Intellectual castration by school textbooks

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Modern youth do not know for anything Stalin shot Suvorov, in no year did Gagarin fly to the moon. Should we be surprised? I think no. It is surprising that today's youth know anything at all. Our textbooks are so bad that they can perhaps be used as an example of exemplary sabotage.

The main goal is now proclaimed the creation of a digital economy, so let's take a textbook on a specialized subject, in computer science. For those who are used to looking at the external shell first of all, let me remind you that I had to write code in a couple of dozen programming languages, that I have been the owner of an IT company for 19 years, and that I had to both teach others and learn myself, moreover both Russian and foreign teachers.

When ordinary adults - the most dense and conservative part of society - talk about the advantages of grandfather's methods of education, they usually emphasize mainly the mythical "systemic". The common people explain the systemic approach like this: “first you need to learn arithmetic, then algebra, then physics. And not like you, Makarenko, suggest, first take up the integrals, and then proceed to long division."

Here we run into exactly the same problem as with medicine. There is a healthy conservatism: if something happens, go to the clinic, see a doctor, undergo the treatment that he prescribes. This is what people with good education do, who understand how our sinful world works.

There is obscurantism of the "peasant" type. Smear a wound with bird droppings, shove a cucumber up your ass to absorb the power of the earth, or go to some medicine man to heal a stomach ulcer with a belly massage. There is obscurantism of the "intelligentsia" type. Manure your face with stem cells so that wrinkles disappear on it, or buy a jar of dietary supplements for 10 thousand rubles, so that you can eat casually prepared vitamins every morning with a serious look.

With regard to education, "peasant obscurantism" means learning according to the same methods by which people studied in the era of horoscopes and caloric. "Intellectual obscurantism" is trying to learn English in a dream or forbidding teachers to give two marks to those who do not pull the subject. Unfortunately, modern Russian education paradoxically combines both of these obscurantist features. On the one hand, children are still locked in huge classrooms, where they are stuffed with knowledge in the most disgusting form, and on the other hand, teachers now have neither a heavy enough club to force children to learn, nor at least normal textbooks so that they can it was at least somehow to build on their basis the educational process.

Yes, you heard right, there were good textbooks in the USSR. Here, for example, is a history textbook for grade 5 from 1962. I'll quote the beginning:

Don't you notice anything strange? Otozh! You can read this tutorial! If we remove from it the ideological heresy common for those years, we get an excellent literary text - quite at the level of a good writer or an excellent blogger. Give me an editor's pencil, ask me to make the text of the textbook more intelligible, and I will freeze in bewilderment. There is nothing to improve here.

Of course, from our enlightened times we can laugh at the naivete of the communists, who managed to find class struggle almost in the Paleolithic. Literally, however, the textbook is excellent. Fyodor Petrovich Korovkin, who grew up in a wealthy merchant family, managed to get a good education before dispossession in 1917. I can only complain that Soviet education was not able to give us either the authors of the level of Mr. Korovkin, or even just satisfactory authors of textbooks.

I suggest to inquisitive readers not to take my word for it, but to familiarize themselves with the history textbooks for the 5th grade on their own, since at least 8 of them have already been set up. On the one hand, of course, there are changes for the better: the textbooks are again talking about history, and not about Marxism-Leninism. On the other hand, now, to paraphrase the classics, "a rare schoolchild will read to the middle of a chapter." Modern textbooks are, in fact, no longer textbooks at all, but chaotically glued scraps of random, poorly presented information:

Now that the minute of nostalgia for Soviet textbooks is over, let's return to the very "systemic" that people who are far from applied studies like to talk about. Both engineers and accountants, and, in general, all those who are engaged in something mundane and practical professionals know very well that if instead of accurate or at least rough measurements they try to slip a mountain of unverifiable chatter on you, this is a very bad symptom.

Doctors, for example, constantly conduct double-blind studies - half of the patients are given a pill, the other half a dummy. If there is no difference, if patients react to both the pill and the dummy in the same way, doctors conclude that the pill does not work, and charlatans begin to rub the flock with different game about the energy field, purging toxins from the body and congruent molecules with memory.

The same is true for school subjects. The student is taught mathematics, then he is given a problem on the topic on the exam. I solved the problem, it means that something is left in my head. I didn't decide - it means that something went wrong in the learning process.

Get your diploma off the shelf. What do you have on the subject of "consistency"? And what about Ability to Learn? Nothing? There are no such subjects in your diploma? So you were not taught this. If taught, it could be measured, in these subjects it would be possible to arrange a test.

I will say more. Despite all these naive conversations about the ephemeral systematicity that spreads within the walls of educational institutions somehow by itself, almost by airborne droplets, something opposite to systemicity reigns in our schools and universities now. Lack of system.

There are two ways to teach something to the interlocutor. The first method is to shower him with random facts in the hope that some of them will be fixed in his mind. The second method is to find what the interlocutor already knows, and purposefully hang a new fact on him, like a ball on a New Year tree.

