Article author Gulnaz Baiturova, psychologist, training leader
The modern psychological literature is replete with articles extolling the values of free parenting. You read this literature and are afraid to offend the child, so as not to accidentally plant the seed of uncertainty in the growing child. You shout and reproach yourself that you are a bad parent. God forbid you spank a child, and you begin to understand that you are violating the rights of the child, and sometimes you feel like an inhumane, not the right mother. But on the other hand, recalling your childhood and the stories of parents and grandmothers about their childhood, you understand that for centuries parents spanked their children, scolded and called names, and it’s hard to say that for thousands of years people were unhappy because of inhumane upbringing by parents.
An additional handful of doubt about the correctness of my understanding of «free» education was thrown by a program about healthy eating. According to the experiment conducted in the film, some of the girls ate a cleansing exceptionally healthy diet for two weeks, while the other part of the girls ate what they liked. The results of analyzes and observations of the condition of girls from both groups showed the same results.
In order to understand the concept of “free education”, I had to re-read a bunch of literature, including books by the founders of the idea of “free education”: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Sergei Iosifovich Gessen, and other authors, and it turned out that we, modern readers, often misunderstood the idea of »free parenting.»
Turns out I had misunderstood free parenting before. Specifically striving for the free upbringing of children, not fully understanding the true meaning of the concept of free upbringing, I messed up a bunch of firewood.
These are:
I thought that free upbringing is the need to feel sorry for the child, especially his psyche, I was afraid once again to develop in the child complexes of uncertainty, lack of attention. How often do I catch myself not being able to bear the fact that the child sits for hours with incompletely dressed pantyhose on the floor and chats, is distracted, I take him and dress him to the end, feed him quickly from a spoon if he sits and picks for a long time in the soup and says, that she wanted porridge, but she does not eat it. Rousseau writes that it is better for a child to fall ill and sleep under a window that he has broken than to grow up to be a fool. Mistake. I am aware when I am in a hurry to do for the child, what he / she is capable of, I think first of all about myself, about my desire not to hear capricious exclamations, whining, to see the child half-dressed on the cold floor, the desire not to be late. If you think about tomorrow, I understand how many reproaches I myself can express to a child if he does not learn how to properly care for himself. I am already dressing and cleaning up her toys after her — with all my appearance and comments, I involuntarily give her not the most flattering idea about her. I understand that in order to develop a sense of confidence in a child, you need to work, strain your nerves, insist on independence, even if you really want to and it’s easier to do it yourself. It is when she becomes independent that she will feel confident in certain skills, this is how her principles (cleanliness, discipline, exercise, shower) will be built, on them a future personality capable of being strong, and therefore free.
Sometimes I allowed the child to command, I thought that the child would be able to develop leadership qualities in this way. After reading about how Rousseau relates to allowing children to command adults, I realized that she was engaged in deliberate permissive education. Rousseau writes that one should not put oneself in the most dangerous dependence — in the dependence of the educator on the pupil. “The caprice of children is not the work of nature; this is a matter of bad education; it means that they obeyed or commanded; and I repeated a hundred times that neither one nor the other is needed. Then, after reading Hessen, I realized that leadership qualities are developed through the development of independence, when a child learns to think and act independently, in other words, when he learns to live from childhood in the author’s position. It is much more important for a child to feel protected in what is authority and a guide. Feeling a strong parent who consistently insists on a certain routine, sets the direction, the child sees more clearly what is good and what is bad, it is easier for him to playfully learn life, to value his personality. It’s like any woman, no matter how independent and successful she is, intuitively looking for an even stronger man in spirit, any child initially strives to see, and sometimes experiences, in order to ascertain the parent of a strong, omniscient sage, wizard, role model. When we allow ropes to be twisted out of ourselves, demonic contentment appears in the eyes of the child, which causes in the child a feeling of anxiety and a desire to continue testing parents until he finds in them that very strong and authoritative parent with whom the world is clear and with whom there is a certain order and security. Now, I understand that a commanding child can hardly grow into a leader; rather, he will grow up into a person unsuitable for social life and morality with a low level of culture and communication difficulties. Such a person will probably continue to look for landmarks, the meaning of life in adult life, while not accustomed to paying tribute to parents, the most holy people in his life, and having no authority other than his own whims like laziness, anger, gluttony, etc.
