How will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a school of the future, which is worth dreaming about? Column for Kompyuterra #115
Project justification (probably slightly or not so slightly utopian): creation of the distance learning complex "Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future", intended to significantly improve the efficiency of school education
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Dmytro Shabanov
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{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "What can be judged by measuring fluctuating asymmetry?\nHow will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a future school worth dreaming about?\nCulturally adapting opportunists, or On the diversity of ecological niches of Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758", "column_numbers": "Column for Kompyuterra #114\nColumn for Kompyuterra #115\nColumn for Kompyuterra #116", "content": "Unexpectedly for me myself, I was invited to participate in a pedagogical festival that should take place in mid-August in Tatarstan, in Yelabuga. Well, I am glad for the opportunity to visit Kazan and Yelabuga; now I need to understand what I can present at an event oriented primarily toward school teachers. Although what is there to doubt: there is no particular reason to doubt. Over the past couple of years I have been developing, gradually concretizing, one idea that belongs to the sphere of education. I have already had to tell the readers of \"KT\" about its main components; first of all, they were discussed in columns about the day-after-tomorrow textbooks, the supertask for education, and the mountain road. Here I will try to assemble what is coming out, into a unified whole. I hope that the discussion of these ideas in the column will help, rather than hinder, their development in Yelabuga…\n\nBoth in Russia and in Ukraine, school education is in deep crisis. Schoolchildren study the foundations of sciences, yet neither they nor their teachers understand why they are doing this. Mastery of sciences is traditionally based on memorizing textbook texts and teachers' dictations. The reason for this is the absence of a universally understood goal. It is clear to everyone that children need to be taught something, but there is no unified understanding of what, why, and how, alas. Why did this happen?\n\nIdeally, education in each country should be a holistic system, built to achieve a certain goal. In the USSR, education was subordinated to a specific task—to withstand and win in the competition of superpowers. Although it was not possible to cope with the task, a holistic and quite effective educational system was built to solve it.\n\nThe Soviet empire lost the Cold War and fell apart. The goals of the educational system were lost on its fragments. In the search for a new identity, educational reforms were launched in each of the post-Soviet countries, of a chaotic nature. In words, they were directed at borrowing features of more progressive educational systems, and in practice they often turned out to be a way of either saving or washing finances. The thing is that different educational systems have been created in different parts of the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Successful systems are holistic complexes where, in the course of multi-decadal (often—multi-century) work, all parts have been harmoniously linked with each other. Our reformers throughout try to tear out some single detail from an educational system they like and transplant it to our soil. Alas, the resulting hybrids turn out to be non-viable, as non-viable as a construct with eagle wings, tuna fins, and antelope legs.\n\nSo, to make the educational system holistic, one should set a certain supertask for oneself, and then subordinate to it the construction of methodological and organizational educational technologies. Are such plans realistic in today's situation?\n\nAlas, it seems to me that at the current stage—no. A significant part of the management ideas, the implementations of which we observe, is the result of reconciling the short-term interests of kleptocracy with the medium-term ideas of populist propaganda aimed at reproducing the current power mechanism. Long-term interests of society as a whole, and even more so the prospective planning of humanity's strategy, somehow never reach the hands (and heads). Can we hope that education will be lucky and everything will work out differently for it? Nevertheless, I think that one must still think about the desired state of this sphere. The algorithm of changes is simple (I dare quote myself).\n\nI. Diagnostics of the current state.\nII. Goal-setting (determination of the desired state).\nIII. Development of the optimal transition route.\n\nApproaches for diagnosing the current educational system that seem rational to me, I have already outlined. Now I want to understand what state of this system should be recognized as desired. Even if our dreams turn out to be utopian—nevertheless, by clarifying them, we can understand something new.\n\nI will begin with the supertask. It is clear to me that humanity as a whole now stands before a more serious choice than the leadership of the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War. The Soviet leaders, of course, were not ready to lose—but they lost, and the world did not collapse. We live with you, raise youth, and make plans for the future. But if humanity cannot change its way of relating to the biosphere, the living conditions of today's children, and even more so—future generations, may become unbearable, not admitting a decent life.\n\nSo, the current nature of humanity's connection with the environment, with our dependence on non-renewable and easily exhaustible resources, with unfounded hope for unlimited economic growth, is fundamentally temporary, transient. If we remain in relaxed expectation, we will face a chain of military redistributions of rapidly melting resources in a polluted and destroyed biosphere. Fitting into the turn is an extremely difficult task for all of humanity.\n\nBesides this global task, we also have a number of national ones. Every state, every nation stands before the possibility of either preserving itself and finding its place in the future sustainable humanity, or getting lost at the turn. What are the roles of Russia and Ukraine in the coming future? It is clear to me that from the point of view of Russian and Ukrainian interests, these roles should be independent and different, but, of course, their definition is a very difficult task.\n\nWell, and what does the educational system have to do with it? It should prepare citizens who, at a minimum, will be able to fit into the turn themselves, and at a maximum, will be able to participate in planning and implementing such a turn.\n\nAnd what educational system will be able to ensure the preparation of such citizens?\n\nLet us figure out what education is. Creation of an image of reality, or better said—creation in the psyche of the learner of a model of the existing system of knowledge and technologies. The system consists of subsystems and interconnections between them, which should find their reflection in the pupil's picture of the world. Education is modeling!\n\nMy main achievement in the methodological field I consider to be participation (together with Alexander Kozlenko and Maryna Kravchenko) in the creation of the IUMK (innovative educational-methodological complex) \"Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere\" for specialized classes of senior school (more details—here). This IUMK was made in 2008 by order of the National Foundation for Personnel Preparation of Russia, passed approbation, received enthusiastic reviews… and was withdrawn from use due to copyright restrictions. The thing is that the firm that provided the programming for this product unobtrusively for the customer sewed into it the use of technology to which it had exclusive rights, demanded additional payment, and, not receiving it, banned the use of the result of many years of work!\n\nThe idea of our IUMK was this. To understand how our biosphere functions, one must make its model. For this, a simulator similar to a computer game was used. Separate stages of such modeling were used as assignments for students' project work. To create such a model, one needs to figure out how the original is arranged and how it functions. For this, students used 50 research models (describing our real biosphere and multi-level systems within it) and a textbook. Some of the models we made for the IUMK are collected here. And here a film made by Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren about the approbation of our product is posted.