“In the depths of the garden, a clumsy two-story shed stuck out, and a small red flag fluttered over the roof of this shed. The moss-covered roof of the barn was full of holes, and from these holes some thin rope wires stretched over the top and disappeared into the foliage of the trees.
So, at first from afar and from the outside, the reader of the famous book by Arkady Gaidar «Timur and his team» begins to get acquainted with the barn where the «headquarters» of the company of local children was located, led by the thirteen-year-old boy Timur. Soon, together with the main character, the girl Zhenya, the reader gets the opportunity to inspect this place from the inside. Zhenya discovers that you can climb up to the second floor of the shed using a long ladder hidden near the shed in the thickets of nettles.
“This attic was inhabited. On the wall hung coils of rope, a lantern, two crossed signal flags, and a map of the village, all streaked with some incomprehensible signs. In the corner lay a heap of straw covered with burlap. There was also an overturned plywood box. Near the holey, moss-covered roof stuck out a large helm-like wheel. A makeshift telephone hung above the wheel.
There were no owners in the attic. And the attic itself seemed to the girl such a seductively interesting place that she, quickly getting used to it, gave free rein to her imagination.
“And then Zhenya decided: let the pigeons be seagulls, this old barn with its ropes, lanterns and flags is a big ship. She will be the captain herself.
Zhenya’s calm game did not last long. She did not even imagine that, turning the steering wheel, she accidentally transmitted a signal of general assembly to all members of Timur’s team via rope wires: bronze bells tied to the ends of the wires rang in the house of each of them.
The boys arrived a few minutes later. It was then that Zhenya finally realized that she was in the «headquarters» of the boyish gang. So she met Timur, the eldest boy, who was the leader of this company. As it turned out later, the members of Timur’s team were united not only by friendship, but also by a common cause: it turned out that the guys secretly helped the residents of the village who needed support.
Judging by the works of A. Gaidar, he knew the children’s tradition very well, understood the psychology of the child, and, moreover, apparently yearned for his own childhood. It was abruptly interrupted by the Civil War, and therefore remained unfinished and, probably, the brightest period in the life of the writer — a constant source of themes and images of his work.
Gaidar managed to capture and very accurately embody in his books about Timur’s team children’s dreams of an ideal yard company of peers and its active, but hidden life in the space of the adult world, where this company has its own secret place, a secret shelter, which among children often bears the name «headquarters».
In this chapter, we will get acquainted with different types of «headquarters» for children of different ages, but we will start talking about them with an analysis of the construction of the barn attic, which the heroes of Gaidar’s story arranged for themselves. It is of interest to us now as an ideal model of a children’s «headquarters».
We discover that this is a neglected place, overgrown with nettles, in the depths of the garden of that dacha, which stood uninhabited until Zhenya and her older sister arrived there in the middle of summer. There is an abandoned barn with a holey mossy roof. In general, we can say that this is the periphery of the world of adults, a “junk” place that adults do not claim and do not appear there. For children, on the contrary, it becomes that ecological niche where they equip their nest.
It should be noted here that not only literary characters of the 40s, but also real modern children usually build their «headquarters», «shelters», «huts» in similar places in the backyards of the adult world: behind garages, transformer boxes, sheds, in a dead end or a corner of the yard, in bushes, on a branchy tree, etc. That is, children try to separate themselves from the world of adults as spatially as possible and organize a special place for themselves outside the zone of their interests and influence.
The next feature of Timur’s «headquarters» is that it is not easy to get into it — you need to know how to do it. In appearance, the barn is uninhabited, there is no entrance below, surrounded by nettles, where a long old ladder is hidden, which rises with a rope. These details reinforce the impression that this shed already belongs to another, reserved, secret world, the border of which cannot be crossed by the uninitiated, belonging to the ordinary world. An important detail is the fact that Timur’s «headquarters» is located upstairs, in the attic of the shed, i.e. lifted above the ordinary world. We will discuss the psychological significance of this fact later, but for now we will only note that modern urban children often build their «headquarters» on trees near roads or in green courtyards between houses. Typical examples of such buildings can be seen in photographs taken in two regions of Russia that are completely different and remote from each other: in different districts of St. Petersburg and in Vladikavkaz.
Being the personification of the secret world of children, Timur’s «headquarters» is not only in a special position in relation to the outside world, but is also equipped with its own system of secret communications.
Firstly, these are rope wires that stretch from the roof of the barn to the houses of all members of Timur’s team: each turn of the steering wheel in the attic is a signal that is transmitted through the wires. The guys have a set of combinations of these signals to encode different messages.
Secondly, this is a makeshift phone that connects the «headquarters» with Timur’s dacha. At first, the girl Zhenya thought that he was a toy, but then it turned out that he was calling for real and you could talk on him.
Thirdly, these are two signal flags, with the help of which the signalman can transmit messages from the roof of the barn to all members of the team who are outside the house.
