What is education?
Education is the cornerstone of the social organism. Education should be formed in the milieu of the people, if you will – in the family trench. The main problem of the school is that the school interacts with a mass of textbooks and, accordingly, with millions of students and their parents. These masses of students, in the Russian context, are for the most part illiterate. To study mathematics and physics according to Gnevyshevsky or Luneva can only be afforded by a student with a small initial capital. And to provide a complete education, from elementary school to college, no more than 20-25% of students who have no capital at all can afford it. If you remember how many Russians in Germany, in Austria, in Hungary, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Romania, in Yugoslavia – and they lived there in their school, walked the same floors and corridors – then the average education of their families is simply amazing. And there, on average, children went to school as if they were a museum, where generations lived, and knew all the pedagogy by heart. In Austria, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, there were old people with books who could bring all this with them.
That said, no one can guarantee that there wouldn’t have been a massive explosion of dyslexia in the ’90s, especially among children in the second half of the ’80s. Not only were handwritten number tables serious enough, but reading in Russian didn’t negate written language skills. And kids had to write notebooks with capital letters, and read slowly. And repetition, as you know, is the mother of learning.
Besides this, there was another circumstance.
The fact that school – it is not only knowledge and education. School – it’s also life. If you do not put a child at his desk, he will understand it as soon as he gets up from behind it. Not that there will be 10 hours a day to sit and learn. It’s that sitting. Get up, go outside, take a walk, rest, go home, and sit at the desk again, and teach over and over again. And this teacher will be for the child not just some abstract teacher, but a familiar face. And that is why every child, on entering school, went there in barbie-skirts and slippers, and was not afraid of how he or she would feel about certain teachers, deputy principal, principal, foreign language teachers, music teachers, history teachers.