The School Hole: On the Role of Current Teachers and the Degradation of Education

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

Conversation with the scientific editor of the Expert magazine, Alexander Nikolaevich Privalov. The conversation was about the real goals of educational reform, about what knowledge and abilities the graduates of recent years have in reality, disenfranchised teachers, interested and disinterested parents. And also about what is needed to revive the Russian secondary school.

We remember the school only for informational reasons: the end of the school year, the failed USE results, a single textbook, changes to the Law on Education, which we were already so praised, but now it turns out that it urgently needs to be improved - and so on.

But the state of the Russian school never became a subject of constant public interest. This is bad. Our education and, above all, the school have been reformed for fifteen years already - it is inconceivably long, but there are no results. That is, there are no positive results; there is a tangible degradation, and this should at least be spoken about aloud. This must be realized by the society.

The essence of education reform

The most accurate statement on this matter was said by the past Minister of Education, Mr. Fursenko. He put it like this: the Soviet education system tried to prepare creators; we need to prepare literate consumers.

The whole essence of the educational reform is that, in the opinion of its creators, our education was excessively luxurious, not a porch for our snout.

We need to have a more modest education. A very compact higher education: several good universities, which will even be included in some international rankings. Well, and a maximum of another hundred universities, which will do what you absolutely cannot do without.

We will sculpt quasi-teachers for quasi-schools in pedagogical technical schools, which are called bachelor's degrees. We will teach quasi-engineers for dusting off imported equipment in engineering colleges, which we will also call bachelor's degrees. We will need serious specialists, in fact, serious ones, or we will write them out from abroad, or we will train them abroad. And if the reformers see our higher education as such, then secondary education should be much simpler.

This position was, in my opinion, absolutely wrong before. But then, at least, some serious arguments could be made in its favor. In the post-Crimean era, there were no serious arguments in its favor.

It is quite obvious that they will be very reluctant, if at all, to admit us to any modern technologies and achievements of science. That the presence as a secondary, but full-fledged element of the world system, buying the missing specialists for oil money, does not shine for us.

This means that it is necessary to build a self-sufficient education system, and this is fundamentally different from what has been done all these years. Suffice it to say that for all the years of reforms, the conversation about the content of our education has never been raised.

A graduate of a modern school: according to documents - a six-winged seraphim …

There is a wonderful paper, Strategy 2020, developed and adopted several years ago with a fair amount of noise. In the educational section of this strategy, it was written in black and white: the main danger that threatens our education is that some bore will force us to return to the discussion about the content of education. We cannot survive this. This is how we are doing well, but it will be even better. But if we start talking about the content of education - that's it, fucking. And the reformers managed to avoid this great danger: they never let anyone talk about the content of education.

Read the famous FGOS (Federal State Education Standard), which says what a graduate of our national schools should be like. Soul-saving reading. You will learn that this graduate is six-winged, like a seraphim, and clever, like the three Aristotles. He possesses mathematical thinking, geographical thinking, physical thinking and chemical thinking. This is all written in the standard. It does not say only whether he knows the Pythagorean theorem. Does he know Ohm's law, does he know which side of Russia the Northern Sea Route runs from? This is unknown. But he possesses geographical and physical thinking.

So, if you ask how the reformers themselves see the graduate of the school, I will tell you honestly: I don’t know. I do not really believe that they see it as it is written in these very state standards - they are not crazy, in fact.

I am telling you quite seriously, I have been in the media for more than twenty years: if there were at least fifteen people in Moscow, as the section of state standards for literature draws a graduate of a school, they would be snatched up to the chief editors of Moscow publications in six seconds. There are no such people, there are no such people in nature, not like school graduates.

… in fact - a degrading C grade

Last year showed what our graduates are really worth. He was famous for the so-called "honest exam". It's funny: until last year we were not told that the exam was not fair. On the contrary, they tried to convince us in every possible way that he was terribly objective. And last year they made it "honest" by spending four times more money on it than on a regular one. Honesty isn't cheap.

Everything turned out rather strange, because it was necessary to underestimate the predetermined limits of satisfactory grades in compulsory subjects - in Russian and mathematics, retroactively. Otherwise, as they say, up to a quarter of the school's graduates would not have received their certificates. This would, of course, be a politically unacceptable scandal. They did not go to him, they lowered the bar.

