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

Altshuller is among Soviet scientists and teachers known outside Russia. His TIPS helped turn discoveries into regularities instead of treating them as random variables and was popular in the USSR. Even today, the theory has many followers all over the world.

To sum it up: inventing can be creative. Both can be taught, which means that everyone can be made talented and unique.

THE LEGENDARY TEACHER OF OUR TIME

And now let’s talk about probably our most famous teacher, loved by many people in our country, and rightly so. Shalva Amonashvili is the founder of humane pedagogy.

In the 1970s, he was criticized by the official academic community. Vasily Davydov (an author of the Elkonin-Davydov System), helped him a lot then. But here is the main thing: Amonashvili has been able to maintain his humane pedagogy to this day. In fairness, we must say that the only school in Moscow that openly promoted Amonashvili’s ideas closed 10 years ago, and there is no other yet. Amonashvili has many supporters and followers among teachers and parents, he regularly holds seminars, meetings, educational schools, festivals, conferences in Georgia and Russia. His lifework lives and wins.

What is the main message of humane pedagogy? A child is a unique being, he must be nurtured and cherished, protected from evil and led to good. "Parents, you are lucky, you have an angel born, so be proud and take care of him/ her – this is your chance,” humane pedagogy tells us. Before Amonashvili, Janusz Korczak delivered the same message. And many of the recognized teachers said that children should be loved. It sounds corny, but there are nuances.

Already at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, Amonashvili implements his idea of a "humane school.” First off, this is a school the child is not afraid of going to. Instead of a red pen, the teachers use a blue one, instead of "You may sit down” – "Thank you for the answer, dear Olya.” Lessons are full of emotions: if your answer is poor – "sad,” if good – "happy.” There are no grades in elementary school. Amonashvili’s school is a school of high spirits. Both teachers and students extensively use such words as "good,” "sincere,” "thoughtful,” "happy.” They take pleasure in being here. It is joyful to be here.

The idea that children are unique and amazing was not so obvious in the 20th century in our country. It took a very long time for the society to recognize their independence and freedom, and there are still big problems with this in many schools around the world, and in Russia, too. Children used to be perceived as unreasonable beings and therefore requiring persistent attention and care from adults.

First Janusz Korczak, and then Shalva Amonashvili, promoted the idea of the uniqueness of the child’s inner world, of caring for him/her. It is not enough to "shove” knowledge into children. They need emotional support and love (by the way, Dima Zitser is going in approximately the same direction today. At each meeting, he says that a child should be treated like a small adult).

Both Korczak and Amonashvili remind us that children have rights. Although they are small and do not know much yet, this does not mean that you may insult, humiliate them, disrespect their interests and needs. You should see personalities in them. Do you remember Makarenko with his school boards, students’ rights, respect between teachers and students? All this is a way to realize this individuality, uniqueness, the child’s right to respect and personal freedoms.

To sum it up: each and every child is unique and must be protected. School must preserve personal freedoms of a child. Instead of fear and violence – a respectful attitude. When there is no fear, there is freedom.

INTERESTING AND FAST LEARNING

Here we come to the idea of putting personal freedoms into practice as one of the main values of the school in the 21st century. But first we need to talk about one more person many people might know – Viktor Shatalov. He lived a very long and interesting life. His first experiments with teaching methods date back to the 1950s.

But in Soviet times, his discoveries were not widely applied, although they were highly effective.

Shatalov had many accomplishments, but I will focus on the best known ones.

Reference signals – visual aids, formulas and notes make learning faster, more engaging and efficient.

A differentiated approach to home assignments (or any assignment, for that matter) – the assignment must match the child’s level. Let’s say, give them a hundred sums to do and praise for any sum done. Again, it is emotions that matter! The child should feel strong, smart and handsome (remember Amonashvili?)

To sum it up: learning doesn't have to be hard. Learning without violence is possible: it is enough to explain correctly, help to remember, make arrangements for joint study and ask kindly. An individual approach is our everything.

HIGHS AND LOWS

Now, let’s move on to the most controversial part. Soviet education. There are lots and lots of opinions about it. Some scold it, some praise it, some want to abandon it completely, and some still teach children using Soviet textbooks. I will express my own opinion. Anyone is free to challenge it.

