fatherland. And there are a great many such mind-blowing sensations that have overwhelmed long-suffering Russia. Trouble and nothing more. “The most serious problems of modern man arise from the fact that he has lost the sense of meaningful cooperation with God in his intentions for humanity,” these are the words of the great Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky most fully reflect the realities of modern life.
Without a doubt, in our country there are good schools and gymnasiums and, in particular, Orthodox schools, where they provide excellent knowledge in mathematics, physics, biology, Russian language and literature and other classical subjects, and where they not only learn the secrets of existence, but and are taught to distinguish good from evil, to respect and love their parents and teachers. Students in such schools experience the joy of learning, and they come home with enlightened, peaceful faces, and it does not occur to them to commit any sinful act for which they would be ashamed and ashamed of their parents. But for some reason, such a true form of education, proven over centuries, bypasses both the state and would-be education reformers and education officials - it is paid for out of the pockets of parents who with all their hearts want to raise their children well-mannered and enlightened; to raise comprehensively developed people, in whose souls would be infused not by the demons of hatred and profit, but by love for one’s neighbor, compassion and mercy.
School problems, like an avalanche, fall on higher educational institutions, most of which have created all the conditions not for learning, but for flourishing in the lush flower of freedom from education and where, for the same reasons as at school, students do not want to bother themselves with their studies. They will receive a diploma of “manager”, “economist” and “lawyer”, and some of them will be helped to seize the position of manager in the prescribed manner by influential and wealthy parents, and not at all by fundamental and professional knowledge. Savvy students observe that without special, highly qualified training, i.e. Without being highly qualified specialists, you can miraculously find a high position, for example, take the post of head of a large industry, say, the energy or nuclear industry. And the result of such “management” is known to everyone: systematic shutdowns of power supply sources (with excess energy capacity in our country), which was previously extremely rare; the injection of huge financial resources into nuclear energy, which in many civilized countries is being phased out so as not to leave a dangerous radioactive legacy to its descendants; man-made disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, where the management turned out to be free of technical and engineering knowledge.
What is the huge amount of parental money being spent on, which has fallen into the hands of a small handful of university “leaders” and a significant portion of which is passed over by teachers and staff? Last year, the television program “Man and the Law” and other leading channels told the entire Russian people, including parents who love their children, telling how their money, earned by honest labor, was criminally wasted, using the example of the State University of Management, where, under the guise of repair work, millions of rubles ended up in the pockets of work and where, based on violations of the law, a search was carried out, an arrest was made and a criminal case was opened. At the same university for the rector Lyalin A.M. two luxury cars were purchased, costing millions of rubles each, and many employees and teachers receive meager salaries, which are barely enough for travel and food. After a thorough investigation, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at the end of last year sent materials to the Ministry of Education and Science for taking decisive measures. After much thought and silence, by order of the ministry Lyalin A.M. nevertheless, he was fired for his “fruitful” work. And at the same university he was appointed to the position of adviser. The question is, why? Is it not in order to continue to advise how to divide and conquer and to further ruin the university and eradicate from it the engineering and economic direction, for which it was famous throughout Russia before the reign of Lyalin. Another question arises: why is the ministry withdrawing from its direct responsibilities?
Who needs such a ministry and why? Maybe it is needed in order to introduce, through the new education law, their delusional ideas about the introduction of a new state standard, in which there was no place for compulsory study of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, Russian language and literature, or geography, nor the foundations of Orthodox culture, which all taken together form fundamental knowledge about nature and make a person enlightened, educated and educated, and the deeds of such a person will be aimed not at destruction, but at creation and development. The minister’s explanations about the proposed “innovations” look very ridiculous. The new version of the standards, which differs little from the previous one, is also not encouraging. Is it really necessary to intervene at the highest level to put everything in its place? Why, then, is a huge army of ministerial and other education officials needed, on whose maintenance quite a lot of money from all taxpayers is spent?
The subjects “Life Safety” and “Physical Education” were placed in first place in the proposed standards, and a certain symbolic date was named - 2020. It can be assumed that by that time, as a result of all the failed reforms, including “innovative” education reforms , the dying Russian nation will reach a point beyond which everything will be collapsed and destroyed to such an extent that only one field of activity will remain - the field of life safety for physically strong, but ignorant, ill-mannered and spiritually backward people, but by that time there will be no one to save .
The degradation of society and the extinction of any nation begins with the degradation of education and the human soul. By saving a person’s soul through the acquisition of spiritual and moral values, one can save education from far-fetched and harmful reformations. To do this, education reformers must understand and firmly grasp a simple truth: education is not a paid service or a product that can be sold as expensively as possible, but it is an invaluable creative process that nurtures well-mannered, enlightened and educated people capable of creating great things. miracles in the name of saving civilization and the further development of all humanity.
Stepan Karpenkov , Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, laureateState PrizeRussian Federation in the field of science and technology