\n\nOur experience showed the following:\n— work with models and especially their creation is an extremely effective method of teaching;\n— project work is a successful method of stimulating students to master educational material;\n— solving complex tasks during project work requires combining material from different fields of knowledge;\n— presentation of educational material not in the order corresponding to the structure of science, but in the logic subordinated to solving some task, is quite possible and promotes better perception of it;\n— the system of educational manual preparation, oriented toward the profit of manufacturing firms, is ineffective for restructuring the educational process in accordance with modern requirements.\n\nI have already had to explain why I consider that textbooks of the future (the day-after-tomorrow's, not tomorrow's) will be networked, distant. Only they will support continuous change of educational text, keeping it current; only they will allow using the necessary volume of additional materials; only they will ensure the proper level of interactive interaction of schoolchildren with educational material and with each other. I think that something similar to our IUMK (only broader and more technological) should be done on a networked basis.\n\nSo, the time has come to explain what I propose. I want to participate in the creation of a distance educational complex \"Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future.\" Its features seem to me as follows:\n— it is necessary to ensure stimulation of schoolchildren by searching for ways of changing humanity's relations with the biosphere for its sustainable existence, as well as searching for their country's place in global humanity;\n— basic educational activity should be online individual and group work (including—project) with models of studied objects, as well as creation of such models;\n— the modular structure of the complex should ensure diversity of educational trajectories corresponding to the profile of the school, class, and individuality of each pupil;\n— in various modules and educational trajectories based on them, materials from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, economics, political science, fundamentals of life safety, etc., should be used;\n— for general education school, elaboration of a mandatory set of modules relating to the main directions should be provided; for specialized education, a deeper examination of a broader set of modules of the corresponding orientation is necessary;\n— the organization of educational material should correspond not to the logic of sections of each of the sciences (as is accepted in most textbooks), but to the logic of solving certain tasks (for example, genetics and molecular biology can be studied as material necessary for solving the problem of safe use of GMOs or compensation of humanity's genetic load);\n— the complex should be located on the distance education site of one of the classical universities capable of ensuring its development and maintenance by specialists of different branches; the possibility of editing and refinement of its modules should also be given to experts from other educational and scientific institutions; possibly, different parts of the complex can be located on sites of different organizations;\n— training with the use of this complex should be included in the state educational system; the complex as a whole should receive \"approval\" (endorsement) of the relevant ministry, and successful completion of trajectories built on it should be counted as successful completion of the general or specialized education program.\n\nUtopia? Yes, it looks like it. Creation of the complex I described requires the most extensive coordinated work of authors of different specialties, serious financial costs, solution of complex organizational problems. The mere endorsement of such a complex and equating the results of work with it to the sequential memorization by schoolchildren of texts from a bunch of poorly connected textbooks is a dizzyingly complex organizational task. Will ministerial officials be ready to release from their hands petty control over curriculum fulfillment? If they agree to this, then only under the condition of such control over the created complex that will reduce the entire meaning of its development to zero. To not repeat the joyless fate of various point reforms, we must properly fit this complex into the general system of secondary and higher education. And what benefit will those structures receive that will finance the creation and maintenance of the working capacity of such a complex? You understand that such a complex cannot be done carelessly, \"anyhow\"; it must either be done well, or not done at all.\n\nAnd yet, understanding the complexity of the task set, I want to find a route leading from the current state of the educational system to that about which I fantasized here. What if it works out? If one really wants it?\n\nIf the task I described belongs to the number of potentially realizable ones, there should be ways of creating and using its components separately, before the entire complex is created and enters regular mode. For example, some components of this system can be created as a distance biology course on the site of one of the serious universities (you can, of course, guess that I mean first of all the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in which I work myself). The work on creating a course for applicants with such a long-term perspective Maryna Kravchenko and I have already begun. I retain hope that the project briefly described in this column will receive funding from some serious grant-maker or simply attract sponsorship money. Perhaps, if it received intergovernmental (Ukrainian-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, or maybe even three- or four-sided) status, this would promote the successful passage of the initial stages of its development?\n\nI do not know… I continue to think about this idea and count on the help of constructive critics."}
{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "What can be judged by measuring fluctuating asymmetry?\nHow will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a future school worth dreaming about?\nCulturally adapting opportunists, or On the diversity of ecological niches of Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758", "column_numbers": "Column for Kompyuterra #114\nColumn for Kompyuterra #115\nColumn for Kompyuterra #116", "content": "Unexpectedly for me myself, I was invited to participate in a pedagogical festival that should take place in mid-August in Tatarstan, in Yelabuga. Well, I am glad for the opportunity to visit Kazan and Yelabuga; now I need to understand what I can present at an event oriented primarily toward school teachers. Although what is there to doubt: there is no particular reason to doubt. Over the past couple of years I have been developing, gradually concretizing, one idea that belongs to the sphere of education. I have already had to tell the readers of \"KT\" about its main components; first of all, they were discussed in columns about the day-after-tomorrow textbooks, the supertask for education, and the mountain road. Here I will try to assemble what is coming out, into a unified whole. I hope that the discussion of these ideas in the column will help, rather than hinder, their development in Yelabuga…\n\nBoth in Russia and in Ukraine, school education is in deep crisis. Schoolchildren study the foundations of sciences, yet neither they nor their teachers understand why they are doing this. Mastery of sciences is traditionally based on memorizing textbook texts and teachers' dictations. The reason for this is the absence of a universally understood goal. It is clear to everyone that children need to be taught something, but there is no unified understanding of what, why, and how, alas. Why did this happen?\n\nIdeally, education in each country should be a holistic system, built to achieve a certain goal. In the USSR, education was subordinated to a specific task—to withstand and win in the competition of superpowers. Although it was not possible to cope with the task, a holistic and quite effective educational system was built to solve it.\n\nThe Soviet empire lost the Cold War and fell apart. The goals of the educational system were lost on its fragments. In the search for a new identity, educational reforms were launched in each of the post-Soviet countries, of a chaotic nature. In words, they were directed at borrowing features of more progressive educational systems, and in practice they often turned out to be a way of either saving or washing finances. The thing is that different educational systems have been created in different parts of the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Successful systems are holistic complexes where, in the course of multi-decadal (often—multi-century) work, all parts have been harmoniously linked with each other. Our reformers throughout try to tear out some single detail from an educational system they like and transplant it to our soil. Alas, the resulting hybrids turn out to be non-viable, as non-viable as a construct with eagle wings, tuna fins, and antelope legs.