Fourthly, this is a conventional sign — a red star. It is embroidered on Timur’s blue tank top. She marked the houses of all the wards of Timur’s team. Children draw it instead of a signature, exchanging messages.
The description of the secret communication system of the Timur team was made by Gaidar psychologically accurate — in this he literally embodied the children’s collective dream of secret languages and secret ways of communication.
Any adult who communicates more or less closely with preteen children can notice their predilection for codes, ciphers, secret signs and signals, secret languages as means of communication. Interest in such things usually appears in children after the age of seven and blossoms, sometimes becoming a real passion, between eight and eleven years. At this time, children love to read stories about all sorts of encrypted messages — and they themselves exchange similar ones. They copy from their friends the “ABC of the Dancing Men”, the idea of which is drawn from the story of A. Conan Doyle. Classmates teach each other the elements of the alphabet of the deaf and dumb and proudly demonstrate how to communicate without words. They try to memorize the Morse code and listen with keen attention to the story of the guide in the museum about how the prisoners of the old prison were tapping. They invent their own ciphers and even use secret languages that can be truly spoken. Secret languages have long existed in children’s tradition — they are passed down from generation to generation of children as a legacy of children’s subculture.
The first and, apparently, until now the only researcher of these languages was a well-known connoisseur and keen observer of the children’s world, the Siberian professor-folklorist G. S. Vinogradov, whose scientific activity was interrupted by the Soviet authorities in the early 30s. In 1926, he published an article entitled «Children’s secret languages», where he first described their different types. The basis of all the secret languages of Russian children is their native language, Russian. It turns into a «secret», i.e. incomprehensible to uninitiated people, as a result of rather cunning transformations of natural language words, various types of which were studied by G. S. Vinogradov. For example, both in the 1910s and 20s in Siberia, and now, in the late 90s of the XNUMXth century, in St. Petersburg, there is a secret language among children, speaking in which one and the same syllable must be added to each syllable of each spoken word. , for example «pi». If you want to say: «Mom went to the store», then in this secret language the phrase will sound like this: «Pima-pima pipopishla beer pimapigapizin.»
Through hard training and sufficient language practice, one can become skilled enough to pronounce and understand simple phrases quickly enough. At the same time, others will have the complete impression that you are speaking an absolutely incomprehensible exotic language. Naturally, using the language in «pi» is quite difficult, although it is still one of the simplest secret languages. It is clear that you will not talk on it for a long time. But this is not so significant. For children, the very idea that you can learn to speak a language known to you, but incomprehensible to others, and that these “others” can discover the secret of the language and thus join your world, or you can excommunicate them, leaving them in darkness, is extremely important for children. ignorance.
Of course, the desire to master secret languages, ciphers and codes arises in a child of preadolescent age is far from accidental — it marks the appearance in a young person of new needs and new opportunities to satisfy them.
If we talk about new opportunities, they are primarily associated with the progressive restructuring of the child’s intellect, which occurs at the age of about seven years. This is one of the natural micro-revolutions in the system of children’s logic, described by the famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The child’s thinking becomes capable of performing new types of logical operations. In the context of our topic, it is important to note that the ability to isolate individual elements as structural units of the whole is noticeably improving.
Even six-year-old children often fail to use the counting rhyme correctly when, standing in a circle, they try to “count” in order to fairly distribute the roles in the future game. They have a syllable on one person, a word on another, and a whole phrase on a third.
A seven-year-old schoolboy, on the contrary, tries to carefully ensure that each participant gets one word from the text of the rhyme — he can do this because he is already able to divide the continuity of the text into separate and homogeneous units — words. Schooling certainly trains these abilities. After all, it is very verbalized and, above all, it forces the child to actively work with different sign systems in the process of mastering reading, writing, numbers and mathematical signs, the ability to understand conditional images in pictures and use a large number of rules for switching from one system to another.
Naturally, the use of a cipher or the same secret language in «pi» makes even more complex demands on the child’s ability to divide a sentence into words, and words into syllables, and even encode — translate content from one sign system to another.
Therefore, for a younger student, the possession of codes, ciphers, and secret languages is evidence of his intellectual competence, proof that he has risen to a higher level of mental maturity compared to younger children.
By the way, gender differences can also be noted: boys are more fond of codes and ciphers, and girls prefer secret languages, which they use much more dexterously than boys, since the so-called “verbal fluency” among females is consistently higher. To put it simply, girls have a slightly better tongue, and they speak more briskly.
So, we see that children of primary school age already have the intellectual abilities necessary to use secret codes and secret sign systems. But we have not yet answered the question of where the very need for such communication comes from in children. Why do they need it?