Instead of brief instructions (which I perceived as degrading orders), I tried to scientifically explain why something is impossible, but something is possible, so that she could navigate herself and decide what is right and what is not. She firmly believed that the child would understand everything if it was explained to him correctly. She told stories about bacteria to wash her hands, she explained about white blood cells to drink medicine. In general, she grows up erudite, but I understand that I sometimes moralize where it is easier to simply establish a rule. Rousseau, a proponent of free education, appeared to write on this subject: “Nature wants children to be children before they can be adults. If we want to break this order, we will produce early-ripening fruits that will not have either maturity or taste and will not slow down to spoil: we will get young scientists and old children. Gessen believes that a preschooler is characterized by anomie or lack of awareness of norms and patterns. Preschoolers are much more likely to take the world for granted than to build logical chains and draw conclusions. It turns out there is no need to get ahead of the development of the human mind and in advance to present the world too much to the child in scientific terminology.
I agree with Rousseau that the child must be protected from the negative influence of society, whether it be relatives, the court, an overly religious television channel, as all these are the seeds for which we are responsible if we want to consciously raise our child. That being said, I would like to add. I think the child still needs to some extent to come into contact with the real world, with the negative that he carries, with the competent presence and unobtrusive assessment of the parents of the manifestations of this world. For example, I will not say that a neighbor’s child who uses obscene words is bad, just because he was not taught to hide his child, I will say that he does not act well, and usually such people make such and such an impression and such and such attitude, and let her think it over whether it is worth repeating such an example. An excessive desire to isolate the child from the hardships of real life causes a desire to break free away from the parental home and spoils relations with parents.
The question of upbringing according to a certain pedagogical ideal — it seems to me that interferes with the freedom of the child. As a classical religious school, it initially limits the child’s ability to challenge and seek the truth, as it imposes a narrowly defined understanding of the world, and any upbringing for a certain ideal of an educator is debatable for me. On the one hand, parents are guidelines, but they should not become pointers. I think the child should have the opportunity to develop as comprehensively as possible. The child does not need to be presented with a ready-made pattern of behavior, it is better to acquaint him with various values, broaden his horizons, teach him to set goals and achieve, discipline and the ability to be the author of his life. At the same time, if we consider this issue more broadly, the development of the author’s position is in itself also a certain pedagogical ideal.
In the book “Emile, On Education” by Rousseau, one feels artificiality, which is possibly associated with a lack of practical experience in education. It is not at all necessary, in my opinion, that in certain situations, that the child will react exactly as Rousseau imagines it. For example, in a situation where a child finds adults in the process of a quarrel, they write: “He sees a burning face, sparkling eyes, threatening gestures, hears screams — all these are signs that the body is not in its usual state. Tell him calmly, without pressure, without mystery: «This poor man is sick, he has a fit of fever.» It is hard to imagine that a child who knows how to speak and ask questions well does not encounter scenes of conflict and believe Rousseau’s words that this person is sick. I also think it’s wrong to put the blame for your anger on a child. “And if you yourself, in a moment of temper, happen to lose the composure and restraint with which you should conduct your studies, do not try to hide your mistake from him, but tell him frankly, with a gentle reproach: “My friend, you hurt me” . I concluded for myself that Rousseau should not be taken literally, but rather as a writer, a composer — his main ideas and ideals — make his contemporaries and even our generation think and rethink our traditional methods of education.
Rousseau and Tolstoy narrowly understood «free understanding». Rousseau and Tolstoy denied traditional education and wanted to raise a person not spoiled by civilization and trying to preserve the element of “freedom” in the child. They doomed the child to a certain extent to social inadequacy, the inability to adapt to the realities of life, and most importantly, the child does not become free, he reflects the habits, models of people who surround him and educate him. Tolstoy’s students, condemning the boy who stole, were not free from the patterns and behavior patterns of the same janitor and Leo Tolstoy. Free education could not be understood as an opportunity to achieve the end result, it is not an end in itself, but a constant process that can reach a certain development and end at the moment of death.