\n\nSo, to make the educational system holistic, one should set a certain supertask for oneself, and then subordinate to it the construction of methodological and organizational educational technologies. Are such plans realistic in today's situation?\n\nAlas, it seems to me that at the current stage—no. A significant part of the management ideas, the implementations of which we observe, is the result of reconciling the short-term interests of kleptocracy with the medium-term ideas of populist propaganda aimed at reproducing the current power mechanism. Long-term interests of society as a whole, and even more so the prospective planning of humanity's strategy, somehow never reach the hands (and heads). Can we hope that education will be lucky and everything will work out differently for it? Nevertheless, I think that one must still think about the desired state of this sphere. The algorithm of changes is simple (I dare quote myself).\n\nI. Diagnostics of the current state.\nII. Goal-setting (determination of the desired state).\nIII. Development of the optimal transition route.\n\nApproaches for diagnosing the current educational system that seem rational to me, I have already outlined. Now I want to understand what state of this system should be recognized as desired. Even if our dreams turn out to be utopian—nevertheless, by clarifying them, we can understand something new.\n\nI will begin with the supertask. It is clear to me that humanity as a whole now stands before a more serious choice than the leadership of the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War. The Soviet leaders, of course, were not ready to lose—but they lost, and the world did not collapse. We live with you, raise youth, and make plans for the future. But if humanity cannot change its way of relating to the biosphere, the living conditions of today's children, and even more so—future generations, may become unbearable, not admitting a decent life.\n\nSo, the current nature of humanity's connection with the environment, with our dependence on non-renewable and easily exhaustible resources, with unfounded hope for unlimited economic growth, is fundamentally temporary, transient. If we remain in relaxed expectation, we will face a chain of military redistributions of rapidly melting resources in a polluted and destroyed biosphere. Fitting into the turn is an extremely difficult task for all of humanity.\n\nBesides this global task, we also have a number of national ones. Every state, every nation stands before the possibility of either preserving itself and finding its place in the future sustainable humanity, or getting lost at the turn. What are the roles of Russia and Ukraine in the coming future? It is clear to me that from the point of view of Russian and Ukrainian interests, these roles should be independent and different, but, of course, their definition is a very difficult task.\n\nWell, and what does the educational system have to do with it? It should prepare citizens who, at a minimum, will be able to fit into the turn themselves, and at a maximum, will be able to participate in planning and implementing such a turn.\n\nAnd what educational system will be able to ensure the preparation of such citizens?\n\nLet us figure out what education is. Creation of an image of reality, or better said—creation in the psyche of the learner of a model of the existing system of knowledge and technologies. The system consists of subsystems and interconnections between them, which should find their reflection in the pupil's picture of the world. Education is modeling!\n\nMy main achievement in the methodological field I consider to be participation (together with Alexander Kozlenko and Maryna Kravchenko) in the creation of the IUMK (innovative educational-methodological complex) \"Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere\" for specialized classes of senior school (more details—here). This IUMK was made in 2008 by order of the National Foundation for Personnel Preparation of Russia, passed approbation, received enthusiastic reviews… and was withdrawn from use due to copyright restrictions. The thing is that the firm that provided the programming for this product unobtrusively for the customer sewed into it the use of technology to which it had exclusive rights, demanded additional payment, and, not receiving it, banned the use of the result of many years of work!\n\nThe idea of our IUMK was this. To understand how our biosphere functions, one must make its model. For this, a simulator similar to a computer game was used. Separate stages of such modeling were used as assignments for students' project work. To create such a model, one needs to figure out how the original is arranged and how it functions. For this, students used 50 research models (describing our real biosphere and multi-level systems within it) and a textbook. Some of the models we made for the IUMK are collected here. And here a film made by Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren about the approbation of our product is posted.\n\nOur experience showed the following:\n— work with models and especially their creation is an extremely effective method of teaching;\n— project work is a successful method of stimulating students to master educational material;\n— solving complex tasks during project work requires combining material from different fields of knowledge;\n— presentation of educational material not in the order corresponding to the structure of science, but in the logic subordinated to solving some task, is quite possible and promotes better perception of it;\n— the system of educational manual preparation, oriented toward the profit of manufacturing firms, is ineffective for restructuring the educational process in accordance with modern requirements.\n\nI have already had to explain why I consider that textbooks of the future (the day-after-tomorrow's, not tomorrow's) will be networked, distant. Only they will support continuous change of educational text, keeping it current; only they will allow using the necessary volume of additional materials; only they will ensure the proper level of interactive interaction of schoolchildren with educational material and with each other. I think that something similar to our IUMK (only broader and more technological) should be done on a networked basis.\n\nSo, the time has come to explain what I propose. I want to participate in the creation of a distance educational complex \"Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future.\" Its features seem to me as follows:\n— it is necessary to ensure stimulation of schoolchildren by searching for ways of changing humanity's relations with the biosphere for its sustainable existence, as well as searching for their country's place in global humanity;\n— basic educational activity should be online individual and group work (including—project) with models of studied objects, as well as creation of such models;\n— the modular structure of the complex should ensure diversity of educational trajectories corresponding to the profile of the school, class, and individuality of each pupil;\n— in various modules and educational trajectories based on them, materials from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, economics, political science, fundamentals of life safety, etc., should be used;\n— for general education school, elaboration of a mandatory set of modules relating to the main directions should be provided; for specialized education, a deeper examination of a broader set of modules of the corresponding orientation is necessary;\n— the organization of educational material should correspond not to the logic of sections of each of the sciences (as is accepted in most textbooks), but to the logic of solving certain tasks (for example, genetics and molecular biology can be studied as material necessary for solving the problem of safe use of GMOs or compensation of humanity's genetic load);\n— the complex should be located on the distance education site of one of the classical universities capable of ensuring its development and maintenance by specialists of different branches; the possibility of editing and refinement of its modules should also be given to experts from other educational and scientific institutions; possibly, different parts of the complex can be located on sites of different organizations;\n— training with the use of this complex should be included in the state educational system; the complex as a whole should receive \"approval\" (endorsement) of the relevant ministry, and successful completion of trajectories built on it should be counted as successful completion of the general or specialized education program.