Wrecking, because of which the modern school does not literate does not teach to think

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

Did you know that now in Finland and the USA they are starting to use the ancient methods of the Soviet Union? Why did they need them? And what teaching methods do our schools use? Let's figure it out together.

Conceptual thinking. Why 80% of adults don't have it

The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky began to deal with the problem of conceptual thinking. He identified three main points in the concept itself: the ability to highlight the essence of an object or phenomenon, the ability to see the cause and predict the consequences, the ability to systematize information and build a whole picture.

Let's solve a problem for children six to seven years old, although adults do not always cope with it. So tit, dove, bird, sparrow, duck. What's superfluous?

Of course a duck! Or is it not? Why duck? Because she's the biggest? And besides, waterfowl? In fact, of course, a bird is superfluous in this series, because it is a generalizing feature, but in order to understand this, you need to have conceptual thinking. Like the video if you decided the test correctly, and then we will see by numbers what percentage of viewers have conceptual thinking. According to experts, today only 20% of people have full-fledged conceptual thinking. First of all, these are those people who have studied technical or natural sciences, who have learned to highlight essential features, divide and combine into categories, and establish cause-and-effect relationships.

Conceptual thinking makes it possible to adequately assess the situation and draw logically correct conclusions. But those who have not formed it are also able to do this. Then what's the difference? The fact that for the latter their idea of the situation is their own illusion and has nothing to do with reality. Their picture of the world collapses when faced with reality, plans do not come true, dreams and predictions do not come true. And they consider the people around them or the circumstances to be guilty of this. Conceptual thinking is not formed by itself in everyday life. It is possible to develop it only through the study of sciences, since they themselves are built on a conceptual principle. Scientific concepts are based on the basic concepts on which the pyramid of scientific knowledge is built. If these principles were not laid down in school for a child, then he or she enters adulthood without conceptual thinking. This, in turn, leads to the fact that objectivity in his actions will be absent, and he will be guided only by emotions and subjective perception.

How does school influence the formation of conceptual thinking?

Previously, the basics of conceptual thinking began for kids with the subject "Natural Science". This item has now been replaced by The World Around. Anyone who has ever seen this textbook understands that this is some kind of meaningless okroshka, a collection of disparate facts. In this mess, logic seems to be seen only by its compilers, who, apparently, themselves cannot boast of having conceptual thinking.

The next subjects, which were called upon to develop the conceptual apparatus of a child from the fifth grade, were "Botany" and "History". Now these objects are also replaced by stories in pictures without any logic: scattered stories about nature or individual stories about primitive people or knightly times.

Further in the sixth grade appeared "Zoology", in the seventh "Anatomy", in the eighth "General biology". On the whole, a logical picture emerged: flora, animals, people and general laws of development. Now all this is mixed. All information is presented according to the principle of a kaleidoscope, where one picture is replaced by another. The developers call this the system-activity approach.

The picture is the same with other objects. For example, in physics and chemistry lessons, now they do not solve problems, but make presentations. That is, they retell texts in pictures. No tasks - no opportunity to develop conceptual thinking.

There is a rather cynical point of view on what is happening in the education system. We are a raw material country of the third world. We do not need a large number of educated people who can think and draw conclusions. How close this point of view is to reality, we will discuss after watching in the comments under the video, but for now let's move on to the second global error of the education system, and it is associated with total illiteracy, which has become the norm among modern schoolchildren. So,

Total illiteracy is a mistake of the System, not of children

The problem of illiteracy of the majority of school graduates began to be actively discussed a couple of decades ago. Now everyone is just accustomed to the fact that the school cannot teach children to write without mistakes. The school sees the problem in children who have become different, in parents who cannot allocate the time and energy to help the child learn. However, in the middle of the 20th century, in the post-war period, when parents who were busy rebuilding the country did not have to wait for help in their studies, children still knew how to write correctly. Nobody ever heard of speech therapists and tutors. Why, now, when parents have the opportunity to resort to the help of certified Russian language tutors, children still write with mistakes?

What happened half a century later?

The answer to this question is simple: the method of teaching the language has just changed.