Pedagogy is not in a thing in itself. Like everything around us, it depends on the inner workings of the society. In Russia, as in Europe and America, its development was determined by two interdependent directions: the arms race and the formation of a consumer society. The world could notice it by the growth of the anti-war movement and in the work of Andy Warhol. In the USSR, this development was marked by the number of trials against black marketeers and the ban of Kino, the music band. The confrontation between the capitalist and socialist worlds largely determined the main developments in education.

It is hard to dispute the Soviet Union’s success in physics, mathematics and chemistry. This leadership, by the way, remains to this day. Biology was less fortunate. In the late 1940s, the USSR fell behind the world’s pace and never caught up. In other words, the industries the military-industrial complex depended on were unequivocally successful. Accordingly, teaching the respective disciplines at schools and universities was honed to perfection. Here, the pressure of ideology was completely absent (or almost absent), everyone understood that pressure was not the best way to develop science above the average level. No wonder the intelligentsia became the basis of free thinking (just remember the books by the Strugatsky brothers, the songs and poems by Bulat Okudzhava, or read the biographies of Pyotr Kapitsa and Lev Landau). In line with these interests of the state, working with talented children, teaching physics, chemistry and mathematics at school, opening special physics and mathematics schools and study groups at Palaces of Pioneers became an actively developing direction. Academic competitions in physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy (given the achievements of all opposing sides in astronautics) were held. In these subject areas, you can notice what I just talked about earlier: a creative approach to solving technical problems, unique equal and respectful relationships between teachers and students, the absence of fear and pressure, work on real cases and problems. Can we be proud of these achievements? Sure we can.

While Makarenko works with homeless children, his books contain a lot about the fact that upbringing and education are not only the responsibility of the state, but also of parents.

The humanities are quite a different story though. From the very first years of the Soviet Union, ideological pressure and censorship have been hard here. It is hard to imagine the development of literature or history under strong pressure and isolation from the outside world. Exactly the same thing happens at school. In the "country that reads the most,” there was no opportunity to read and discuss books outside the system of socialist realism. Even the cultural critic Yuri Lotman, the author of immortal broadcasts on Russian history, who was definitely no threat to the state, was forced to develop his structural analysis in Tartu, Estonia, as in Moscow his work would be subject to censorship.

The same was true with history. It was difficult to imagine any work of a historian on any topic and about any era outside of Marxist ideology.

Is it possible to adopt censorship and prohibitions from the Soviet era for the education of the future? God forbid! Ideological prohibitions and isolation have never contributed to the development of science and education.

THE NEEDS OF THE NEW AGE

Do you remember what Makarenko says in his books about creating an atmosphere of respect, equality, and freedom at school? He blurs the line between school and life, opens the school gates and lets real life in. Exactly the opposite of what the Soviet school did (I admit that the entire Soviet society may have been deprived of this). We can still hear that a good teacher is a "strict teacher." This is the legacy of the Soviet schooling, which we must leave behind without doubt. A good school is a school where both teachers and students are happy. Happy, not scared.

The first attempts at making schooling different were made by innovative teachers in the 1990s, when the confrontation of the two social systems was no longer decisive. There was a demand for change in schooling towards greater humanization, towards individual learning. The transition from the vertical (hierarchical, rigid, authoritative) structure to the horizontal one (democratic, emotional, open). The horizontal structure respects and appreciates the student’s personal view on problems, weaves education into a single system of knowledge, takes knowledge beyond the school walls and opens up a world that turns education into the path of a lifetime.

Just like in the second half of the 20th century, the development of nuclear energy and space travel lent a great momentum to science and forced us to reconsider many educational priorities, nowadays we see digital technologies and the Internet forcing us to reconsider the old principles of the development of modern schools.

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

IDEAS OF DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEW AGE OF EDUCATION

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

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

I must say that public schools understand that they fail to keep pace with the times and are looking for new solutions. Their main strength is that they can give fundamental education in mathematics, physics and chemistry. I will clarify – to give it to those who really want to take it. The ability to prepare strong personnel for the military-industrial complex has not disappeared. Now programmers have been added to the list of occupations. Here we are developing very well even compared to the rest of the world. The skills of Soviet education are not outdated.

All schools – public, private, family and alternative – are actively searching for new ways of developing education in the XXI century. Unfortunately, this search is not going to bring immediate results as education is a very conservative thing and changes slowly.