The answer is rooted in what tasks of personal development the child of primary school — preadolescent age solves. Let us ask ourselves first: why does a person need a secret language at all? The first answer that comes to mind is simple: in order not to let your secrets out of the circle of initiates. For young children, the main carriers of secrets and secrets, as well as the owners of secret, i.e. incomprehensible, languages are adults. It is they who say to the child: «Step back, this is not for your ears»; «Come and play, this is an adult conversation.» It is adults who begin to speak in hints or switch to a foreign language so that the child does not understand them and does not learn their secrets. Being an adult means being opaque to other people, having the right to be closed and keep the secrets of your life inside, trusting them only to a few.
The child, on the contrary, is very open, his internal states are easily read by adults, since everything is usually written on his physiognomy and almost everything can be asked from him. Not without reason, among adults, a sign of a person’s infantility is his naive willingness to tell everything.
A personal secret is a content stored in the soul, invisible and inaccessible to another person, protected by the owner. There is no way for another person to directly get to it himself, unless the bearer of the secret is willing to share it. Therefore, the presence of a secret inside noticeably enhances the experience of one’s own boundaries, separateness and opposition of his «I» to everything that is «not-I», — to the surrounding world and other people.
The “I”, which has a secret, does not let those who are “not-I” into itself, does not give itself entirely to them, and they cannot fully cognize and control this “I” from the outside, despite their strength and influence.
The appearance of a personal secret becomes an important moment for the child, which allows him to feel his «I» as a limited receptacle of his inner life, isolated from the outside world, directly inaccessible to other people. This discovery marks the next stage in the maturation of the child’s personality.
The child directly takes his first steps in this direction in a childish way, for example, in the form of “treasuries”, “secrets” and “hiding places” already known to us (recall the boyish problem: I want to make a hiding place, although there is still nothing to put there!).
When a child is entrusted with someone else’s secret, he also feels that the possession of secret information makes him more powerful and significant. No wonder children often boast to each other that they know important secrets.
Uniting on the basis of a common secret is one of the important psychological tools that children use to unite their group, to strengthen the sense of «We». (Adults often use the same tool when they are trying to create a common foundation in their relationship with a child: “Let this be our shared secret!”)
The socialization of the «I» of an individual child goes in parallel with the children’s living of group identity through the development of the idea of »We», which occurs in the process of joint group activity. These are common activities: walks, games, exploration of the surrounding world, pranks, tests of courage, etc. It is especially important for children to feel the state of the “We” community in situations of danger and stress, when each other’s support is required. The feeling of children’s group identity, as well as the experience of a common belonging to the world of children, becomes especially acute and significant in collisions with the world of adults.
What new does the secret language bring in this regard? It is not only a means of keeping secrets, but also a means of communication with the elite — a group of peers. The secret language allows you to publicly communicate hidden information to insiders (“ours”), thereby uniting them even more, and at the same time keep it inaccessible to everyone else (adults, juniors). Thus, in the space of external interactions of people open to all, one can build
its own semiotic space, served by a special sign system — a secret language. It’s like creating your own corridor in the general air — a frequency range that is inaccessible to anyone’s transmitters and receivers, except for those that belong to «our company».
At first, a striking discovery for children is that in the publicly accessible communicative space of the outside world, one can “enclose” an ecological niche for oneself, into which a stranger cannot penetrate. And this can be done in front of everyone, defiantly, with the help of a secret sign system: a code, a cipher, a secret language. Therefore, the simplest form of the secret language of children is «abstruse speech», once described by G. S. Vinogradov: «… in a group of children, a conversation incomprehensible to others is improvised, teasing passion and causing envy of the uninitiated.» In fact, this is only an imitation of speech: children mumble «gibberish» words invented on the go, which do not make any sense. As G. S. Vinogradov rightly notes, “from living speech all that remains is that sounds and exaggeratedly expressive intonation.”
From a psychological point of view, such abstruse speech, not filled with meaning, is like the same cache, the contents of which have not yet been prepared, but the child has already been imbued with the idea that you can create your own closed secret spaces and fill them with secret content. Only the hiding place belongs to the child personally, and the secret language creates a semiotic space that is common to all who are identified with the «collective I» of the children’s group, and fences off those who do not belong to it. Thus, the children’s company becomes a secret society, communicatively impenetrable to outsiders.
Let’s now return to Timur’s «headquarters». We have already found several sign systems and secret means of communication there at once, with the help of which members of Timur’s team passed secret information to each other. It is no wonder that they are so well provided with means of communication — they are already big children: the eldest, Timur, is already thirteen years old, as is the girl Zhenya, who becomes his friend and member of the group.
Since Timur’s team is not closed to itself — its socially useful activity extends to the entire village — accordingly, the secret sign systems are used by children not only to communicate with each other, but cover the entire living space of the village, which is the field of activity of this children’s company. Let us recall again the gates of all the houses under the secret care of Timur’s team, marked with a secret sign — a red star, and a map of the village, dotted with strange signs, which hung in the attic of the barn.