What happened in the end is easier to explain in mathematics, but in Russian it was the same. In order to get what they began to call a three, a person had to solve three examples in four hours (it is better, of course, more, but three were enough) of such a level: "How many cheese curds at 16 rubles can you buy for 100 rubles?" A person who answered three questions of this quality correctly received a certificate of successful completion of a general secondary school.

It’s not a problem that it turned out: there were a quarter of people who didn’t even climb over this barrier. It's okay - sad, but seemingly inevitable. You will be told: the genetic material is deteriorating, the social structure is deteriorating. They will tell you a lot, and a lot of it will be true. Indeed, a certain number of children cannot master what, in theory, they should master in a high school course. But the trouble is that only 20% know much more than this shame. Only 20% of graduates showed significantly better results than such a trio. This is, of course, a disaster.

Cheap education, disenfranchised teachers

The real meaning of the current reform is economy; saving both money and efforts of the bosses. What is given to us as an education reform is not and cannot be: we have seen that this does not concern the content at all. The reform of education management is underway, and it has really changed beyond recognition.

I am a teacher's son, I remember well my mother's troubles and joys, and I can say with confidence: the bureaucratic oppression that put pressure on the teacher in Soviet times is a miserable half percent of what they have arranged now.

Of course, even in Soviet times, the school director was not a godfather to the king, he quite had bosses - both RONO and GorONO, and there were enough leaders along the party line - but the school director did not have such wild lawlessness as now.

If then someone did not like the director, he could also be kicked out. But it was not easy - and it was a scandal. It was unthinkable to expel him at any second without explaining the reasons, as is being done now.

How did our esteemed reformers get carte blanche for their exploits? Quite simple, I think. Of course, I was not present, but I believe they told the leaders of the country something like this: “Our education system is too cumbersome and too expensive, we undertake in a limited time to make it much cheaper, but in such a way that it will look decent”.

At the same time, both sides of this imaginary conversation could not talk about the content of education. The country's leadership cannot talk about him, because they know nothing about him. The funny thing is that the education authorities cannot talk about him, for exactly the same reason.

The content of education is a very specific issue, solved not at the political, but at the professional level. And to solve it, not managers are needed, but professionals.

Then new introductory letters arrived. What is happening with education now largely stems from the presidential decrees of 2012, where fierce tasks were set to provide workers in general and higher education with a certain acceptable level of wages. Our respected reformers approached the matter simply: “How to make the salary higher? It is necessary that there were fewer people. Which is what happens.

Quite recently, Mr. Livanov or one of his deputies openly said that the teacher's pay should be thirty-six hours - before it was eighteen. Such a rate is an open refusal to do any quality work.

Even if we forget that, as a result of the management reform, a teacher has to write a lot of papers every hour in the classroom, thirty-six hours a week is still a complete rejection of professional growth, of maintaining oneself in a professional form. This is a work of wear and tear. A person is worn out, worn out and either leaves school, or becomes a clockwork gramophone. What is the use of a driven teacher, judge for yourself.

Quality or efficiency

Pay attention: never in all the years of the reform, none of the chiefs of education spoke about its quality. The quality of education is not temperature, not length, you cannot measure it like that. And yet this something can be felt. Just by talking with the graduates of this or that educational institution, any experienced person will tell you whether they received a quality education, and how high-quality. Approximately, not with three decimal places, but he will say right away - and, as a rule, he will not be mistaken. That is why there has never been and never will be a speech about the quality of education in the mouths of managers.

It's about the effectiveness of education. What is efficiency? Efficiency is a balance of costs and benefits. Costs are, of course, money. And about the result, they each time come up with another piece of paper, which sets out efficiency criteria that have nothing to do with the quality of education, generally speaking.

"How many square meters of laboratories do you have per student?" "What is your share of foreign students?" What is the proportion of foreign students in a provincial teacher training university? Yes, none. Nobody needs them there for a hundred years, and they don't need this university. And the university itself is needed. It may well be of high quality and prepare good teachers, but this no longer interests anyone. Mechanics schools are even easier: there the main idol in the temple is the USE scores.

It was with such simple tricks - the invention of pieces of paper and the adaptation of the entire complexity of educational life to conformity with these pieces of paper - that they drove all the teaching staff of Russia into a state of continuous trepidation. What is the use of a frightened teacher, judge for yourself.

