80% of adults think like children

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

Why are elite schools in Finland and the United States starting to work according to the educational methods of the Soviet Union? What is the situation with education in Russia today? What role do schools and universities play in the rapidly widening gap between the smart and the stupid?

Lyudmila Yasyukova, head of the laboratory of social psychology at St. Petersburg State University, head of the Center for Diagnostics and Development of Abilities, has also been working as a school psychologist for over twenty years. In an interview with Rosbalt, she spoke about the results of monitoring the intellectual development of schoolchildren and students

- The origins of this concept should be sought in the works of the outstanding Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Generalized, conceptual thinking can be defined through three important points. The first is the ability to highlight the essence of a phenomenon, an object. The second is the ability to see the cause and predict the consequences. The third is the ability to organize information and build a holistic picture of the situation.

Those who have conceptual thinking adequately understand the real situation and draw the right conclusions, while those who do not have … They are also confident in the correctness of their vision of the situation, but this is their illusion, which breaks against real life. Their plans do not come true, forecasts do not come true, but they believe that the people and circumstances around them are to blame, and not their misunderstanding of the situation.

The degree of formation of conceptual thinking can be determined using psychological tests. Here is an example from testing children six to seven years old, which adults do not always cope with. Tit, dove, bird, sparrow, duck. What's superfluous? Unfortunately, many say it is a duck. Recently I had parents of one child who got excited and argued that the duck was the right answer. Dad is a lawyer, mom is a teacher. I tell them: "Why a duck?" And they answer, because it is big, and a bird, a bird, is, in their opinion, something small. But what about the ostrich, penguin? But in any way, the image of a bird as something small is fixed in their minds, and they consider their image to be universal.

- According to my data and according to the data of other researchers, less than 20% of people have full-fledged conceptual thinking. These are those who studied natural and technical sciences, learned the operations of identifying essential features, categorizing and establishing cause-and-effect relationships. However, there are few of them among those who make decisions about the development of society. Among political consultants we have psychologists, philosophers, failed teachers - people who are not very good at conceptual thinking, but who can deftly speak and wrap their ideas in beautiful wrappers.

- If we take the developed countries, then about the same. I can refer to the research of Lev Vekker, who worked in the USSR, the USA, Europe and Russia. His 1998 studies show that more than 70% of adults, psychologists, with whom he collaborated in the study of the thinking of children, think like children themselves: they generalize from the particular to the particular, and not on an essential basis, do not see cause-and-effect relationships …

Probably, there is some difference between countries, and it can be assumed that the tendencies of increase-decrease in the percentage of people with conceptual thinking are different in different countries, but no one conducts such detailed cross-cultural studies. Or, at least, there is no such data in the open press.

It is impossible to form conceptual thinking in life, it is acquired only in the course of studying the sciences, since the sciences themselves are built according to the conceptual principle: they are based on basic concepts, over which the pyramid of science is built. Such a conceptual pyramid. And, if we leave school without conceptual thinking, then, faced with this or that fact, we will not be able to objectively interpret it, but act under the influence of emotions and our subjective ideas. As a result, decisions made on the basis of such a pre-conceptual interpretation of what is happening cannot be implemented. And we see it in our life. The higher a person is in the social hierarchy, the more expensive is the price of his biased interpretations and decisions. Look at how many programs we accept that end in nothing. A year or two has passed, and where is the program, where is the person who declared it? Go look.

- Earlier, the foundations of conceptual thinking began to be laid in natural history. Now, instead of natural history, we have "The World Around". Have you seen what it is? This is a meaningless okroshka. Only compilers who themselves do not have conceptual thinking can see logic in this. It is supposedly a practice-oriented, research subject. None of this is there.

Further, earlier, from the 5th grade, botany and history began as the history of the development of civilizations. Now in the 5th grade we have natural history in the form of stories about nature without any logic, and instead of the history of civilizations - "History in pictures" - the same okroshka without logic, something about primitive people, something about knights.

In the sixth and seventh grades, there used to be zoology, again with its own logic. Further in the eighth was anatomy, and already in high school, general biology. That is, a kind of pyramid was built: flora and fauna, which, in the end, are subject to the general laws of development. Now there is none of this. Everything is mixed up - botany, and the animal world, and man, and general biology. The principle of scientific presentation of information has been replaced by the principle of a kaleidoscope, changing pictures, which the developers consider a system-activity approach.

The picture is the same with physics. Also stories about space, about planets, about Newton's laws … Here, there is a boy sitting with me, I ask him: "Do you at least solve problems in physics?" He answers: "What tasks? We make presentations." What is a presentation? This is a retelling in pictures. If there are no problems in mechanics for the decomposition of forces, then we can not talk about the formation of conceptual thinking in physics.

- Everything is different there. In the West, there is really complete freedom, and there are very different schools. Including those who are selected not by the wallet, but by the level of development. And there, of course, there are schools of an excellent level, where they train the elite, possessing both conceptual and abstract thinking. But there is no desire to perfectly educate everyone and everyone there - why is this necessary? In addition, there education is not by class, but by programs. Children who show good results are united in groups studying more complex programs. As a result, those who need it, in any case, have the opportunity to get a good education and go to university. It's a matter of family motivation.