RESULTS AND PROSPECTS

In my opinion, in the near future, education will change in the following directions:

• The focus will be on the student, his needs and opportunities. The student who interacts with the world, not counteracts the world. Metadisciplinarity will become the main way of learning (hello, Anton Makarenko, Viktor Shatalov and Mikhail Shchetinin).

• Education will transcend the boundaries of the school, grade, and age. The whole world will become a school (Mikhail Shchetinin, Alexander Tubelsky).

• The main motivation for learning will be interest in the subject, not fear. Positive emotions will be the basis of learning. If a child comes home from school happy, then this is a good school (Shalva Amonashvili, Anton Makarenko, Alexander Tubelsky).

• Boring memorization and cramming will be replaced by effective memorization, a creative approach to solving problems, project work (Genrikh Altshuller, Viktor Shatalov).

• The main challenge for education in the 21st century will be the need to combine a strong scientific worldview with creative approaches and a pedagogy of uncertainty and spontaneity. This is a union between the Soviet scientific school, training, creativity and democratic structure of education, no matter how incompatible they may seem now.

P. S. Unfortunately, there are not too many books and research papers analyzing the experience of Soviet innovative teachers. This topic is just beginning to be explored. The facts I wrote about were largely taken from seminars and personal meetings, conversations with school principals, teachers and students as well as followers of innovative teachers. Here are a few books which are relevant to the topic and which I used in preparing this article.

LIST OF SOURCES

1. Alexandrova, Ye. A. (2017) Cultural Studies. The History of Ideas and Their Implementation. Moscow: Forum Publ., INFRA-M Publ. (In Russian).

2. Amonashvili, Sh. (2017). How to Love Children. The Experience of Introspection. Moscow: Svet Publ. (In Russian).

3. Amonashvili, Sh. (2014). Pedagogical Parables. Moscow:

Amrita Publ. (In Rusian).

4. Anikeeva, N. (2020). The Main Thing about Raising Children. Montessori, M.; Korczak, J.; Vygotsky, L.; Makarenko, A.; Erikson, E. Moscow: Piter Publ. (In Russian).

5. Soloveytchik, S. (2018). Pedagogy for Everyone. Moscow: AST Publ. (In Russian).

6. Tubelsky, A. (2012). School of the Future Built Together with Children. Moscow: Pervoe sentyabrya Publ. (In Russian).

Архитектура Школы будущего: гибкость, открытость и оригинальность

Амир Идиатулин

DOI 10.55140/2782–5817–2022–2-S1–40–47

Хотели бы вы учиться в Школе чародейства и волшебства Хогвартс? Кто из нас, посмотрев серию фильмов о Гарри Поттере, не был восхищен архитектурой и стилем замка? Образ Хогвартса крайне обаятельный, но с реальностью и будущим не соотносимый, считает основатель и генеральный директор бюро IND architects Амир Идиатулин. Эксперт поделился своим мнением, о чем должен помнить архитектор, проектируя Школу будущего, и почему типовые решения могут быть вредны.

Амир Идиатулин

Основатель и генеральный директор бюро IND architects

КОНСЕРВАТИВНЫЕ И ПРЕДСКАЗУЕМЫЕ

Дети – невероятно консервативные существа. Ответственные родители знают, что размеренный образ жизни, дисциплина – залог здорового развития ребенка. Если ребенок просыпается, ест, учится, играет, занимается спортом и ложится спать примерно в одно и то же время, он с гораздо большей вероятностью вырастет спокойным, собранным, психически устойчивым. Разумеется, наличие расписания, обуславливающего ритм жизни, – отнюдь не единственный фактор, влияющий на формирование нервной системы молодого организма, однако стоит признать, что это весьма существенный фактор.

Для ребенка принципиально важна предсказуемость, по крайней мере, до момента его вступления в пубертатный возраст, – предсказуемость в еде, в том, как организовано пространство его маленького мира, и так далее.

В школе ребенок проводит значительную часть своей жизни – 5–6 дней в неделю, от 4 часов в день, если говорить о младших классах, и более (не забываем о факультативах и продленке). По этой причине устройство школы должно быть предельно понятным, то есть предсказуемым, таким, чтобы новые ученики максимально быстро адаптировались к непривычной обстановке.