School died - nobody noticed

This is what is actually weird. School is an incredibly important thing, the same nation-forming thing as guarded borders, army and currency. There is no nation without them - and without a school there is no nation. The school, in my opinion, is obviously ruined. Why are there no screams, why aren’t frightened crowds running through the streets? For two very simple reasons.

The first is that this is, unfortunately, a topic of limited time interest. Usually, a person is interested in school for exactly the last three years of his baby's education. What the child's school was before, the average parent is almost not important: what it is, it is. And in the past three years, everyone has become very interested in whether they teach well, whether they will do it.

For the last three years, the parent has been inclined to talk about this, the rest of the time a normal person does not care about school: he does not understand to what extent it is important. He is not obliged to understand this. Another ordinary person is not obliged to understand, for example, to what extent water treatment is important, but there should be water treatment. He is not obliged to understand what a nation-forming institution, a school, should be, and whether there is such an institution today.

The second is why no one runs in a panic. Because the one who wants to learn can still learn; well, in big cities.

In smaller cities, especially in villages, this is a completely separate conversation. And in big cities, especially in very big cities, this is certainly the case. If the child himself and his parents want the child to learn, the child will learn. Today it is possible - because inertia exists. School is a gigantic institution, many, many people. And no vices of the organization, even those that have had time to fully manifest themselves, will not bring down this matter at once.

There are still quite a few schools that look good; some are even good, but mostly look at the expense of the surviving group of high-level teachers - and at the expense of the tutors. Because when people from the outside - not specialists - or officials, also from the outside, evaluate the school, they evaluate it by digital results - USE scores and some other nonsense. These digital results are inseparable from what the school brought and what the tutors who were invited by the students' parents brought in. This, in principle, cannot be divided.

If a school has a more or less intelligent group of teachers and more or less wealthy parents, they give a total result that makes the school seem good. But this is false. If tomorrow this school is locked, the results of the children who went there may be even better. Because they will not waste time with teachers who are not of such high quality as the presenters. And the leading teachers will stop wasting time writing papers for the Ministry of Education and will deal with children around the clock, as good tutors do.

So people do not see how everything is sourly arranged. I am afraid that when they see it, it will not be very clear what to do. Yes, and now it is not very clear. So they sometimes discuss with undue ardor the most important aspects of the problem.

Single textbook or gold standard?

I am not at all inclined to share today's general horror of the concept of a "single textbook", I do not see anything terrible in this, because the textbooks are really united today. The fact that there are several hundred of them in a certain registry, nothing changes in this particular class.

This school bought such a textbook and is studying it. And because there are fifteen more lying nearby, you are neither warm nor cold. There is no variability today, except perhaps in the slogans of the Ministry of Education itself, which are no longer repeated very often. The school has no time, no premises, no personnel, no effort, no money for real variability.

The danger of a single textbook is really great, but only in the sense that, unfortunately, nowhere is it written that this textbook will be good. Moreover, if the matter proceeds in accordance with the bill by Yarovaya and Nikonov, which the State Duma has now begun to consider, then, most likely, there will be no good textbooks.

We will not go into details, but it says that the textbook, having passed through numerous wheels of consideration and thereby becoming "one", is conserved. But history has never seen a good stable textbook written right away. All the great textbooks that have gone down in history became such by the twentieth or even thirtieth reprints.

I myself am a mathematician by education, and in the case of mathematics I am categorically in favor of a stable basic textbook. Moreover, in other matters, I would be in favor if they told me that he would be good. If they told me how it will be done, what the selection procedures will be, the procedures for its further improvement, and all this would be plausible. If I finally saw that it was not bureaucrats who were doing this, but professional people.

But in reality, a single educational space is not necessarily uniform textbooks. But this is necessarily a single content of education. There must be what was once called the "golden canon." So that we can count on the fact that the entire mass of children from Smolensk to Kamchatka goes to schools, and all, not necessarily from a single textbook, gets acquainted with approximately the same array of content. When people who have graduated from different schools meet together at work, on the tram, on vacation, they speak a common language. They all read Krylov's fables, they all know Ohm's law, they have a certain common core.