\n\nUtopia? Yes, it looks like it. Creation of the complex I described requires the most extensive coordinated work of authors of different specialties, serious financial costs, solution of complex organizational problems. The mere endorsement of such a complex and equating the results of work with it to the sequential memorization by schoolchildren of texts from a bunch of poorly connected textbooks is a dizzyingly complex organizational task. Will ministerial officials be ready to release from their hands petty control over curriculum fulfillment? If they agree to this, then only under the condition of such control over the created complex that will reduce the entire meaning of its development to zero. To not repeat the joyless fate of various point reforms, we must properly fit this complex into the general system of secondary and higher education. And what benefit will those structures receive that will finance the creation and maintenance of the working capacity of such a complex? You understand that such a complex cannot be done carelessly, \"anyhow\"; it must either be done well, or not done at all.\n\nAnd yet, understanding the complexity of the task set, I want to find a route leading from the current state of the educational system to that about which I fantasized here. What if it works out? If one really wants it?\n\nIf the task I described belongs to the number of potentially realizable ones, there should be ways of creating and using its components separately, before the entire complex is created and enters regular mode. For example, some components of this system can be created as a distance biology course on the site of one of the serious universities (you can, of course, guess that I mean first of all the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in which I work myself). The work on creating a course for applicants with such a long-term perspective Maryna Kravchenko and I have already begun. I retain hope that the project briefly described in this column will receive funding from some serious grant-maker or simply attract sponsorship money. Perhaps, if it received intergovernmental (Ukrainian-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, or maybe even three- or four-sided) status, this would promote the successful passage of the initial stages of its development?\n\nI do not know… I continue to think about this idea and count on the help of constructive critics."}
{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "What can be judged by measuring fluctuating asymmetry?\nHow will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a future school worth dreaming about?\nCulturally adapting opportunists, or On the diversity of ecological niches of Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758", "column_numbers": "Column for Kompyuterra #114\nColumn for Kompyuterra #115\nColumn for Kompyuterra #116", "content": "Unexpectedly for me myself, I was invited to participate in a pedagogical festival that should take place in mid-August in Tatarstan, in Yelabuga. Well, I am glad for the opportunity to visit Kazan and Yelabuga; now I need to understand what I can present at an event oriented primarily toward school teachers. Although what is there to doubt: there is no particular reason to doubt. Over the past couple of years I have been developing, gradually concretizing, one idea that belongs to the sphere of education. I have already had to tell the readers of \"KT\" about its main components; first of all, they were discussed in columns about the day-after-tomorrow textbooks, the supertask for education, and the mountain road. Here I will try to assemble what is coming out, into a unified whole. I hope that the discussion of these ideas in the column will help, rather than hinder, their development in Yelabuga…\n\nBoth in Russia and in Ukraine, school education is in deep crisis. Schoolchildren study the foundations of sciences, yet neither they nor their teachers understand why they are doing this. Mastery of sciences is traditionally based on memorizing textbook texts and teachers' dictations. The reason for this is the absence of a universally understood goal. It is clear to everyone that children need to be taught something, but there is no unified understanding of what, why, and how, alas. Why did this happen?\n\nIdeally, education in each country should be a holistic system, built to achieve a certain goal. In the USSR, education was subordinated to a specific task—to withstand and win in the competition of superpowers. Although it was not possible to cope with the task, a holistic and quite effective educational system was built to solve it.\n\nThe Soviet empire lost the Cold War and fell apart. The goals of the educational system were lost on its fragments. In the search for a new identity, educational reforms were launched in each of the post-Soviet countries, of a chaotic nature. In words, they were directed at borrowing features of more progressive educational systems, and in practice they often turned out to be a way of either saving or washing finances. The thing is that different educational systems have been created in different parts of the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Successful systems are holistic complexes where, in the course of multi-decadal (often—multi-century) work, all parts have been harmoniously linked with each other. Our reformers throughout try to tear out some single detail from an educational system they like and transplant it to our soil. Alas, the resulting hybrids turn out to be non-viable, as non-viable as a construct with eagle wings, tuna fins, and antelope legs.\n\nSo, to make the educational system holistic, one should set a certain supertask for oneself, and then subordinate to it the construction of methodological and organizational educational technologies. Are such plans realistic in today's situation?\n\nAlas, it seems to me that at the current stage—no. A significant part of the management ideas, the implementations of which we observe, is the result of reconciling the short-term interests of kleptocracy with the medium-term ideas of populist propaganda aimed at reproducing the current power mechanism. Long-term interests of society as a whole, and even more so the prospective planning of humanity's strategy, somehow never reach the hands (and heads). Can we hope that education will be lucky and everything will work out differently for it? Nevertheless, I think that one must still think about the desired state of this sphere. The algorithm of changes is simple (I dare quote myself).\n\nI. Diagnostics of the current state.\nII. Goal-setting (determination of the desired state).\nIII. Development of the optimal transition route.\n\nApproaches for diagnosing the current educational system that seem rational to me, I have already outlined. Now I want to understand what state of this system should be recognized as desired. Even if our dreams turn out to be utopian—nevertheless, by clarifying them, we can understand something new.\n\nI will begin with the supertask. It is clear to me that humanity as a whole now stands before a more serious choice than the leadership of the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War. The Soviet leaders, of course, were not ready to lose—but they lost, and the world did not collapse. We live with you, raise youth, and make plans for the future. But if humanity cannot change its way of relating to the biosphere, the living conditions of today's children, and even more so—future generations, may become unbearable, not admitting a decent life.\n\nSo, the current nature of humanity's connection with the environment, with our dependence on non-renewable and easily exhaustible resources, with unfounded hope for unlimited economic growth, is fundamentally temporary, transient. If we remain in relaxed expectation, we will face a chain of military redistributions of rapidly melting resources in a polluted and destroyed biosphere. Fitting into the turn is an extremely difficult task for all of humanity.\n\nBesides this global task, we also have a number of national ones. Every state, every nation stands before the possibility of either preserving itself and finding its place in the future sustainable humanity, or getting lost at the turn. What are the roles of Russia and Ukraine in the coming future? It is clear to me that from the point of view of Russian and Ukrainian interests, these roles should be independent and different, but, of course, their definition is a very difficult task.\n\nWell, and what does the educational system have to do with it? It should prepare citizens who, at a minimum, will be able to fit into the turn themselves, and at a maximum, will be able to participate in planning and implementing such a turn.\n\nAnd what educational system will be able to ensure the preparation of such citizens?\n\nLet us figure out what education is. Creation of an image of reality, or better said—creation in the psyche of the learner of a model of the existing system of knowledge and technologies. The system consists of subsystems and interconnections between them, which should find their reflection in the pupil's picture of the world. Education is modeling!