Here it would be appropriate to draw the reader’s attention to how children in real life love to take the opportunity to hang some announcements on the streets or on the doors of houses: about a missing animal, about a children’s concert, congratulations on a national holiday to all residents of the microdistrict, etc. Children really like it when the space of the surrounding world is marked with unusual signs of their active presence. In the same vein, we can talk about children’s graffiti: drawings, inscriptions, badges that children make on the walls of houses, on fences, on asphalt, etc. — they are also a form of semiotic space exploration, which, however, fulfills several more psychological functions.
So, Timur’s «headquarters» is a secret gathering place for a children’s company, skillfully hidden inside the space of the world of adults, and at the same time the center of children’s semiotic space, where all the systems of their secret communications are concentrated.
If we talk about the functions of this «headquarters» in the life of the children’s group, then there are two of them.
Firstly, the “headquarters” is a form of self-affirmation of the existence of a children’s company: isolated from the external environment, isolated, hidden, not accessible to anyone else, a secret shelter, a special independent world, which is a symbolic epicenter of children’s life.
Secondly, it is an observation post that rises above the everyday life of busy adults. From here, children can quietly observe everything that is happening around, in the big world, being themselves unnoticed by anyone. (Outside, over the dormer window of Timur’s attic, a boy observer sat on a rope swing with theater binoculars on a cord around his neck and surveyed the surroundings from above.)
We will return to the discussion of these two functions of the «headquarters» when we study the structure of similar «headquarters» of modern Russian children. And now the time has come to complete the discussion of the attic of Timur and his team and answer the question that, perhaps, has long been ripe for an astute reader: is all this true, could such a children’s «headquarters» really exist, or is it just an invention of the writer A. Gaidar ?
Any sane person who knows the realities of Soviet life in the late 30s and early 40s will say: of course not! It couldn’t be. In an atmosphere of pathological suspicion, when spies appeared everywhere and people followed and informed on each other, a group of children who are engaged in incomprehensible affairs, arranging for themselves a secret meeting place, would be exposed in one moment. Both children and their parents would suffer severely. Equally impossible is the existence of such a “headquarters” from the point of view of the physical laws of the material world. Take, for example, rope wires. How can they be pulled so that they go to the houses of all the members of the group living in different parts of the village, and even so that the bronze bells at the ends of these wires in the children’s houses ring when the steering wheel is turned in the attic. (Here you can add — where did the ropes come from, if in those days a piece of a simple clothesline was a value for any housewife.) Or a home-made telephone that could be used to talk — how did the children manage to make it? After all, it was impossible to get any materials for this.
All this is so. Timur’s «headquarters» is indeed a myth, only not figuratively, but in the literal sense of the word. The idea of this «headquarters», as well as the details of its structure, embodies a collective childhood dream. It can never be fully materialized in the real world. This is the children’s ideal of a secret haven, which is only partially embodied in the collective buildings of real children.
Each of the «headquarters», which will be discussed further, is somewhat reminiscent of the «headquarters» of Timur. Gaidar succeeded in synthesizing all childhood dreams and technical fantasies on the theme of «headquarters» in an artistic image. In his work, Gaidar recreated the children’s collective myth. It does not correspond to the truth of everyday life, but extremely accurately reflects the psychological truth of a child’s life.
Let’s get acquainted with how the «headquarters» of modern children are arranged. The material for us will be descriptions made mainly by people of student age, whose childhood fell on the second half of the 80s of the XX century. For the most part, these are residents of cities and towns in the North-West region of Russia.
“But what kind of headquarters we had at the age of seven or eight. In the courtyard stood two huge elephant slides about three meters high. We broke out a plank in the elephant’s belly from below and equipped a headquarters inside. There we gathered, told scary stories, jokes, played cards and watched all the people through the cracks between the boards. It was interesting since no one could see us. We sat there for hours. A lot of people crowded there. Often we made fun of the kids who wanted to climb the hill, and all of a sudden different sounds came from it” (Irina).
“Our headquarters were bushes, or rather corridors in them, covered from above with branches and plastic wrap. The bushes were quite low. We had to bring in logs left over from sawn logs. They served as benches. The headquarters was both a hiding place and a place for the development of «military plans». The adults knew about it and constantly kicked us out of there, but the headquarters was recreated again” (Maria).
“Headquarters and shelters — it was some kind of mania. In winter they were made from snow. They were constantly building something up. There we gathered after school and discussed the plan to capture the enemy’s fortress (which in fact did not exist!).
“When I was seven years old, my neighbor and I built a shelter house. It was from some plants with long stems of two and a half meters. I still do not know what these plants were and how they got to us. With long ropes we intertwined tall stems with large leaves and tied them together. The result was a house in which almost no light made its way. It was cozy and warm there. This place was “ours”, and no one knew about it. We picked berries, held ‘dinner parties’ and ate everything ourselves.»