Finland is an interesting example. It is recognized by all that there is now the best education system in Europe. So, they just took our Soviet programs and principles of education. We had a conference on education not so long ago, and one of our high-ranking lady, the author of many of the latest innovations, spoke there. She proudly proclaimed that we are finally moving away from all these myths about good Soviet education. In response, a representative of Finland spoke and said - sorry, but the Soviet education system at the school was excellent, and we borrowed a lot from you, which allowed us to improve our system. They translated our textbooks, and they take the teachers of the old school with great pleasure to share with their teachers the Soviet teaching methods.

- Yes, and these are not my assumptions, but the research data that I have been conducting in schools for more than twenty years, from year to year.

- Unfortunately no. The losses in the school are visible, but there are no gains yet.

- The gap is growing, and how. Of course, there are excellent schools and universities, from where graduates are not only professionally educated, but also with a highly developed intellect. This gap began to widen rapidly in the 1990s and the situation is getting worse.

You know, I have my own hypothesis, quite cynical, regarding the educational policy of our leadership. We are a raw material country of the third world. We don't need many people with good education and ability to think and draw conclusions. They have nowhere to find employment, they are not needed here.

At the same time, huge amounts of money are spent on education, really huge ones. What's going on? Our highly educated professionals leave and work in more developed countries around the world. Whole companies of Russian programmers work in the USA, for example. I know one of these in Boston, they generally all, except for the Negro cleaning lady, are Russian.

Why does our government need to train highly qualified personnel for the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe? Did you know that in the USA there are even mathematical schools in Russian with our methods? And those who graduated from these schools are fine with their lives. But our country does not need these people. It needs those who work as drillers, build houses, pave streets and lay asphalt. I think that our government is trying to transfer the population to these professional spheres. But nothing comes out. People do not go into these areas, preferring trade in different forms. We have to import more and more people from Asia who have no ambitions. Till.

And our class specialists, graduates of the best schools and universities, leave, not finding a worthy place for themselves here. That is, the overall level is decreasing.

See also: School - a conveyor belt of biorobots

As for the people from the Ministry of Education, I admit that they really do not understand what they are doing. They are sincerely mistaken, thinking that blindly adopting some Western approaches can bring something to our school. Previously, our textbooks were written by mathematicians, physicists, biologists, now teachers and psychologists are engaged in this. These people are not experts in the subject they are teaching. This is where education ends.

- For the growing illiteracy, in many respects we must thank the so-called phonetic training programs, which we switched to in 1985 - thanks to APN member correspondent Daniil Elkonin. In Russian, we hear one thing, but we must write another according to the language rules. And in the method of Elkonin, an auditory dominant is formed. Pronunciation is primary and letters are secondary. Children who are taught according to this method, and now everyone is taught this way, have a so-called sound recording of the word and they write "yozhyk", "agur'ets" there. And this sound recording goes through the seventh grade. As a result, the percentage of allegedly dysgraphics and dyslexics has grown. They started talking about the degeneration of the nation. But in fact, these are just the fruits of a teaching method based on the priority of phonemic analysis.

Read also the series of articles "organized crime groups in philology"

Elkonin's primer was created in 1961, but was not introduced, because there was no desire to do so. It was believed that he might be interesting as a new approach, but at school it would be difficult with him. Nevertheless, Elkonin and his associates persistently continued their attempts to introduce their method, and when in the seventies children who could read without exception went to schools, it was believed that the primer works well, giving children a more voluminous vision and hearing of the language.

Elkonin was a very active person, a prominent scientist, he and his students "pushed through" the introduction of the ABC book, the training in which began in 1983-1985. But it was then that the economic situation in the country began to change: in the nineties, children who were not taught to read by their parents went to school, because they no longer had enough time and money, and the defect of the new system became absolutely obvious.

The phonetic system did not teach reading, did not teach literacy, on the contrary, it gave rise to problems. But how are we? Not a bad primer, but bad children, do not fit the primer. As a result, they began to teach phonetic analysis from kindergarten. After all, what are children taught? That "mouse" and "bear" begin differently and designate them differently in the phonetic system. And "tooth" and "soup" in this system end in the same way. And then the poor children begin to write letters, and it turns out that their previous knowledge is not combined with the new one. Why, one wonders, did they have to memorize and practice all this? They then write "fluoric", "va kno" instead of "out the window."

- Elkonin had a theory that reading is the sounding of graphic symbols, so he tried to implement it with all his might. But in fact, reading is about understanding graphic symbols, and scoring is about music. In general, he has many theoretically dubious statements, and all of this is quoted with reverence. On this, people make dissertations and then, of course, hold on to these approaches. We have no other teaching, only this teaching principle. And when I try to argue with this, they tell me that you are an academic psychologist, not a teacher, and you don’t understand that you cannot teach reading without phonetic analysis and phonemic hearing. And I, by the way, worked for four years at a school for the deaf and dumb and they perfectly learned to write literate by the same method that they taught us - visual-logical. And they, as you understand, have neither phonemic hearing, nor any other.

