Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

But not only that: each culture gradually invites, or used to gradually invite children into the ‘yellow zone’; to involve them into doing household chores or maybe into professional activities of their parents, to charge them with more and more adult tasks by performing which they would learn how to make grown-up choices—and how to answer for them. I cannot help recalling the charming and malicious Becky Sharp, a character in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair who starts working as an assistant teacher even before she leaves her school or—a more unsettling image—Petya Rostov in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace who dies as a cavalry officer in the battlefield when he is barely fifteen. (His is, of course, an extreme example of a young man placed in the ‘red zone,’ a zone, that is, where freedoms and obligations of a teenager completely coincide with those of a fully grown-up person and where, as a result, teenager’s choices and decisions become ‘deadly serious’—literally so in his case.)

Your humble lecturer sees the first two zones as absolute necessities in education of a child, in turning him or her into a fully responsible, fully answerable human being. The sad fact of our culture is that we do not know how to establish both of them any longer.