Let's say we want to explain to a savage what an exchange is. We first find out what the savage already knows. After making sure that the savage had a chance to exchange precious stones for colored glass from white people, we explain: the exchange is a large hut in which people exchange bags of precious stones for bags of colored glass.

This, again, is a systemic method. We found a suitable place in the student's brain for a new fact, consolidated the fact. Or, if it was not possible to find a suitable place on the tree, they first fixed a "twig" on it: an intermediate fact that will help to get to the present. For example, if the savage does not know the word "bag", we can take the bag out of the backpack and demonstrate its structure.

The haphazard approach that is used in our schools and universities looks like this. We tell the savage that the word "exchange" comes from the Dutch "beurs" and that it is the legal entity that ensures the regular operation of an organized market for commodities, currencies, securities and financial derivatives. We also explain that trading is carried out in standard contracts or lots (lots), the size of which is regulated by the regulatory documents of the exchange.

It seems that we not only did not lie, but even provided the savage with important, relevant information. At the same time, it is absolutely obvious that a savage will not understand us - he simply does not have hooks in his head on which to hang all these concepts infinitely far from his life - “legal entity”, “derivative financial instruments”, “regulation by regulatory documents.

Imagine a mentally handicapped man in a hard hat who has been commissioned by a corrupt construction manager to build a house. The moron gravely takes the window and puts it in the place where the window should be. The window falls down and breaks. Moron, not at all embarrassed, begins to sculpt plaster on the wall of a house that has not yet been built. The plaster falls to the ground, but the moron waves and waves the trowel until a loud whistle informs him of the onset of lunchtime.

This is exactly how the building of knowledge is being built in the heads of modern Russian schoolchildren and students. They are shot at with random facts, not caring at all whether the unfortunates already have that place to which new knowledge can stick. As a result, by the end of the training, students are divided into two types.

The first type, the most numerous, receives instead of a beautiful building a heap of disorderly ruins, among which here and there small sheds suitable for habitation rise. The second type of students receives knowledge somewhere outside the educational institutions, and therefore uses official lessons as reinforcing material.

Now that all the tools are ready and laid out, I'm ready to start opening the very computer science textbook that prompted me to give birth to this emotional post.

The textbook is terrible from the first page to the last, but it makes no sense to disassemble it completely, since computer science has been going on since the second grade, and this textbook just continues a long series of other, no less terrible textbooks. I will go straight to a new topic, to programming, since up to the 8th grade, schoolchildren are held for stupid, torturing them with scholastic rubbish in the spirit of "lower the pen and move to the point (5, 2)".

Real learning to program, no matter at what level, is structured in a fairly simple way. First, the reader is told very briefly (2-3 pages) about the language that he will learn, and then they are given the opportunity to write a simple program that displays the words "Hello World!", "Hello, world!"

Then the student is given some new knowledge - for example, they are told about the differences between strings and numbers - and they are offered to write a program a little more difficult. From time to time the teacher makes digressions, talking about good programming style, about the philosophy of the language, about the sources of information retrieval, and other important side things.

This is how the courses for first-graders and advanced courses for the smartest students, such as the legendary SICP, which was taught for many years at the same Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are arranged in this way.

Let us now take our 8th grade textbook for comparison. The first 100 pages of schoolchildren are diluted with watery delirium in the spirit of "expressions consist of operands (constants, variables, functions), united by the signs of operations." Then the actual training in the "Pascal programming language" begins:

In the beginning there is an indigestible mass of pseudo-scientific nonsense, which is not only unnecessary for the student, but also incomprehensible to him. Here's a typical example:

Further, the citation of the reference book begins - the rules for naming variables are enumerated, service words and data types are enumerated. This makes even less sense than trying to learn a foreign language by reading a dictionary. When a student reads in the dictionary that "aardvark" translates as "aardvark", he at least can go to Wikipedia and find out that the aardvark is such a funny eared pig with a long penny. When a student reads that “there are a number of different chains of symbols in the language,” absolutely nothing moves in his soul.

This is followed by citing other pages of the reference book, where incomprehensible definitions are interspersed with confusing diagrams, and, finally, the lesson ends with questions in the spirit of "What slides could you supplement the presentation from the electronic attachment to the textbook?"

In the middle of the next lesson, the children are finally allowed to start the first program. It looks like this:

If you are a programmer, you can see that the programming style is quite sloppy - the authors of the tutorial did not even bother to come up with normal names for variables. If you are not a programmer, you do not understand what this program does.

This concludes the analysis of the textbook. It is bad from all sides: rotten information is presented in it at the same time both tongue-tied and in the wrong order.

Let's now apply a systematic approach and estimate how we would have compiled a textbook if we were in the place of those pests who are now responsible for this sabotage.