“At the age of 13, the headquarters was under the stairs in the entrance. It was made out of boxes, and everyone had their own room there, where there was a «library», «TV», «weapons» and «headquarters plan». It was the place where we kept our secrets, the place we cherished. The goal of the headquarters was the headquarters itself. Why we built it, we did not understand” (Aleksey).
“In the fourth grade (11 years old), my classmates and I organized a “Timurov team”. We found a hole in the woods next to the railroad line, quite wide and shallow. And they started building: they dragged sticks, plywood and built a roof. Then they bought a loaf and lemonade and sat there. It was great that our company has its own place.”
Then some of the guys brought their friends there. I felt that I, our idea, had been betrayed. I think that everyone felt that way, because after that we no longer went there, and our company broke up ”(Natasha).
“Many people wanted to participate in the construction of the headquarters, but it was started by the elect, those who had a higher status. The rest had to build their «options» in more inconvenient places. If a fairly strong group broke away, then a struggle could begin over who had the better headquarters. In our community, the headquarters was an alternative to the parents’ house. We tried to fill it with household items, even dishes, and loved not only to play there, but also to eat something there, and sometimes to sleep.”
“At the age of 9-11, due to the absence of children in the area where I lived, I built myself a shelter-headquarters alone” (Volodya).
“For the headquarters, we built huts. In winter — from discarded Christmas trees, in summer — from boxes, branches, sticks. The main thing is the presence of mystery. The members of the game had a password, there was a game script, roles were clearly assigned, and names were invented for everyone. As a rule, there were imaginary opponents. For example: we are Indians, they (passers-by) are pale-faced. The hut was our own world, opposing everything else” (Olya).
“We walked in the territory of a large courtyard, which, although not entirely interested in adults, was completely controlled by them. As a «headquarters» we used a spreading apple tree — each had its own branch or fork. The more difficult it was to get there, the more the place was valued and the higher was the status of its owner” (Anna).
So, children’s «headquarters» are different. For example, by location.
They can be sunk into the ground when children find or dig a cave, dugout, or hole.
They can be on the ground: a snow fortress, a hut, a building made of boards, plywood, sticks, branches, hay, cardboard, polyethylene, etc.
They also happen indoors: in the barn, in the basement, in the attic, under the stairs, etc.
Quite often they are located in trees, especially in a big city like St. Petersburg, where it is difficult for children to find natural shelter. These «headquarters» on trees often amaze the imagination of adults with their inaccessibility, impressive size and complexity of design. It turned out that these «headquarters» are the easiest to photograph. Therefore, the reader had the opportunity to see several such places.
The features of the structure of the «headquarters», the duration of its existence and its functions in the life of children primarily depend on the psychological tasks that the members of the children’s group solve for themselves. These tasks are partly determined by the age of the children, and partly by the degree of socio-psychological maturity of the children’s company itself. It turns out that the nature of the «headquarters» reflects the characteristics of that phase of development of the children’s group as a social organism, in which this group is located.
The first independent “headquarters”, which are also called “shelter”, “hut”, “house”, “cave” among children, are usually built by a couple of children about seven years old who are relatives or close friends. It can be both girls and boys. They are driven by a recent important discovery: it turns out that it is possible, on their own initiative, to fence off a hidden place in the space of the outside world that will belong only to them. (About a similar construction, but inside the house — we will talk later) The process itself is important in creating such a «headquarters». Children are very passionate about the matter: seriously and at the same time emotionally. They are fully involved in the construction and are ready to sacrifice many others for it. For them, the very idea of building a secret shelter is new and significant. Children build it as a big «secret» or «hiding place» in which they think they can fit themselves. But their construction, unfortunately, is often non-functional. Usually — because of the inability to correlate its dimensions with the bodily dimensions of the children themselves. For example, only one of the builders can squeeze into the shelter, and even then — hunched over. This is still the same, already known to us, problem of perception of the metric characteristics of spatial objects — the lack of understanding by children of the sizes of objects and their relationships (see Chapter 6), especially if the children themselves are included in the spatial situation.
“In the village, my brothers were digging headquarters. It was a hole covered with boards. The brothers did not fit together there. This pit was located behind the barn, away from the road, so that no one could see it” (Natasha).
At this early stage in the construction of «headquarters», children live the very idea of creating a common secret shelter in the space of the outside world. When the shelter is built, the children climb there to experience the sensations they need. Often this is where everything ends, because it is impossible to stay inside such a building for a long time and what to do next there is also unclear.
