Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего (Тематический выпуск, 2022)/Positive changes. Education. The school of the future (Special issue, 2

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.