First, this is how the simplest program that displays the words "Hello World!" Looks like this in several programming languages:

PHP:

Python:

JavaScript:

Pascal:

Basic:

It is easy to see that Pascal is somewhat more difficult to master than many modern programming languages: if, say, in Python, a simple program occupies one understandable line, then in Pascal this line needs to be wrapped in a more cumbersome structure.

Basic is simple, but it can teach children to a bad style of programming and, more importantly, in the modern world it is not Basic that is widespread, but its descendant, mutilated by Bill Gates, Visual Basic, which is categorically not suitable for learning.

PHP, JavaScript and Python remain the method of elimination, each of which has its own pros and cons, and each of which is an order of magnitude more convenient as a first language than the awkward and rarely used Pascal today.

Then, there is no point in loading schoolchildren with information about the diameter of the ears and the length of the elephant's trunk until they see the animal itself. Obviously, first you need to give the children the opportunity to run the program, and only then start telling: "This is called a variable, this is an operator, this is how we can do it, but this is how an error will turn out."

Farther. Both adults and especially schoolchildren should be given the opportunity to get down to real business as soon as possible. Now on the Internet there are a bunch of sites where you can directly enter the code and immediately see the result. We write a couple of lines, press the "execute" button, the computer executes our commands - this is the magic that can really ignite your eyes! Instead, the magic of schoolchildren are fed for hours on inedible tediousness, making sure that the poor guys begin to stir up at the mere word "Pascal."

Finally, from a systemic point of view, students should be taught good style from the very first lesson, not allowing them to call the program the word n_1, and the length of the circle the letter c.

There are, of course, other tricks that distinguish systemic training from unsystematic, but these points are quite enough to pass judgment. So the creators of the tutorial:

1. Chose the wrong language.

2. Killed the students' interest by feeding them 10 pages of incomprehensible nonsense.

3. Have strengthened the aversion to the subject, not allowing schoolchildren to "get their hands dirty" in real business.

4. Demonstrated bad style by offering to copy it.

This tutorial can be poked with a stick for a long time, but I don't see the point in this. The above is quite enough to dismiss everyone involved in the creation and acceptance of this instrument of intellectual castration with a wolf ticket.

Some say sadly: in the first grade, schoolchildren run skipping, with a thirst for knowledge on their bright faces, and by the middle of school their eyes go out and the thirst for knowledge is replaced by eternal fatigue. Personally, I do not find anything strange in this. Other textbooks are no better than the disassembled ones; the entire education system in Russia is built in a similar way. This is exactly the case when the fish rotted from the head. School teachers, shackled hand and foot by different bureaucracy, can change little.

In fact, the whole course of school computer science is extremely bad. He, as I showed above, is absolutely unsystematic, and therefore even after passing the exam, the student will not have real knowledge in his head - for the same reason that after watching a third-rate action movie, we do not remember the numbers of the cars on which the bandits and police were moving.

As a finishing touch, I will cite two killer figures that clearly prove that the traditional school is doomed to give way to more modern teaching methods in the near future.

Firstly, the programming course that is given to schoolchildren from grades 8 to 11 can be packed into 10 lessons with a large margin: without homework, of course. You don't need to be a pedagogical genius to do this, you just need to add a pinch of consistency and stop wiping your feet on the students' study time.

Secondly, in extracurricular courses, programming is taught now from the age of six, and more or less serious programming - from the age of 10. A child who is interested in the topic, at the age of 12-13, is quite capable of writing independently, for example, games and uploading them to Steam. At school, children begin to "teach" programming only after 7 (!) Years of feeding them poisonous nonsense about alphabetic chains and algorithms for working with arrays.

Actually, this is the whole essence of the problems of the traditional school. It would seem that if you want to teach a child about arrays, here's a direct way: make a program with him in Python that will sort the class by last name. One lesson, and the concept of arrays will be firmly entrenched in the student's head.

But no. This is not the way the school prepares future digital economy builders. We will invent several dead programming languages, add flowers and balloons to them "to make it easier for the kids to understand," and then we will rinse the brains of schoolchildren with this squalor, deliberately cut off from life.

Imagine, you came to school to learn a foreign language, and they tell you: “You don’t need English and Chinese, we will learn Mongolian. But for now it is difficult for you, you will learn the first word in Mongolian in 7 years. In the meantime, here we have invented a new simplified language for you - remember that the "cat" in this language is called "rushkozavrikus". No, you will not speak and read books in this invented language, listen to the teacher and memorize.

This is exactly what they teach now in our schools of computer science and programming. With other subjects, things are not so bad, but the general essence remains the same: living, interesting objects are deliberately killed with formalin, so that in no case give schoolchildren even the slightest opportunity to sincerely get carried away with their studies.

If we want Russian education to be worth something in the modern world, we need to carry out very serious reforms at once in a number of areas.

Personally, I would suggest starting these reforms with the complete dissolution of the department of the Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the computer science course, and with the hiring, if not the best, then at least normal specialists, since such are now present in industrial quantities both in Russia and abroad.