Articles & Research

A School of a Different Educational Systemicity

A teacher, a talented educator, beyond the ability to hear the child, to see his “got it” on his face, in his posture, in his movements — must be an example of thinking, a guide through the subject, through universal learning activities. In the internet space he teaches the safety of thinking and working with enormous volumes of data; managers have had this in their focus for quite a long time, while classical secondary education totally ignores such skills. The children are drowning. They need to be taught only once — at the very beginning of the path, in the process and the activity of that path. Darwinian, unpredictable evolution tells us that it is impossible to know whether there will be a storm, or a genius contemporary, or a poem in my head — but one can be ready for it. With a full acceptor of the result of actions, of curiosity, and of will. Otherwise Google will X-ray you right through! To be ready to change for the sake of change — A. G. Asmolov.

To instill the habit and the love of reading. A teacher’s professional success depends on personal development, and no less on the state lived through in feeling-thought inside a masterpiece, inside classical artistic images you return to again and again. A human being is an inner system and needs the process of discovering inner utterances within culture. To teach reading is the goal of the school. Different texts. To master your own world inside the understanding of the complex. Individual deciphering and the creation of a system of images. School alienates the child from the inner reading of texts. The teacher must not be a carrier of subject knowledge; he must orient himself superbly within the subject and show the history of its development, relying on reflexive and communicative skills, as G. P. Shchedrovitsky said at his seminars.

“No knowledge was given, but there was a school.” Where do you find such a person — a talented teacher-experimenter? In other words, how does such an example of thinking arise — one capable of grasping the dynamics of the run in the 21st century, of its economic niches, the state, technological progress — while at the same time possessing scientific thinking, a humanistic taste, belonging to High Culture, and knowing every useful app in the App Store? This is a time of return, but to polyhistory in an already different composition. This teacher is interdisciplinary, polyphonic, and loves philosophy. Possessing a personal, integral system of the relation of the human soul to the surrounding world, being a successful guide in the structure of such relations — on the content of any subject, he is able to teach the child to live in the world, to show the adult an example!

In every century, a struggle is under way in all spheres of human activity. The teacher must realize that he is a participant in an information war — one he always loses, either because he is a boring “driver,” or because circumstances have bent his will. Then those for whom he took responsibility choose trash content, the simple path, and are no longer carriers of the culture that people call classical. The Heideggerian midnight still will not arrive. Computers will come not for forecasting but for control, and online education will pay for it. A popular term — cognitive diversity — is either standing guard over globalization, or is truly being used in the name of personalization. Divide and rule, but differently.

Then again, to teach the thinking of any content whatsoever already makes one, in effect, a citizen of an unknown homeland — just like the philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. A unique logic of thinking, a little stream — or, simply, autodidactics — is a real possibility of bringing to life the dream of education, which is to hand over, at the speed of the 21st century, the tools for developing one’s own thinking. What is he to do in this simple century, if he was raised on the content of High Culture? Let us be optimists, and let us go to the end — something like tragic optimism, but in it is the whole song of the pedagogical struggle. And Makarenko would have laughed at our problems. To realize that knowledge — it is mine, my own; to understand that, as with dying, no one will do it for me.

To look for difference, to establish criteria for comparing skills, to reduce everything to professional development — altogether unprofitable for the 21st century. Simple or automatable tasks will pass to the machines, while we will have to solve problems that are beyond their “wit.” The same goes for a child’s motivation in the utilitarian chain — school for the university, which is for the job, which is for securing a happy life. But what motivation can we synthesize in our century? Comparison, too, is globalization and a weapon in the information war. But this is a century of philosophy, like any other. We will have time to pose in it a few questions from the very highest level of reflection — questions that will change technology and education. Of course, we must have time to school it properly!

Conclusion: the teacher’s organic, interdisciplinary worldview is an instrument for the child’s organic and living education — a child able to release its inner world, to think through any subject independently, and to cope with any task. We need a school of the cultivation of taste. We will learn to tell hackwork from non-hackwork. “For trees grow without the help of tutors.”

What is most important for a teacher?

First — philosophy, the understanding of meaning

Second — the library, a model of culture

Third — supervision (a teacher’s ear)

Motto: I understand, and I travel freely.