Unlike, for example, Serbian or Belarusian languages, where there is no difference between how words are pronounced and how words are spelled, in Russian it is impossible to write “as you hear” by ear, because in our language there is a difference between a word written and a word pronounced …

(Belarusian language)

(Serbian language)

This is the difficulty of teaching literate writing. And this very difficulty, somewhere around the mid-eighties, was successfully overcome by the methodology of teaching the native language, which was based on the visual-logical way of presenting information. Its essence was as follows: first, children were introduced to letters, then they were taught to compose and read words from samples. After mastering reading, the rules of the Russian language were studied. And children did not begin to write dictations, to perceive words by ear, not earlier than by the end of their studies in the third grade.

What did the visual teaching method give? The most important thing is the habit of writing competently and understanding the logic of the language itself. Even if the students did not remember the exact rules of the Russian language, they still wrote without mistakes, using visual memory.

In the second half of the eighties, the principle of teaching the Russian language changed dramatically. Now it is based on sound analysis of speech. Children first study the phonetic composition of words, and only then they are introduced to the letters and show how to translate sounds into letters.

What do you think happens in the child's head?

The sound image of the word, the way it is pronounced, becomes the main, "primary" for children, and the letters that students then begin to use to write words, the way the word is spelled is secondary.

That is, children are actually taught to write the way they hear, which is contrary to the principles of spelling words in Russian.

In addition, primary school textbooks on the Russian language contain a lot of exercises for sound recording of a word using letters.

Such exercises, when the writing depicts how a word is pronounced, only reinforces the skill of illiterate writing. Pupils get used to writing "biroza", "sasna" instead of "birch", "pine", and in the future they are not at all embarrassed by the sight of what they are portraying.

Children skip letters when they encounter unpronounceable consonants in a word, i.e.they write the way they pronounce, for example, "ladder", "sun" (instead of "ladder", "sun"). Their prepositions usually merge with words, because this is how they say, for example, "vakno" (instead of "out the window"), "fki no" (instead of "in the cinema"). They also write voiceless and voiced consonants as they hear, namely: "flak" and "flags", "dup" and "on the oak". Since there are no sounds I, Yo, E, Yu, the children write "yozhik", "yashik", "zeloniy", "yula", etc.

Today, all these features of illiterate writing are considered to be speech therapy errors, and a child who makes them is sent to a speech therapist for correctional classes. But until the end of the eighties, no one had heard of speech therapists. They did not work in schools, and even without them they successfully mastered literacy. The situation changed after the primary school switched to a new Russian language program. A program that teaches children to write as they hear.

At the same time, the would-be Methodists began to correctly translate the arrows - according to them, the reason for total illiteracy is insufficient phonemic hearing in children. But in order to learn to write correctly, children do not need to have phonemic hearing, and indeed hearing in general. Proof of this: deaf-mute children who are still taught by the visual method and achieve high positive results with its help: the majority of deaf-mute children write correctly.

The methodology of teaching the Russian language based on sound analysis of speech is the main, but far from the only reason for the general illiteracy of schoolchildren today.

The second reason is inadequate reading skills. There are 4 criteria for evaluating reading technique: speed, expressiveness, flawlessness and comprehension of the text. It is generally accepted that if a child reads quickly, then he understands what he read. But this is far from the case. The fact is that scoring and comprehending a text are two different brain operations. Since the main thing when checking the reading technique is speed and expressiveness, the reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. As a result, most children read quite fluently, but do not understand what they have read.

Such a system for assessing reading technique has led to the fact that today about 70% of school graduates do not have a full-fledged reading skill. They cannot read serious literature, because they simply do not understand what it is about.

So, for several decades, modern educational methods have not been able to cope with the task of teaching children to write literate, full-fledged reading, and thinking in general. Are there answers to the age-old questions "Who is to blame" and "What to do"?

Parents are trying to find some recipes themselves, for example, by teaching their child how to calligraphy on their own, watch our video on this topic. Someone is looking for alternative education systems, and finds them, but these exceptions only confirm the rule. In fact, there are much more global mistakes in the modern education system than we have shown, and in the near future we will make a video on this topic, so we recommend setting up notifications. And do not forget to leave a comment, they help us find the latest information. See you later.