Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

The children of today are given no real safe space where they could enjoy their naïve self-invented games at their heart’s content. A book like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could never be written nowadays—no more wardrobes to peep into, no old houses to explore without adult supervision. Instead of it, our children have to deal with the sophisticated machinery of computer games that never encourages their own imagination and that basically sees them as little adults—‘little adult consumers’ would be a more appropriate term. Computer games, instead of nurturing children’s fantasy or other creative powers, coerce them into following a pre-approved pattern of very pragmatic, very rational behaviour. In a classical ‘shooter,’ for instance, you shoot down your ‘enemies’ and collect your rewards—otherwise, you get shot and lose your game. No third option is available, and the very necessity of killing those ‘enemies’ or, indeed, of seeing them as such never can be questioned, as the pseudo-reality of a computer game literally has no character or algorithm who (or should I say ‘that’?) can answer such questions. One could almost say that the mechanisms underlying the reality of computer games and the political proceedings of today are essentially the same; that we as political puppets are given the same limited choices between two options falsely presented to us as true alternatives; that the Pavlovian training of primitive social reflexes which the computer games have in view is therefore highly justifiable. But this would lead us too far away from our subject. We should never forget, by the way, that anyone who undergoes this primitive training is exposed to an enormous psychological pressure which completely excludes computer games from the list of protected areas—this was my point when I started talking about them.

Neither can the school of today be seen as ‘the safe zone.’ Saying this, I do not specifically refer to numerous cases of school abuse and school bullying. What I really mean is the fact that contemporary school is a place where you as a student must ‘excel’ and compete with other learners, not one where your mistakes can be easily pardoned, let alone quietly discussed in a fruitful manner. It is true for parents as much as for their children, perhaps even more so for the former. Each parent almost feels as if a mistake in choosing a ‘good’ school would turn fatal for the career of his of her child, even though he or she has no clue at all what a ‘good’ school really is. But surely, if we start to talk of school education in the light of children’s future career, the most reasonable choice is to stuff up students’ schedule with ‘realistic’ and ‘profession-like’ learning and extracurricular activities that never are really ‘green’ in terms discussed before. Neither are they really ‘yellow,’ of course: they are as grey as the everyday of an office clerk.