- We now have a polymental country in which there are many value systems in parallel. And pro-Western, and Soviet, and ethnically-oriented systems, and crime-oriented. The child, naturally, unconsciously adopts value attitudes from parents and environment. The school did not participate in this in any way until the two thousandth. The tasks of upbringing have gone away from the modern school for some time, now they are trying to return them.

They are trying to introduce cultural and educational cycles, for example, for the formation of tolerance. Only these cycles do not form any tolerance. Children can write an essay or prepare a story on this topic, but by no means become more tolerant in their everyday life.

It must be said that it is precisely in children with more developed conceptual thinking that a calm perception of a different everyday behavior, a different culture is more pronounced. Because they have higher predictive abilities and "others" are not so incomprehensible to them, so they do not cause such feelings of anxiety or aggression.

“I don’t see that. Although, of course, I don’t work in absolutely dysfunctional schools now, I don’t know what is going on there. And before we fought in schools and sort things out, only there was less talk about it. In general, the higher the cultural level of the parents and the school (gymnasium, lyceum), the less fists, fights and swearing. In decent schools, the level of aggression is low, there are not even so many harsh words.

- ADHD is not a diagnosis. Earlier it was called MMD - minimal cerebral dysfunction, even earlier PEP - postpartum encephalopathy. These are behavioral features that are manifested in a wide variety of pathologies.

In 2006, we formally adopted the American perspective on this problem and their treatment logic. And they believe that this is a 75-85 %% genetically determined complication that leads to behavioral disorder. They prescribe medications, psychostimulants, which should compensate for these disorders.

We have banned psychostimulants, but the drug Strattera (atomoxetine) is prescribed, which is not considered to be a psychostimulant. In fact, the result of its use is very similar to the result of using psychostimulants. Children come to me after a course of "Stratters" and they have all the symptoms of "withdrawal".

There was a wonderful American physiotherapist Glenn Doman, who did a lot for the development of children with lesions of the nervous system. He took children who did not develop at all until the age of three to five - not only did not speak, but also did not move (they only lay, ate and singled out), and developed them to a level that allowed them to successfully graduate from schools and universities. Unfortunately, he died a year ago, but the Institute for Maximum Human Development, created by him, is working. So, Doman actively opposed the syndromic approach in medicine and said that one should look for the cause of the disorders, and not try to reduce the severity of symptoms. And in our approach to ADHD, it is the syndromic approach that has become entrenched. Attention Deficit? And we will compensate for it with medicine.

Based on the research of neurologists, doctors of medical sciences Boris Romanovich Yaremenko and Yaroslav Nikolaevich Bobko, it is concluded that the main problem of the so-called ADHD is in disorders of the spine - dislocations, instability, and malformation. In children, the vertebral artery is pinched and the so-called stealing effect occurs, when as a result, blood flow decreases not only through the vertebral artery, but also in the carotid arteries supplying the frontal lobes. The child's brain constantly receives less oxygen and nutrients.

This leads to a short cycle of performance - three to five minutes, after which the brain turns off and only after a while turns back on. The child is not aware of what happens when disconnected, fights and various antics are associated with this, which he does not remember, because they develop at moments of shutdown of brain activity. The brain shutdown effect is normal, we all experience this when listening to a boring lecture or reading something difficult and suddenly we find ourselves blacking out. The only question is how often and for what periods of time these outages occur. We pass out for seconds, and the child with ADHD for three to five minutes.

To help children with ADHD, it is necessary to correct the spine, often the first cervical vertebra, and very few people take it. Usually neurologists do not see this problem and do not work with it, but there are doctors, and we work with them, who know how to do this. And here it is important not only to straighten the spine, but also to strengthen the new correct position so that the habitual displacement does not occur, so you need to do exercises with the child for three to four months. Ideally, of course, when the child is home schooled for these three or four months and it is possible to control not only that he is doing exercises, but also that he does not fight and does not perform any somersaults. But, if this is not possible, then at least we give an exemption from physical education for these months.

After the blood flow is restored, the periods of the brain's working capacity increase to 40-60-120 minutes, and the periods of shutdown become seconds. However, behavior in itself does not immediately become good, aggressive patterns of behavior have managed to gain a foothold, it is necessary to work with them, but now the child already has a resource for conscious control and inhibition. He can handle it already.

The trouble is that the pharmaceutical industry is much more cynical than our state. Pharmaceutical companies are interested in producing drugs that do not cure once and for all, but maintain an acceptable state. This provides them with a huge permanent sales market. These companies naturally sponsor such research that goes in their favor.

On the other hand, even if the problem with the spine and improved blood supply to the brain could not be solved, you can always follow the path of developing thinking. Higher functions, as proven by the world-renowned psychologist Lev Vygotsky, can be compensated by lower ones. And I have seen many examples when, through the development of thinking, compensation for problems with attention and a short cycle of performance was achieved. So you should never give up.