This common core really should be. And in this sense, the aforementioned bill makes an excellent step forward, because it says (so far also very inaccurately) that educational standards should set its content. Which is quite reasonable. The standard should set the content, and not consist of wishes about geographical thinking. If this law is adopted, I hope that serious people who are in Russia will make such a standard.

It's not a problem. Gather highly professional people, and they will write an excellent document in just a week or two. Well, in a month - it won't take another fifteen years to waste. But whether it will be done, I do not know.

How much does it cost to work with the gifted?

The ending school year has passed under the sign of uniting with neighbors - read, rout - our best schools that worked with gifted children. This is very bad.

Whether the Soviet school was generally the best in the world is at least a controversial issue. But what was indisputably the best in the world in the USSR was the system of working with gifted children, which came from Kolmogorov and Kikoin. These were boarding schools - Kolmogorovsky in Moscow and in several other cities; these were special schools - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk. It was absolute brilliance. The way it was done became a role model for the entire globe, except for us.

Recently there was a controversy here: how to work with gifted children. People who came out of the Kolmogorov system wrote a project that was called the Kolmogorov project.

The bottom line is this: the state gives a certain - in fact, very small - amount of money. In three years, basic lyceums have been created in all provincial centers. These lyceums, firstly, concentrate talented youth, talented teachers, and secondly, they develop methods that can be replicated in ordinary schools. That is, for three years of work, a very small amount brings concrete results.

Not only do gifted children revolve among their own kind, and therefore remain gifted and progress. The machine also begins to work, which develops and will continue to develop methods for teaching the most important school disciplines. After three years everything works, everything is fine.

The alternative was the project of the Ministry of Education: 999 billion million to develop a computer system that would take into account all gifted children; 999 billion million every year in grants to these children and the educators who teach them; and so every year.

As a result, there is a computer system where, it seems, gifted children are taken into account. But if tomorrow you stop giving these very billions of millions, then there is nothing. In addition, very important things are not taken into account there.

A child remains gifted and motivated only while communicating with gifted and motivated peers. When it is in a school dominated by less gifted and motivated children, it gets twice in the neck for being a “nerd” and ceases to be gifted and motivated.

Farther. The race of parents and teachers for these grants, which are attributed to the child for his supposedly giftedness, is a wild psychological trauma. All psychologists howled at once: this cannot be done!

Well? Arranged a discussion. We published the results of it in our "Expert". In an open discussion, our side absolutely won, I will not say if the opponent failed to appear - there were representatives of the opponent, but won, in essence, without discussion. “Yes, you are right, let us take into account all your suggestions. Come on, let's …"

But in practice, of course, everything has become their way. There is no system of schools for gifted children and teachers that could generate an intellectual wave throughout the country. And there is worse. Okay, this crap with grants, it's just a shame; but there are worse things. There is a direct persecution of schools that are superior to others.

We adopted a big law "On Education", and it says in black and white that all schools are the same. But in order for the school to be a higher level, so that it is able to work with gifted children, not adjusting them to a common plinth, but allowing them to grow and develop, it must be arranged somewhat differently.

I had the good fortune to graduate from one of these schools myself, and I remember how it looked. For example, there should be people who work with small groups. The class comes entirely to the lesson of chemistry or physics, and then the hours of mathematics come, and the class is divided into small groups with which students and graduate students work.

This is a different organization. There are many part-time workers, there are more audiences, everything is a little different there. It is not necessarily that much more expensive, but it is much different. And nothing of this will happen. There will be strict per capita financing, there will be strict equal standards for everyone. And therefore schools that are trying to get out a little above the general level will be systematically destroyed.

No one will shoot at them from howitzers. Not everyone will even be merged with ordinary schools (and this, I repeat, also means the end for an ordinary school). It's just that the very arrangement of supplying schools with money and other resources has already been arranged in such a way that schools will be trimmed down.

If today, say, in Moscow the best schools receive some additional money - grants from the Moscow Government, for example - then what will happen tomorrow, none of them knows. So can you work?

Not to mention, the best schools are the very talented people who created and support them. And not all such people like the atmosphere created by the Ministry of the Environment. So the future of such schools in the system of government created by our reformers, I look very darkly. In the created conditions, they have no future.