The next, second stage differs from the previous one in that the secret space of the shelter not only accommodates its builders (there may be several of them), but also invites them to equip it: the children begin to equip it and decorate it like a house. Sometimes they provide him with the bare minimum necessary to stay there, such as logs for sitting, and sometimes they start a whole household with «furniture», utensils and toys. In principle, Timur also had a household in the attic — in some ways ascetic (an armful of straw covered with burlap), and in some ways (telephone, steering wheel, lantern, signal flags, binoculars, etc.) rich in envy .
Sometimes an aesthetic element is introduced into the interior, corresponding to the spirit of the company of children-owners. For example, the boys, who set up their «headquarters» in the basement, brought there and installed a lot of strange glass ones «for mystery.» With great difficulty, they secretly mined them on the territory of the glass factory.
At this stage, the secret shelter is actively settled down. The emphasis shifts to the events within it. The group is consolidating in this space. Children tend to take actions there that unite the whole company: they eat together, tell each other news, anecdotes, scary stories, etc. That is, in their closed and secret circle, children constantly exchange and share resources — food, information, emotions that become common to the entire group.
At this stage, the refuge is experienced as «our space, where we live our common secret life.» It is perceived by children as a place of common gathering and the epicenter of children’s life — that is, it implements the first function of the ideal «headquarters» in our interpretation.
The third stage, on the one hand, smoothly continues the second, on the other hand, at this stage, the theme comes to the fore, which has existed latently from the very beginning of the construction of secret shelters by children. This is the theme of confronting the children’s secret world with the rest of the world around, in particular the world of adults.
At this stage, it is important for children that they feel they are in a special reserved space, but inscribed in the world around them. Children begin to take this world more and more into account and extend their play activity to it. Here the opposition «We» — «They» is actualized with a new emphasis on the second component of this pair.
In the outer space where «They» are located, children create imaginary opponents for themselves (we are Indians, they are pale-faced) and thereby unite their group even more in the face of an imaginary enemy. It is at this stage that it is legitimate to call the children’s secret shelter «headquarters.» Now this is a real headquarters — a place where joint plans are developed, operations and actions against common «enemies» are discussed.
“In the mid-1980s, when I was six, seven and eight years old, during those three years I was friends with a boy two years older than me. It happened in the summer in a village near St. Petersburg. We constantly played various thematic games — Indians, partisans, the Great Patriotic War, etc. In all these games we had headquarters.
We liked to play scouts in the trees. We spent whole days there. On one, the largest tree, we had the main headquarters. There were stored maps, wooden boards depicting walkie-talkies, wires and other things that were of value to us. All trees were entangled with wires. We were talking on the «walkie-talkie», although we heard each other — of course, just like that. We hunted for «fascists». They were bystanders. We often threw branches and leaves at them” (Nadya).
In general, at this stage, the secret community of children already feels like an integral social organism. Its members are connected to each other by many socio-psychological ties. This is friendship, and common interests, and the experience of joint construction and organization of life in the “headquarters” itself. But soon this becomes not enough: in order for the group to hold on and have development prospects, a common cause is needed, a goal is needed, an ideology is needed. As is known from systems theory, the goal of any viable system is outside it. Therefore, children also turn their eyes through the cracks in the walls of the “headquarters” to the outside world and involve it in the plots of their games; Such games unfold like a long-term series that inspires all members of the children’s group. Interestingly, the roles in it are distributed not only among the members of the children’s company, but are also assigned to some unsuspecting adults who walk past the «headquarters» on their own business. Since these adults live and act by their own rules, they bring an exciting element of unpredictability into the children’s play. One of the typical plot moves is the children tracking down one of these unfortunate people.
“In a large clearing in front of the houses where we lived, the grass was above our waists. In one place, we crushed it so that a circle with “walls” formed. This was our headquarters. They kept «walkie-talkies», «secret packages» for transfer to other «fronts», «weapons». In addition to the general “headquarters”, each soldier also had his own “trench house”. Everything happened along the road. Cars of different colors were driving along the road, and we believed that red ones were “ours”, black and white ones were “Germans”, buses were naive “civilians”, cars of other colors were “neutral”. From the «Germans» it was necessary to hide, and the «Reds» — to wave their arms with all their might.
It is important to note that in extreme situations — «injury» or «death» of a soldier, as well as real injuries — we always fled to headquarters. They couldn’t hit you from the plane there, they couldn’t kill or injure you there. When you are in danger, the main thing is to have time to crawl to the headquarters and hide there ”(Nadya).