Все мы помним образ Хогвартса из цикла романов о Гарри Поттере – замок с лабиринтообразной структурой, где полно тайных комнат, лестницы постоянно перемещаются и можно проходить сквозь камины и шкаф. Так вот, образ крайне обаятельный, но с реальностью не соотносимый.

Отмечу, что когда я рассуждаю об условной предсказуемости образовательного пространства, то имею в виду, конечно же, его планировочное решение. Немаловажную роль, разумеется, играют и качество навигации, и отношение педагогов к своим подопечным, и общая атмосфера в учебном заведении, но планировка – это основа основ, каркас, который определяет как форму, так и «содержание».

НИ НА ЧТО НЕ ПОХОЖИЙ

Вместе с тем архитектору следует отдавать себе отчет в том, что дети с их бьющей через край энергией и богатой фантазией остро нуждаются во впечатлениях, в каких-то маркерах самоидентификации. Архитектура школы может и должна быть одним из таких маркеров – вот почему типовые решения в данном случае не то что не применимы (они применимы везде), а скорее вредны.

Задумайтесь, почему какая-нибудь гимназия № 1529 им. А. С. Грибоедова (бывшая школа № 59 им. Н. В. Гоголя) в Староконюшенном переулке в Москве пользуется такой популярностью, почему многие так страстно желают отдать туда своих детей? Дело ведь не только в репутации самого учреждения, в квалификации работающих там учителей. Людей притягивает само здание – у него есть история, его облик узнаваем и впечатывается в память. Большинство российских школ, увы, не могут похвастаться тем же.

«Финская школа» в Подмосковье, также мной упоминавшаяся, является своеобразным прототипом школы-пансионата в Бурабае, подобно тому, как роман «Камера обскура» Набокова можно рассматривать в качестве эскиза к его же «Лолите». В проекте «Финской школы» мы впервые сформулировали те принципы, которые позднее легли в основу концепции IQanat.

В 2012 году авторитетный архитектурный журнал «Проект Россия» выпустил номер с темой «Детство», где были напечатаны фотографии типовых школ в московском Бутове. Это, конечно, печальное зрелище – сплошь серые ящики с вкраплениями бледно-розового, бледно-зеленого или бледно-желтого, в редких случаях украшенные какой-нибудь суперграфикой. Кто придумал такой странный, не побоюсь этого слова, дизайн-код, если упомянутый термин вообще здесь употребим? И как можно идентифицировать себя с чем-то подобным? Вместо яркой и вдохновляющей архитектуры, транслирующей, что знания – это не только полезно, но еще и чертовски интересно, мы имеем безликие фабрики образования, не символизирующие ничего, кроме того, что человек – это винтик в огромной машине под названием «государство».

Я бы сказал, что главная задача архитектора при проектировании школы – это упаковать в какой-то степени консервативный функционал в привлекательную, будоражащую воображение обертку. Есть такой термин, пришедший к нам, как и слово «дизайн-код», из английского – «иконическая архитектура». Иконический означает уникальный, ни на что не похожий, выдающийся. Архитектура школ, возможно, и не обязана быть выдающейся, но она точно должна быть уникальной.

ЧТО СЕГОДНЯ ЭТОМУ МЕШАЕТ?

Прежде всего, пожалуй, действующие проектные нормативы, которые, на мой профессиональный взгляд, требуют радикального пересмотра. Вообще, любая архитектура начинается с двух вещей – списка нормативов и технического задания. Нормативы определяет государство – это его прерогатива, а техническое задание формулирует заказчик, отталкиваясь от нормативных и иных ограничений. В роли заказчика проекта образовательного учреждения может выступать то же государство или бизнес. Возможен и формат так называемого государственно-частного партнерства, когда, например, девелопер получает землю под застройку на льготных условиях, но с обременением построить классную школу – в качестве примера на ум приходит школа № 14 в подмосковном Пушкине.

Государство заинтересовано прежде всего в скорости производства работ – ему важно как можно быстрее обеспечить население необходимыми образовательными площадями, снизить дефицит мест в школах и детских садах. Качество архитектуры для него, как правило, вторично, исключая те случаи, когда в деле замешана политика, – тогда, кстати, и бюджет на реализацию выделяют больше обычного.