A necessary condition for healing

It is quite obvious to me that no serious changes for the better are possible until the truth is told about the state of affairs. Until this truth is spoken officially, from some high enough rostrum. It follows that change is impossible until they are fired - even with honor, in laurel wreaths from head to toe! - all these reformers: Fursenko, Kuzminov, Livanov with all their henchmen.

After all, not only is it lost fifteen years, a lot of money, a lot of strength, tens of millions of people have been spoiled with buckets of blood. How many teachers have gone out of sight. How to take all this and write it off? In order to write off, I must say: there was a disaster.

I don’t know when this will happen. I don't even know if this will happen at all. But I firmly know that without this the school will not begin to revive.

The main problem of the school, which cannot even begin to heal while the reformers are in place, is that there is no school. The school has ceased to be an inherently valuable, self-sufficient organization and has become an appendage to the institute fastened from below: it merely “prepares for a university,” and officially has no other value.

The USE became a manifestation of the school's lack of independence. Today's USE, since it is both a graduation and an introductory one, must simultaneously sum up the results of school education and recognize the readiness for university studies. These are two fundamentally different tasks.

According to the results of the exam, the student should be able to enter the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. That is, he must be able to solve mathematical problems of such a level that not every student and not even every teacher can solve. Thus, the Unified State Exam in mathematics should include Mekhmat level problems, otherwise the second half will not work.

But the school now and always graduates a lot of C-graders. And these Cs should be differentiated from both Losers and Quaternaries. This exam, which must recognize the details of the mekhmatov level, must recognize the details of the three-point. This is unrealistic.

For mathematics this year, the exam was split into basic and specialized levels, but I don't even want to discuss this. I firmly hope that this shameful innovation, which legalizes the issuance of a certificate to a student who, of all mathematics, knows only addition within the first hundred, will be quickly canceled. But in all other disciplines, the USE continues to try to grasp the immensity.

There are tasks at the kindergarten level, and there are really quite difficult ones. But people minimize the effort. Every teacher knows how many points are given for each of these tasks. And it’s easier for him to train him for triplets.

And in all other subjects for which there is no compulsory USE, people simply stopped studying. At all. What for? They won't ask me at the end of the year, they won't ask me at the end of school. The teacher at the end of school will not be asked how he taught me. They won't ask anyone. So, what will he teach, and I will learn? It's easier for both of us to pretend. And we pretend.

School has turned into daytime overexposure for children. Those who want to study, while, I repeat, while they can study there. And the rest sit out. You can not do it this way. If we want to survive as a country, the school must be a school.

This means, I must say that the exam was worse than a crime - it was a mistake. The USE in its current form should be canceled. We need to restore independence to the school and, in particular, compulsory final exams in basic subjects. This cannot be done without dismissing all its organizers, because it is by the introduction of the Unified State Exam that they justify their existence for all fifteen years.

Sufficient Condition of Healing

But, of course, the change of education leaders by itself will not change the situation. Those who become aware of the decline in national education today - teachers, parents, citizens in general - should understand one more thing. Very important. Nobody will ever "make them beautiful". In order for the education system to meet the requirements of society, society must clearly present and stubbornly defend these very requirements. So far, let's be honest, this is extremely far away.

Not to mention the whole society, even teachers have no solidarity. I'm not talking about school teachers. But when they began to smash high schools, when there was a famous scandal with monitoring efficiency, according to which who just did not get into ineffective …

It would seem that, gentlemen, teachers of higher education, they came to cut you, specifically they came to cut you. And from the first time they showed what it will be like for you: they will not feel sorry for anyone. Well, stand up as a wall, say something! No.

"We cannot protest together with these, but we cannot protest together with these - we do not agree with them on this and that." Guys, you will disagree later! All of you are being destroyed, all of you are being driven under the plinth, say something. Union of rectors, for example.

I don’t know, parents are different, sometimes completely stupid. There are no such stupid rectors. But they sit quietly, if when they object, then timidly, timidly, softly, gently, neatly …

What is there! When two years ago, without declaring war, the Academy of Sciences was hacked to death, if the same Presidium of the Academy, upon hearing this news, would simply stand up and leave - that would get up and go out into the street - then be trustworthy, the destruction of the Academy would have been stopped. But no, they swallowed it.

As long as the society does not attend to school - parents, teachers, children, in order to protect their right to receive education, not scraps, the school will continue to degrade under the confident leadership of reformers.