It should be noted here that children in their relations with the wider social world usually do not go beyond games involving strangers, exploration of their own courage in external situations, wars with other children’s gangs and with adults (in the form of raids on their gardens or punishment of adults for sins). against children) and helping stray animals. The idea of helping other people or socially useful activities (like Timurov’s) is usually introduced by adults as carriers of higher moral and spiritual principles. This can happen as a result of the direct influence of an authoritative and interested adult in children on the leaders of the children’s group. But more often this kind of adult influence is indirect: it comes through books for children, films, TV shows, etc. On closer examination of this problem, the great power of such indirect influence is surprising. Children with extraordinary willingness seek out exemplary, from their point of view, examples of behavior in different texts and try to immediately implement them. Firstly, they want to do something interesting, secondly, they want to be good, and thirdly, children are usually terribly fascinated by the opportunity to have a positive impact on the adult world. One of the reasons why they do not do this on their own initiative, without an ideological push from an adult adviser, is that children do not believe, do not allow, do not realize that they can do this — on an equal basis with adults, constructively influence events great life around. They feel like they don’t have the right to do so yet. More typical for them is the position of the weak, who either hides and lives his own life, or conducts partisan actions in relation to the world of adults.
A common misfortune that children face when they try to do collective good deeds in the world is misunderstanding on the part of adults, which often leads to the collapse of beautiful children’s ideas, naturally realized in a childish way.
In connection with all of the above, Timur’s team can be defined as an ideal model that embodies the highest, fourth stage in the life of the children’s group and the organization of its «headquarters» corresponding to this stage. This is not a gang, not a company, but a team, a secret society of like-minded people, which has a common system of values, principles and norms of behavior, a permanent composition of participants soldered both by personal friendship and mutual comradely obligations, its own secret abode, secret communication systems and the most the main thing is charitable activity clothed in a game form. True, Timur’s team is a utopia, an ideal that not a single spontaneously formed children’s group with its own «headquarters» falls short of.
But this ideal, in principle, can be achieved by a children’s group under the guidance of a good adult teacher, which was done with us by such people as A. S. Makarenko, V. A. Sukhomlinsky and others.
It was this ideal that the English general R. Baden-Powell, the creator of the scouting movement, had in mind and realized in his pedagogical system. He fought in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 and was amazed at the great help given to his militia parents by small groups of Boer children. Mobile, inventive, they solved the tasks assigned to them by military life, in typically childish ways. Boer children undertook to bring water, food and cartridges to adults, carried out various assignments and often served as scouts. This is about them, famous in the children’s literature of the XX century, the novel by Louis Boussenard «Captain Rip-Head». Despite the fact that for General Baden-Powell they were the children of Boer enemies, white colonists who lived in their republic in southern Africa, he was delighted with their patriotism, cooperation with adults and independence. The general liked the Boer system of raising children so much that, returning to England, he decided to raise the spirit of an aging Britain and strengthen its strength in the face of the younger generation. So he created the scouting movement, which organically corresponded to the characteristics of the children’s subculture, but introduced humanistic ideology, patriotism, a system of moral principles and organizational rules into it. In fact, R. Baden-Powell suggested that the adult world support the children’s subculture at the point where it stops in its own development, and complete the top floor in it in the form of an ideology — conscious principles of attitude to life and interaction with people, Scout had to become a person courageous, courageous, organized, observant, not lost in any situation, a faithful comrade. He had to be able to do a lot, and one of his main mottos was: not a day without a good deed.
Scout, in English, is a scout. Baden-Powell’s first book was called To Help the Scouts. Then came the «Young Scout». Why exactly — a scout? What is a scout? What is close to children?
A scout is a person who is in a foreign camp in order to collect the information he needs there. If someone thinks of himself as a scout, then he, by definition, refers to himself the following two statements. First: I am from another world and now I am in a strange world. Second: I collect information. In a weakened form, it will sound like this: I am not included in the events, but I observe.
The position of the observer is involuntarily close to the child and is very important for his development. In relations with the adult world, the child masters its childhood. Adults are extremely inclined to psychologically and even physically leave the child “behind the scenes” in many situations that are significant for themselves. And he looks from a secluded corner, listens — observes, remembers, learns behavior patterns. All this happens by itself, naturally.
However, when the era of building secret shelters — «headquarters» begins in the life of children, it marks a new phase in the development of the «I» of the child. As the reader remembers, this “I” begins to be experienced more and more clearly by the child as the inner space of his personality, the hidden abode of his soul, inaccessible to other people, the inner world from which he looks out. All these initially vague and unconscious psychological discoveries materialize outside and “are worked out »children in the process of building «headquarters». Inside the «headquarters» the personal «I» of the child is additionally protected by the walls of the shelter and strengthened, «fat» by the collective «We» of the children’s group. When the “headquarters” is built, mastered, and a new feeling of security and group general strength is felt for the child, the turn of new forms of contact between children and the world of adults begins. According to our classification, this is the third stage in the life of the children’s «headquarters». At this time, children tend to perceive their “headquarters” primarily as a secret observation post, and themselves as scouts who can quietly monitor everything that happens outside.