\n\nMy main achievement in the methodological field I consider to be participation (together with Alexander Kozlenko and Maryna Kravchenko) in the creation of the IUMK (innovative educational-methodological complex) \"Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere\" for specialized classes of senior school (more details—here). This IUMK was made in 2008 by order of the National Foundation for Personnel Preparation of Russia, passed approbation, received enthusiastic reviews… and was withdrawn from use due to copyright restrictions. The thing is that the firm that provided the programming for this product unobtrusively for the customer sewed into it the use of technology to which it had exclusive rights, demanded additional payment, and, not receiving it, banned the use of the result of many years of work!\n\nThe idea of our IUMK was this. To understand how our biosphere functions, one must make its model. For this, a simulator similar to a computer game was used. Separate stages of such modeling were used as assignments for students' project work. To create such a model, one needs to figure out how the original is arranged and how it functions. For this, students used 50 research models (describing our real biosphere and multi-level systems within it) and a textbook. Some of the models we made for the IUMK are collected here. And here a film made by Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren about the approbation of our product is posted.\n\nOur experience showed the following:\n— work with models and especially their creation is an extremely effective method of teaching;\n— project work is a successful method of stimulating students to master educational material;\n— solving complex tasks during project work requires combining material from different fields of knowledge;\n— presentation of educational material not in the order corresponding to the structure of science, but in the logic subordinated to solving some task, is quite possible and promotes better perception of it;\n— the system of educational manual preparation, oriented toward the profit of manufacturing firms, is ineffective for restructuring the educational process in accordance with modern requirements.\n\nI have already had to explain why I consider that textbooks of the future (the day-after-tomorrow's, not tomorrow's) will be networked, distant. Only they will support continuous change of educational text, keeping it current; only they will allow using the necessary volume of additional materials; only they will ensure the proper level of interactive interaction of schoolchildren with educational material and with each other. I think that something similar to our IUMK (only broader and more technological) should be done on a networked basis.\n\nSo, the time has come to explain what I propose. I want to participate in the creation of a distance educational complex \"Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future.\" Its features seem to me as follows:\n— it is necessary to ensure stimulation of schoolchildren by searching for ways of changing humanity's relations with the biosphere for its sustainable existence, as well as searching for their country's place in global humanity;\n— basic educational activity should be online individual and group work (including—project) with models of studied objects, as well as creation of such models;\n— the modular structure of the complex should ensure diversity of educational trajectories corresponding to the profile of the school, class, and individuality of each pupil;\n— in various modules and educational trajectories based on them, materials from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, economics, political science, fundamentals of life safety, etc., should be used;\n— for general education school, elaboration of a mandatory set of modules relating to the main directions should be provided; for specialized education, a deeper examination of a broader set of modules of the corresponding orientation is necessary;\n— the organization of educational material should correspond not to the logic of sections of each of the sciences (as is accepted in most textbooks), but to the logic of solving certain tasks (for example, genetics and molecular biology can be studied as material necessary for solving the problem of safe use of GMOs or compensation of humanity's genetic load);\n— the complex should be located on the distance education site of one of the classical universities capable of ensuring its development and maintenance by specialists of different branches; the possibility of editing and refinement of its modules should also be given to experts from other educational and scientific institutions; possibly, different parts of the complex can be located on sites of different organizations;\n— training with the use of this complex should be included in the state educational system; the complex as a whole should receive \"approval\" (endorsement) of the relevant ministry, and successful completion of trajectories built on it should be counted as successful completion of the general or specialized education program.\n\nUtopia? Yes, it looks like it. Creation of the complex I described requires the most extensive coordinated work of authors of different specialties, serious financial costs, solution of complex organizational problems. The mere endorsement of such a complex and equating the results of work with it to the sequential memorization by schoolchildren of texts from a bunch of poorly connected textbooks is a dizzyingly complex organizational task. Will ministerial officials be ready to release from their hands petty control over curriculum fulfillment? If they agree to this, then only under the condition of such control over the created complex that will reduce the entire meaning of its development to zero. To not repeat the joyless fate of various point reforms, we must properly fit this complex into the general system of secondary and higher education. And what benefit will those structures receive that will finance the creation and maintenance of the working capacity of such a complex? You understand that such a complex cannot be done carelessly, \"anyhow\"; it must either be done well, or not done at all.\n\nAnd yet, understanding the complexity of the task set, I want to find a route leading from the current state of the educational system to that about which I fantasized here. What if it works out? If one really wants it?\n\nIf the task I described belongs to the number of potentially realizable ones, there should be ways of creating and using its components separately, before the entire complex is created and enters regular mode. For example, some components of this system can be created as a distance biology course on the site of one of the serious universities (you can, of course, guess that I mean first of all the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in which I work myself). The work on creating a course for applicants with such a long-term perspective Maryna Kravchenko and I have already begun. I retain hope that the project briefly described in this column will receive funding from some serious grant-maker or simply attract sponsorship money. Perhaps, if it received intergovernmental (Ukrainian-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, or maybe even three- or four-sided) status, this would promote the successful passage of the initial stages of its development?\n\nI do not know… I continue to think about this idea and count on the help of constructive critics."}
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Dmytro Shabanov
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{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "What can be judged by measuring fluctuating asymmetry?\nHow will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a future school worth dreaming about?\nCulturally adapting opportunists, or On the diversity of ecological niches of Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758", "column_numbers": "Column for Kompyuterra #114\nColumn for Kompyuterra #115\nColumn for Kompyuterra #116", "content": "Unexpectedly for me myself, I was invited to participate in a pedagogical festival that should take place in mid-August in Tatarstan, in Yelabuga. Well, I am glad for the opportunity to visit Kazan and Yelabuga; now I need to understand what I can present at an event oriented primarily toward school teachers. Although what is there to doubt: there is no particular reason to doubt. Over the past couple of years I have been developing, gradually concretizing, one idea that belongs to the sphere of education. I have already had to tell the readers of \"KT\" about its main components; first of all, they were discussed in columns about the day-after-tomorrow textbooks, the supertask for education, and the mountain road. Here I will try to assemble what is coming out, into a unified whole. I hope that the discussion of these ideas in the column will help, rather than hinder, their development in Yelabuga…\n\nBoth in Russia and in Ukraine, school education is in deep crisis. Schoolchildren study the foundations of sciences, yet neither they nor their teachers understand why they are doing this. Mastery of sciences is traditionally based on memorizing textbook texts and teachers' dictations. The reason for this is the absence of a universally understood goal. It is clear to everyone that children need to be taught something, but there is no unified understanding of what, why, and how, alas. Why did this happen?