Super-task for education
{"title":"","summary":"","body":"What I would like to propose is a variant of a social mandate for the education system (or, if you prefer, a variant of a national idea). What to call this variant—sustainable development or the preservation of the people and humanity—is not particularly important."}
The war is won by the schoolteacher.
Otto von Bismarck (paraphrased)
Throughout history, the older generation has looked at the younger one with condemnation: what has it learned? What values has it absorbed? It's different in our time: real demands were placed on the youth, and thanks to that such wonderful people as us grew up...
Does what I want to write continue these lamentations? No. We have every reason to be dissatisfied with the education system; it simply needs to be resuscitated. And the reason is not only a lack of funding, but also the fact that modern education no longer has a purpose.
Education in the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated. For a state with an inefficient economy to withstand competition with the free world, extraordinary effort was needed. By building a unified (and not bad!) education system, from kindergartens to doctoral programs, the Soviet Union obtained a sufficient number of qualified personnel, which it then used cheaply. That education system declared that its goal was the happiness of all humanity. In reality it was trying to keep our state among the leaders through weapons production, exploitation of mineral resources, and keeping the population in a "pre-consumerist" state. The rejection of Soviet ideology led to the degradation of the education system built for it.
Many smart people believe that the post-Soviet school was deliberately destroyed. I doubt it. It was reformed with the best of intentions, without forgetting to spend the budgets allocated for the purpose.
What should a modern school be: general education or specialized, mass or one that implements the principle of "two corridors" (for the elite and a simpler one)? These questions should be answered based on the goal, first understanding what supertask school education is solving.
Thanks to A. A. Fursenko, Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, for his frankness: "The shortcoming of the Soviet education system was the attempt to shape a person-creator, and now the task is to raise a qualified consumer" (quote from here). Yes, yes, a market economy requires consumers…
Perhaps because I received both my secondary and higher education in the USSR, such an approach seems wild to me. I believe there is more life in a person-creator than in a person-consumer; a creator, to put it simply, is more alive. Though, probably, the most correct thing would be to think about how the mechanism of a competitive market economy will work in a society made up of consumers. Fursenko's approach, being too frank, did not meet with approval. A new standard has been proposed, "aimed at ensuring the formation of Russian civic identity among students". Well of course, excessive knowledge might spawn a critical attitude toward Russian (Ukrainian etc.) realities. How fortunate that a holistic worldview and the capacity for reasoning will be obtained by only some in the new school!
President D. A. Medvedev said that the task of the educational initiative is "to prepare young people for professional activity taking into account the tasks of modernization and innovative development of the country". "Warmer," but, in my view, not concrete. Will this make most students and teachers exert daily effort? I'd like a bit more inspiration, more scale…
Perhaps it makes sense to look at how things stand in other post-Soviet countries, above all — in Ukraine? Here an attempt was made to replace "scientific" communism with Ukrainian nationalism. In most cases they managed to teach children to sing carols, instill in them respect for Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka, and tell them about the wrongs the Ukrainian people suffered from their neighbors. Unfortunately, both the traditions of rural life from the century before last, and the poetry of those same times, and the history of the people's sufferings offer little help in solving today's problems.
An interesting view from a philosopher in Ukrainian education is worth noting. The "quality" of contemporary critics of the government has declined. The Soviet school, besides conformists, also raised ideologically motivated dissidents with broad horizons and a high cultural level. Today's youth, if they take an interest in politics at all, do so for other, more down-to-earth reasons. Unfortunately, the collapse of the post-Soviet education system is a general trend.
What is to be done? Build the entire education system around solving a certain supertask.
What I want to propose is a variant of society's social order for the education system (or, if you like, a variant of a national idea). What to call this variant — sustainable development, or the preservation of the nation and of humanity — is not so important. Let us briefly consider its essence.
Humanity is at a turning point in its history. The accelerating growth of its numbers, which lasted for millennia, has changed into deceleration. We live at the expense of non-renewable, exhaustible resources. This cannot go on for very long. Changes in humanity's way of life, changes in the ratios between the "golden billion" and the "third world," climate change, environmental pollution, and so on may spawn socio-political catastrophes that will further complicate our survival…
No, no, I am not trying to scare anyone. It could go one way, or it could go another. Our future is fundamentally unknowable. Neither catastrophic nor rosy forecasts have sufficient grounds. Probably, the future depends on our actions. We don't know what it will be, but we know what it will not be:
— it will not simply be a continuation of current development trends;
— it will not be a return to the past, if only because there are already too many of us;
— it will not be the realization of the simple ideologies currently on offer in the political marketplace.
But one way or another, today's schoolchildren will live in an era of serious changes and, directly or indirectly, will make decisions on which the survival of present-day Russia or Ukraine, of European civilization, and of humanity as a whole will depend. This is a very serious choice, and we must prepare our children for it.
Most of the population must be able to set long-term and short-term priorities, and then act accordingly. Capable citizens must be able to analyze the arguments put forward in favor of various alternatives and make informed decisions. Without this skill, democracy turns into a screen for brainwashing systems.
The decisions that will need to be made do not yet exist. They will have to be worked out. Working them out through generalized efforts is inefficient. So specialized schooling is, of course, needed. But if the "upper" corridor becomes detached from the "lower" one, the results of professionals' work will be wasted: their decisions will not be used.
By orienting schoolchildren (and students, by the way) toward this priority, we will have to solve, together with them, a whole range of tasks in both the natural and the humanitarian sciences. A full specification of the stated goal won't fit into this column, but I will name a few key problems anyway:
- changing humanity's ecological niche, the nature of resource use (energy, food, water, territory, minerals), and the technological progress necessary for this;
- changing sociocultural policy in a way that reflects demographic reality (roughly speaking, one should think not about making migrants "reproduce" more slowly than the native-born, but about ensuring that inevitable demographic changes strengthen, rather than weaken, society, the state, and humanity);
- changing the structure of everyday values while preserving the core of our culture;
- minimizing "ecological," economic, military, social, medical, and other risks;
- modeling possible scenarios of how events might unfold and developing ways of choosing optimal actions.
A large-scale task? If it is not placed front and center, it will be solved neither one way nor the other.
If we make it a priority of education, it will not only increase our chances of survival, but will also allow us to "pull" the next generation toward a more active and fuller life. Do you agree with me?