I agree with Gessen that free education in the understanding of Rousseau and Tolstoy is arbitrary actions, that is, unpredictable actions, and therefore not free, but dependent on external circumstances, while free education is the development in the child to be above circumstances. Gessen writes: “If voluntary actions are characterized by instability, passive dependence on the external world and, to that extent, by chance and unforeseenness, then free actions in the true sense of the word are distinguished, on the contrary, by stability, originality in relation to the changing influences of the environment, and even partly by the possibility of foresight.” It is possible to make a child above circumstances not by giving the child a broken, depending on the circumstances, irresponsible direction of life, but by consciously directing a stable line of behavior in which a person develops values and skills to be free, that is, to be able to solve the difficult task that has confronted him his own, individually. I agree with Gessen that coercion and discipline are not something to be avoided, but something to be properly applied in order to educate a strong and free personality who will be the author of his life — «the path of systematic and consistent strengthening of the centripetal force of the personality, the gradual the growth of her inner freedom. Hessen calls such education moral education, which boils down to the development of freedom in a person and ends with the formation of a personality in a person, or, which is the same, the development of his individuality.
I am in favor of raising a person strong and confident, able to make free decisions. Now I understand that this can be achieved not by simply giving the child freedom of action, try and find the truth someday, which is actually an irresponsible approach, but by establishing order, rules, discipline, coercion (somewhere natural, somewhere necessary to ensure the consistent implementation of established rules) that will help the child develop their values, learn to be independent, and therefore learn to make their own decisions (and not just react to the circumstances created by life).
In accordance with this worldview, I define for myself the core qualities that a child should possess: independence, purposefulness, author’s position, the ability to manage one’s emotions, kindness and love, knowledge, ethics. Perhaps this list will change. In accordance with these desirable qualities, I consciously do nothing for the child (except when I am completely late or the child is sick), I positively reinforce the manifestations of the author’s position, encourage concern for people, animals, buy appropriate literature and children’s films.
I am for free education in the sense that it is important not that there is no coercion, but that the pupil does not notice coercion, does not feel it. I am in favor of not totally, but sometimes a child learns from his own experience. In this sense, I am very much in favor of Tolstoy’s approach to teaching. I will put this into practice as much as possible.
I think the following principles of education of Jean Jacques Rousseau, I would take note of:
- Do not fight the bad, and do not provoke the development of the bad.
- Don’t force, but make you want.
- Make sure that not you teach, but the circumstances
- Make your compulsion hidden.
- When forcing, make it seem to the child that this is his own choice.
I think it is not always possible to ideally follow these principles. However, by fulfilling them as far as possible, I will help the child to desire to work on himself due to the vital necessity. After all, in fact, one gets the impression that teachers and parents need neat homework and a tidy room, while in fact these skills are needed for a child to grow up to be a successful and happy person. However, our tone and tendency to moralize give the child the wrong impression. We will develop self-control in ourselves in case of minor bruises, not to run to save a child who has not seriously fallen, and let us sometimes go to class unprepared and receive an appropriate mark. At the same time, I’m probably not ready yet to let them catch a cold, given how they carry diseases.
I also like Rousseau’s position that a child should be taught first of all by his own example: “Mentors! Stop pretending, be virtuous and kind; let your examples be imprinted in the memory of your pupils, waiting until they penetrate into the hearts.
Consistency — despite persuasion and stubbornness. Permissiveness is not the freedom of education. Discipline, clear rules, values, guidelines create the prerequisites for educating a person who will have the initial potential to become a person.
Leo Tolstoy’s approach to teaching
I really like the idea of the school created by Leo Tolstoy. I understand that there were excesses that allowed the child to leave classes at any time, but I think that in fact this created the unusual atmosphere of this school, where each child understood that studying was because it was interesting, he was in school for 7 lessons, because that he himself decides and understands that this is necessary for himself. At the same time, I believe that such a school should be as an additional education system, and not as a main one. The main school should be classically strict, children should walk in uniform, not use makeup and get up at the entrance of the teacher. And an additional school is where knowledge is given in practice, where children study with pleasure, try and learn about the world. And to be honest, I dream of creating such a school.
Principles of Responsible Education Nikolai Ivanovich Kozlov
The child does not grow up alone, but hand in hand with the teacher. Coercion is a natural part of life, it should not be feared, just as it should not be put in the first place. It is a natural element of upbringing along with encouragement, support, enlightenment, training and instilling habits. The usual conclusion: the bar for the child needs to be kept high
If we, loving parents, do not take care of the child, then random passers-by will be involved in filling his soul, ideals, values, which can become risky. I made a special conclusion to myself, do not be afraid to force the child. And to my surprise, it works. If I don’t worry, I don’t doubt, but in a firm voice, I define the rules, they look into my eyes, sometimes they continue their own to check, and after a while they do what they are asked — and in the eyes of gratitude, respect and understanding.