\n\nIdeally, education in each country should be a holistic system, built to achieve a certain goal. In the USSR, education was subordinated to a specific task—to withstand and win in the competition of superpowers. Although it was not possible to cope with the task, a holistic and quite effective educational system was built to solve it.\n\nThe Soviet empire lost the Cold War and fell apart. The goals of the educational system were lost on its fragments. In the search for a new identity, educational reforms were launched in each of the post-Soviet countries, of a chaotic nature. In words, they were directed at borrowing features of more progressive educational systems, and in practice they often turned out to be a way of either saving or washing finances. The thing is that different educational systems have been created in different parts of the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Successful systems are holistic complexes where, in the course of multi-decadal (often—multi-century) work, all parts have been harmoniously linked with each other. Our reformers throughout try to tear out some single detail from an educational system they like and transplant it to our soil. Alas, the resulting hybrids turn out to be non-viable, as non-viable as a construct with eagle wings, tuna fins, and antelope legs.\n\nSo, to make the educational system holistic, one should set a certain supertask for oneself, and then subordinate to it the construction of methodological and organizational educational technologies. Are such plans realistic in today's situation?\n\nAlas, it seems to me that at the current stage—no. A significant part of the management ideas, the implementations of which we observe, is the result of reconciling the short-term interests of kleptocracy with the medium-term ideas of populist propaganda aimed at reproducing the current power mechanism. Long-term interests of society as a whole, and even more so the prospective planning of humanity's strategy, somehow never reach the hands (and heads). Can we hope that education will be lucky and everything will work out differently for it? Nevertheless, I think that one must still think about the desired state of this sphere. The algorithm of changes is simple (I dare quote myself).\n\nI. Diagnostics of the current state.\nII. Goal-setting (determination of the desired state).\nIII. Development of the optimal transition route.\n\nApproaches for diagnosing the current educational system that seem rational to me, I have already outlined. Now I want to understand what state of this system should be recognized as desired. Even if our dreams turn out to be utopian—nevertheless, by clarifying them, we can understand something new.\n\nI will begin with the supertask. It is clear to me that humanity as a whole now stands before a more serious choice than the leadership of the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War. The Soviet leaders, of course, were not ready to lose—but they lost, and the world did not collapse. We live with you, raise youth, and make plans for the future. But if humanity cannot change its way of relating to the biosphere, the living conditions of today's children, and even more so—future generations, may become unbearable, not admitting a decent life.\n\nSo, the current nature of humanity's connection with the environment, with our dependence on non-renewable and easily exhaustible resources, with unfounded hope for unlimited economic growth, is fundamentally temporary, transient. If we remain in relaxed expectation, we will face a chain of military redistributions of rapidly melting resources in a polluted and destroyed biosphere. Fitting into the turn is an extremely difficult task for all of humanity.\n\nBesides this global task, we also have a number of national ones. Every state, every nation stands before the possibility of either preserving itself and finding its place in the future sustainable humanity, or getting lost at the turn. What are the roles of Russia and Ukraine in the coming future? It is clear to me that from the point of view of Russian and Ukrainian interests, these roles should be independent and different, but, of course, their definition is a very difficult task.\n\nWell, and what does the educational system have to do with it? It should prepare citizens who, at a minimum, will be able to fit into the turn themselves, and at a maximum, will be able to participate in planning and implementing such a turn.\n\nAnd what educational system will be able to ensure the preparation of such citizens?\n\nLet us figure out what education is. Creation of an image of reality, or better said—creation in the psyche of the learner of a model of the existing system of knowledge and technologies. The system consists of subsystems and interconnections between them, which should find their reflection in the pupil's picture of the world. Education is modeling!\n\nMy main achievement in the methodological field I consider to be participation (together with Alexander Kozlenko and Maryna Kravchenko) in the creation of the IUMK (innovative educational-methodological complex) \"Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere\" for specialized classes of senior school (more details—here). This IUMK was made in 2008 by order of the National Foundation for Personnel Preparation of Russia, passed approbation, received enthusiastic reviews… and was withdrawn from use due to copyright restrictions. The thing is that the firm that provided the programming for this product unobtrusively for the customer sewed into it the use of technology to which it had exclusive rights, demanded additional payment, and, not receiving it, banned the use of the result of many years of work!\n\nThe idea of our IUMK was this. To understand how our biosphere functions, one must make its model. For this, a simulator similar to a computer game was used. Separate stages of such modeling were used as assignments for students' project work. To create such a model, one needs to figure out how the original is arranged and how it functions. For this, students used 50 research models (describing our real biosphere and multi-level systems within it) and a textbook. Some of the models we made for the IUMK are collected here. And here a film made by Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren about the approbation of our product is posted.\n\nOur experience showed the following:\n— work with models and especially their creation is an extremely effective method of teaching;\n— project work is a successful method of stimulating students to master educational material;\n— solving complex tasks during project work requires combining material from different fields of knowledge;\n— presentation of educational material not in the order corresponding to the structure of science, but in the logic subordinated to solving some task, is quite possible and promotes better perception of it;\n— the system of educational manual preparation, oriented toward the profit of manufacturing firms, is ineffective for restructuring the educational process in accordance with modern requirements.\n\nI have already had to explain why I consider that textbooks of the future (the day-after-tomorrow's, not tomorrow's) will be networked, distant. Only they will support continuous change of educational text, keeping it current; only they will allow using the necessary volume of additional materials; only they will ensure the proper level of interactive interaction of schoolchildren with educational material and with each other. I think that something similar to our IUMK (only broader and more technological) should be done on a networked basis.\n\nSo, the time has come to explain what I propose. I want to participate in the creation of a distance educational complex \"Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future.