What is new in this position of the observer is that the child is both spatially and psychologically isolated from the external environment and opposed to it: we are here, they are there. The second important detail is the fundamental difference between the positions of observers and those whom they observe. Observers have a strong and active position: they are protected by a shelter, invisible to the inhabitants of the outside world, purposefully watching them, commenting on their actions, planning their actions in relation to them. People outside are placed in this situation in a passive and weak position: they do not see, they do not notice, they do not assume the presence of observers, they are open, they are like game that a hunter is stalking. That is, children-observers assign the role of an active, cognizing and acting subject, while adults are left with the role of a cognizable object, which can be influenced if desired. Living such a role-playing scenario, completely atypical for the everyday relationships of adult children, gives the child a new and important personal experience for him.
“We built the headquarters at the age of nine or eleven with my grandmother in a village on the outskirts. There was a big lime tree growing on the street not far from my house. There were many lipas, but this one was special. It had large, thick branches, and almost near the top, two branches were so intertwined that they formed something like a seat with a back. It was an observation post — a place for which they fought. There was a sequence for it.
The man sitting on the tree was not visible from the ground. And he saw everything: everyone who walked along the road, and what was happening in the nearest courtyards. It was the place where you can feel like «the ruler of the world.» It was a feeling of superiority, a sense of one’s own strength and courage. Because it was difficult to climb this tree: the first branches were quite high above the ground, and only the most dexterous ones climbed onto the linden” (Oksana).
Another example: a boy who initiated the construction of a “headquarters” in the branches of a sprawling tall tree in the courtyard of a multi-storey building was terribly proud of the fact that, sitting inside the “headquarters”, one can not only see what is happening in apartments on several floors, but also watch through the windows at once several programs on other people’s TVs. (Note in brackets that his «headquarters» was comfortable — seats and utensils: you could eat there.)
If we do not pay attention to children’s proud complacency, but focus on the essence of what is happening, then we can define it as the initial phase of the formation of a child’s conscious reflexive position in relation to the world around him. The child begins to consciously separate himself from this world as a self, opposed as a cognizing subject to the world as an object of cognition. In the child’s mind, this position is quite accurately embodied in the image of a scout, with whom the child often identifies himself. Since this image is psychologically filled and internally close to the child, it is easy to exploit it for pedagogical purposes, on which General Baden-Pauli, the founder of the scouting movement, relied.
At the end of the conversation about children’s «headquarters» I would like to indicate their place in the time perspective of the events of human life, to answer the question: what was before them and what will happen after?
If you start ab ovo, then the first own space of the baby was a completely closed, soft and cozy living bodily house — the mother’s uterus. After birth, a person enters a new huge world, where he begins to know himself and determine his place.
The first attempts of the child to independently materialize the idea of an intimate space where his “I” resides, probably, should be considered holes or caves under the blanket that the baby arranges for himself in his own bed. It often happens that in the morning, when the sun is already shining and you have to get up soon, the child is amused by the fact that he lives in two contrasting states. Inside, under the blanket, which the child specially lifts above him like a soft dome, in a warm cave, where he lies, fantasizes, plays, he feels completely «at home». At the edge of the blanket, the child makes a crack through which the sun breaks through — this is the border of two worlds, the edge beyond which the outer world extends, where all the others are and where it is interesting to quickly look in order to return «to oneself» again.
Then short-lived houses will appear, created for the duration of the game from chairs covered with a blanket, where you can climb along with toys.
In the space of the apartment, the child will find comfortable secluded places where you can sit alone, hiding from everyone. Depending on the nature of the child and the circumstances of his life, such places can be very important for him.
“My favorite place in the house has always been the space under the desk, where I set up a makeshift home in which I literally sat all day. It was my house, where I felt protected and where I hid when I was scared or sad. The same house served as a kind of observation post for the surrounding world” (Maria).
“As a child, at home, I often built myself a “house” under the table, throwing a blanket over it. The peculiarities of my childhood — frequent change of place of residence, several years in a hostel in the same room with my parents — led to the fact that, already being an adult, at eighteen or nineteen years old, I built myself a shelter even in my own room, covering the table with a blanket. This was my favorite place. There was my bed, and even there, under the table (!), I brought my girlfriend” (Volodya).
Then there will be playing houses in the country with a complete dollhouse, located next to a residential building, and, finally, “headquarters”, for which a company is needed and completely different locations are selected.
And even later, in adolescence, the child begins to assert his right to personal space already right inside the world of adults — “my corner”, “my room” — and protect their borders from intrusions. This will begin a new era of «embedding» one’s «I» in the space of the surrounding world already inhabited by other people and the search for one’s own ecological niche: choosing a place of residence, decorating a home in accordance with the tastes, characteristics and habits of the owner, acquiring and developing real estate — and so on. the end of life, when a person is already concerned about where he wants to be buried. And every time his choice will be closely connected with the life of his personality, which will always find a way to imprint itself in the place of its stay. That is why pilgrims are drawn to the places of life of great people: having been there, they want to feel and better understand the person who chose this place for themselves and illuminated it with their presence.