\" Its features seem to me as follows:\n— it is necessary to ensure stimulation of schoolchildren by searching for ways of changing humanity's relations with the biosphere for its sustainable existence, as well as searching for their country's place in global humanity;\n— basic educational activity should be online individual and group work (including—project) with models of studied objects, as well as creation of such models;\n— the modular structure of the complex should ensure diversity of educational trajectories corresponding to the profile of the school, class, and individuality of each pupil;\n— in various modules and educational trajectories based on them, materials from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, economics, political science, fundamentals of life safety, etc., should be used;\n— for general education school, elaboration of a mandatory set of modules relating to the main directions should be provided; for specialized education, a deeper examination of a broader set of modules of the corresponding orientation is necessary;\n— the organization of educational material should correspond not to the logic of sections of each of the sciences (as is accepted in most textbooks), but to the logic of solving certain tasks (for example, genetics and molecular biology can be studied as material necessary for solving the problem of safe use of GMOs or compensation of humanity's genetic load);\n— the complex should be located on the distance education site of one of the classical universities capable of ensuring its development and maintenance by specialists of different branches; the possibility of editing and refinement of its modules should also be given to experts from other educational and scientific institutions; possibly, different parts of the complex can be located on sites of different organizations;\n— training with the use of this complex should be included in the state educational system; the complex as a whole should receive \"approval\" (endorsement) of the relevant ministry, and successful completion of trajectories built on it should be counted as successful completion of the general or specialized education program.\n\nUtopia? Yes, it looks like it. Creation of the complex I described requires the most extensive coordinated work of authors of different specialties, serious financial costs, solution of complex organizational problems. The mere endorsement of such a complex and equating the results of work with it to the sequential memorization by schoolchildren of texts from a bunch of poorly connected textbooks is a dizzyingly complex organizational task. Will ministerial officials be ready to release from their hands petty control over curriculum fulfillment? If they agree to this, then only under the condition of such control over the created complex that will reduce the entire meaning of its development to zero. To not repeat the joyless fate of various point reforms, we must properly fit this complex into the general system of secondary and higher education. And what benefit will those structures receive that will finance the creation and maintenance of the working capacity of such a complex? You understand that such a complex cannot be done carelessly, \"anyhow\"; it must either be done well, or not done at all.\n\nAnd yet, understanding the complexity of the task set, I want to find a route leading from the current state of the educational system to that about which I fantasized here. What if it works out? If one really wants it?\n\nIf the task I described belongs to the number of potentially realizable ones, there should be ways of creating and using its components separately, before the entire complex is created and enters regular mode. For example, some components of this system can be created as a distance biology course on the site of one of the serious universities (you can, of course, guess that I mean first of all the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in which I work myself). The work on creating a course for applicants with such a long-term perspective Maryna Kravchenko and I have already begun. I retain hope that the project briefly described in this column will receive funding from some serious grant-maker or simply attract sponsorship money. Perhaps, if it received intergovernmental (Ukrainian-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, or maybe even three- or four-sided) status, this would promote the successful passage of the initial stages of its development?\n\nI do not know… I continue to think about this idea and count on the help of constructive critics."}
{"author": "Dmytro Shabanov", "title": "What can be judged by measuring fluctuating asymmetry?\nHow will biology and other worldview-significant sciences be studied in such a future school worth dreaming about?\nCulturally adapting opportunists, or On the diversity of ecological niches of Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758", "column_numbers": "Column for Kompyuterra #114\nColumn for Kompyuterra #115\nColumn for Kompyuterra #116", "content": "Unexpectedly for me myself, I was invited to participate in a pedagogical festival that should take place in mid-August in Tatarstan, in Yelabuga. Well, I am glad for the opportunity to visit Kazan and Yelabuga; now I need to understand what I can present at an event oriented primarily toward school teachers. Although what is there to doubt: there is no particular reason to doubt. Over the past couple of years I have been developing, gradually concretizing, one idea that belongs to the sphere of education. I have already had to tell the readers of \"KT\" about its main components; first of all, they were discussed in columns about the day-after-tomorrow textbooks, the supertask for education, and the mountain road. Here I will try to assemble what is coming out, into a unified whole. I hope that the discussion of these ideas in the column will help, rather than hinder, their development in Yelabuga…\n\nBoth in Russia and in Ukraine, school education is in deep crisis. Schoolchildren study the foundations of sciences, yet neither they nor their teachers understand why they are doing this. Mastery of sciences is traditionally based on memorizing textbook texts and teachers' dictations. The reason for this is the absence of a universally understood goal. It is clear to everyone that children need to be taught something, but there is no unified understanding of what, why, and how, alas. Why did this happen?\n\nIdeally, education in each country should be a holistic system, built to achieve a certain goal. In the USSR, education was subordinated to a specific task—to withstand and win in the competition of superpowers. Although it was not possible to cope with the task, a holistic and quite effective educational system was built to solve it.\n\nThe Soviet empire lost the Cold War and fell apart. The goals of the educational system were lost on its fragments. In the search for a new identity, educational reforms were launched in each of the post-Soviet countries, of a chaotic nature. In words, they were directed at borrowing features of more progressive educational systems, and in practice they often turned out to be a way of either saving or washing finances. The thing is that different educational systems have been created in different parts of the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Successful systems are holistic complexes where, in the course of multi-decadal (often—multi-century) work, all parts have been harmoniously linked with each other. Our reformers throughout try to tear out some single detail from an educational system they like and transplant it to our soil. Alas, the resulting hybrids turn out to be non-viable, as non-viable as a construct with eagle wings, tuna fins, and antelope legs.\n\nSo, to make the educational system holistic, one should set a certain supertask for oneself, and then subordinate to it the construction of methodological and organizational educational technologies. Are such plans realistic in today's situation?\n\nAlas, it seems to me that at the current stage—no. A significant part of the management ideas, the implementations of which we observe, is the result of reconciling the short-term interests of kleptocracy with the medium-term ideas of populist propaganda aimed at reproducing the current power mechanism. Long-term interests of society as a whole, and even more so the prospective planning of humanity's strategy, somehow never reach the hands (and heads). Can we hope that education will be lucky and everything will work out differently for it? Nevertheless, I think that one must still think about the desired state of this sphere. The algorithm of changes is simple (I dare quote myself).\n\nI. Diagnostics of the current state.\nII. Goal-setting (determination of the desired state).\nIII. Development of the optimal transition route.\n\nApproaches for diagnosing the current educational system that seem rational to me, I have already outlined. Now I want to understand what state of this system should be recognized as desired. Even if our dreams turn out to be utopian—nevertheless, by clarifying them, we can understand something new.\n\nI will begin with the supertask. It is clear to me that humanity as a whole now stands before a more serious choice than the leadership of the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War. The Soviet leaders, of course, were not ready to lose—but they lost, and the world did not collapse. We live with you, raise youth, and make plans for the future. But if humanity cannot change its way of relating to the biosphere, the living conditions of today's children, and even more so—future generations, may become unbearable, not admitting a decent life.\n\nSo, the current nature of humanity's connection with the environment, with our dependence on non-renewable and easily exhaustible resources, with unfounded hope for unlimited economic growth, is fundamentally temporary, transient. If we remain in relaxed expectation, we will face a chain of military redistributions of rapidly melting resources in a polluted and destroyed biosphere. Fitting into the turn is an extremely difficult task for all of humanity.\n\nBesides this global task, we also have a number of national ones. Every state, every nation stands before the possibility of either preserving itself and finding its place in the future sustainable humanity, or getting lost at the turn. What are the roles of Russia and Ukraine in the coming future? It is clear to me that from the point of view of Russian and Ukrainian interests, these roles should be independent and different, but, of course, their definition is a very difficult task.\n\nWell, and what does the educational system have to do with it? It should prepare citizens who, at a minimum, will be able to fit into the turn themselves, and at a maximum, will be able to participate in planning and implementing such a turn.\n\nAnd what educational system will be able to ensure the preparation of such citizens?\n\nLet us figure out what education is. Creation of an image of reality, or better said—creation in the psyche of the learner of a model of the existing system of knowledge and technologies. The system consists of subsystems and interconnections between them, which should find their reflection in the pupil's picture of the world. Education is modeling!\n\nMy main achievement in the methodological field I consider to be participation (together with Alexander Kozlenko and Maryna Kravchenko) in the creation of the IUMK (innovative educational-methodological complex) \"Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere\" for specialized classes of senior school (more details—here). This IUMK was made in 2008 by order of the National Foundation for Personnel Preparation of Russia, passed approbation, received enthusiastic reviews… and was withdrawn from use due to copyright restrictions. The thing is that the firm that provided the programming for this product unobtrusively for the customer sewed into it the use of technology to which it had exclusive rights, demanded additional payment, and, not receiving it, banned the use of the result of many years of work!\n\nThe idea of our IUMK was this. To understand how our biosphere functions, one must make its model. For this, a simulator similar to a computer game was used. Separate stages of such modeling were used as assignments for students' project work. To create such a model, one needs to figure out how the original is arranged and how it functions. For this, students used 50 research models (describing our real biosphere and multi-level systems within it) and a textbook. Some of the models we made for the IUMK are collected here. And here a film made by Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren about the approbation of our product is posted.\n\nOur experience showed the following:\n— work with models and especially their creation is an extremely effective method of teaching;\n— project work is a successful method of stimulating students to master educational material;\n— solving complex tasks during project work requires combining material from different fields of knowledge;\n— presentation of educational material not in the order corresponding to the structure of science, but in the logic subordinated to solving some task, is quite possible and promotes better perception of it;\n— the system of educational manual preparation, oriented toward the profit of manufacturing firms, is ineffective for restructuring the educational process in accordance with modern requirements.\n\nI have already had to explain why I consider that textbooks of the future (the day-after-tomorrow's, not tomorrow's) will be networked, distant. Only they will support continuous change of educational text, keeping it current; only they will allow using the necessary volume of additional materials; only they will ensure the proper level of interactive interaction of schoolchildren with educational material and with each other. I think that something similar to our IUMK (only broader and more technological) should be done on a networked basis.\n\nSo, the time has come to explain what I propose. I want to participate in the creation of a distance educational complex \"Humanity and Biosphere. Sustainable Future.\" Its features seem to me as follows:\n— it is necessary to ensure stimulation of schoolchildren by searching for ways of changing humanity's relations with the biosphere for its sustainable existence, as well as searching for their country's place in global humanity;\n— basic educational activity should be online individual and group work (including—project) with models of studied objects, as well as creation of such models;\n— the modular structure of the complex should ensure diversity of educational trajectories corresponding to the profile of the school, class, and individuality of each pupil;\n— in various modules and educational trajectories based on them, materials from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, economics, political science, fundamentals of life safety, etc., should be used;\n— for general education school, elaboration of a mandatory set of modules relating to the main directions should be provided; for specialized education, a deeper examination of a broader set of modules of the corresponding orientation is necessary;\n— the organization of educational material should correspond not to the logic of sections of each of the sciences (as is accepted in most textbooks), but to the logic of solving certain tasks (for example, genetics and molecular biology can be studied as material necessary for solving the problem of safe use of GMOs or compensation of humanity's genetic load);\n— the complex should be located on the distance education site of one of the classical universities capable of ensuring its development and maintenance by specialists of different branches; the possibility of editing and refinement of its modules should also be given to experts from other educational and scientific institutions; possibly, different parts of the complex can be located on sites of different organizations;\n— training with the use of this complex should be included in the state educational system; the complex as a whole should receive \"approval\" (endorsement) of the relevant ministry, and successful completion of trajectories built on it should be counted as successful completion of the general or specialized education program.\n\nUtopia? Yes, it looks like it. Creation of the complex I described requires the most extensive coordinated work of authors of different specialties, serious financial costs, solution of complex organizational problems. The mere endorsement of such a complex and equating the results of work with it to the sequential memorization by schoolchildren of texts from a bunch of poorly connected textbooks is a dizzyingly complex organizational task. Will ministerial officials be ready to release from their hands petty control over curriculum fulfillment? If they agree to this, then only under the condition of such control over the created complex that will reduce the entire meaning of its development to zero. To not repeat the joyless fate of various point reforms, we must properly fit this complex into the general system of secondary and higher education. And what benefit will those structures receive that will finance the creation and maintenance of the working capacity of such a complex? You understand that such a complex cannot be done carelessly, \"anyhow\"; it must either be done well, or not done at all.\n\nAnd yet, understanding the complexity of the task set, I want to find a route leading from the current state of the educational system to that about which I fantasized here. What if it works out? If one really wants it?\n\nIf the task I described belongs to the number of potentially realizable ones, there should be ways of creating and using its components separately, before the entire complex is created and enters regular mode. For example, some components of this system can be created as a distance biology course on the site of one of the serious universities (you can, of course, guess that I mean first of all the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in which I work myself). The work on creating a course for applicants with such a long-term perspective Maryna Kravchenko and I have already begun. I retain hope that the project briefly described in this column will receive funding from some serious grant-maker or simply attract sponsorship money. Perhaps, if it received intergovernmental (Ukrainian-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, or maybe even three- or four-sided) status, this would promote the successful passage of the initial stages of its development?\n\nI do not know… I continue to think about this idea and count on the help of constructive critics."}