Why is school needed today?

Psychologies: You look like a collector who has the most unformatted schools in the world in his collection. Why do you need this? What is the purpose?

Alexander Murashev: I put before myself two main questions: why do we need a school now and what is a good teacher today. They may seem stupid and funny, but when I asked myself them, I realized: I have no answer. And the Russian education system, it seems to me, is even afraid to ask them. But these questions are inevitable.

I am 31 years old, and the second half of my life, that is, the last 15 years, I observe how quickly everything changes. As a teenager, I used to rewind tapes on audio cassettes with a pencil and pray for the DJ to spell the name of the artist correctly, and now I have any song I want to listen to on my phone. At the university, I sent notes to girls through my neighbors, and now I exchange messages with them in instant messengers and can contact anyone. When I was a teenager, I hunted for information, and the school was positioned as a place where teachers share sacred knowledge with us.

Today, it is more difficult to protect yourself from information than to receive it. Today’s teenagers don’t understand why they need to spend long hours in four dull walls, learning the facts they find on the Internet in a few minutes – faster than teachers.

But if the school is no longer the place where we get knowledge, then what is it for at all? That’s what I want to understand. And I ask this question everywhere I go. More often I hear this answer: at school we get those skills that are passed only from person to person. For example, in Danish schools, children are taught to interact by dividing into groups to work together right during the lesson. This is not in our tradition – I remember well how the teachers said: “look in your notebook and don’t talk.” And here even the assessment is put one per group. If you want the highest score, work for the success of the team.

Was there an answer that surprised you?

I got it from the Swedish Egalia. This is perhaps the most provocative of all European schools. Children are accepted there from the age of one to six years, and there is no separation by gender. Each child decides for himself whether he is a boy or a girl, what to do, what to play, and teachers treat everyone the same.

Classes there are built on books, and selected in a special way. For example, I saw a book about how different families are: a family with two mothers, or a childfree family. And children from a very early age develop an idea of ​​a multivariate world.

The teachers who work at Egalia answered my question as follows: a school is a place where a child learns to coexist with different, different children. And the task of the teacher is to help him in this. This approach surprised me, because for many of us the school was a place where we had to fight for ourselves, but here it’s the other way around: children are not suppressed, they are accepted by anyone. Where they end up is another matter. At the secondary level of education, there is no such school in Sweden.

What unites the schools you visited?

Almost all of them bring students as close as possible to real life. I remember, at my first school line, the teachers said that they would prepare us for adulthood. After that, I changed three schools, and in none I had the feeling that I was gaining knowledge that I could apply in practice.

Therefore, I was so struck by, say, the education system in Finland. In many schools there, ordinary subjects have been replaced by the study of phenomena. Every six weeks they go through a new topic. I was in a class on the wise use of natural resources. In fact, he combined several subjects at once: a foreign language, natural science, needlework. The children learned the English words reuse and recycling (reuse, recycling), and the teacher talked about saving resources and gave the following example: now you have washed your hands and dried them with a paper towel made of wood. What other way can you dry your hands to save the planet’s resources? The children immediately rushed to offer their options. Someone said: let’s sew cloth towels, and they will be reusable. And in the next lesson they were already sewing these towels.

Why did I like this approach? The fact that the child can immediately understand why he needs new knowledge, he sees how to use it in real life.

Which of the Russian schools is closest in design and implementation to those you have seen abroad?

Definitely, the school “Orange” by Dima Zitser. She makes me proud that I was born in the same city, St. Petersburg. “Orange” is a kind of Russian “Summerhill”. They have no grades, no homework, not a single decision is made there without the participation of children. “Orange” really prepares the child for adulthood – through complete freedom, decision-making experience, through equality in rights with teachers.

You spend in schools from one day to a week. Is this enough to understand how free and confident children feel there?

Of course, one day is not enough. But the eye manages to grab the key details. For example, in one Finnish school, children did not want to go outside during recess – it was so important for them to continue the work they had begun. And in the staff room, I noticed photographs of three diabetic children on the wall with detailed nutritional advice, a detail that is traditional for a private school, but not a public one.

In addition, I always try to communicate with children informally, talking to them alone, without teachers. This is enough to understand whether the school is successful or not. The ability of some 13-14-year-old teenagers to think and reason freely and deeply is amazing – talking with them is more interesting than with many of my peers.

Or another example: I go up to a seven-year-old Finnish girl, and she explains to me in perfect English that she is currently designing her needlework on the iPad, and at the same time keeps notes about what she likes and doesn’t like about this work. She told me all this on the fly, without any preparation.

By the way, in the same place I found the answer to the question that worries many adults: what will happen if we give children complete freedom? Will they destroy the school? Will endless fights and severe bullying begin? Will it all end like in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies? But my experience shows that everything is exactly the opposite: the level of aggression in free schools is decreasing. Children are focused on cooperation, not competition.

What criteria can be used to measure the quality of education in such schools?

Teachers there pay attention not to grades, but to personality development, to the child’s acceptance of himself, the development of his confidence. We will be able to talk about academic success with all certainty only when the children grow up. In the same “Apelsin” the oldest class so far is the seventh. Many of my acquaintances skeptically remark: “Let’s see how they pass the exam and fit into real life.”

Of course, no one canceled exams, so in high school you have to find a compromise between the desire to develop the personality of the student, not to put pressure on him with the requirements of success and the need to comply with education standards.

How successful is this compromise?

School principals have told me that, for example, Danish students do have a more relaxed attitude towards learning than children from Asian countries. They may not be using their full potential. But most of them enter universities one way or another, which means they achieve some success.

It probably helps that teachers in Danish and some Swedish high schools are becoming more coaches than teachers. In Denmark, before the recent reform, there was generally a specialist who helped high school students with pre-exam “logistics” and career guidance. For example, a teenager understood that he wanted to be a lawyer or an actor, and this person explained what subjects he needed to pull up, even if they were not at all interesting to him, and offered a training plan. Now this role is played by teachers.

In Sweden and Denmark, they told me so: the time of teachers is over, the time of coaches has come.

Do you agree with this idea?

Yesterday I was at the French school of information technology “42”, where students (albeit adults, over 19 years old) learn programming on their own. In fact, this is a huge cool office where they sit at the “poppies” and work all day. True, they are obliged to help each other. There are no teachers there, because in the field of IT everything is changing rapidly and ideas about how “correct” quickly become outdated. All answers and solutions are found by students in independent work. As for an ordinary secondary school, in my opinion, the role of a teacher there is to be a navigator in the flow of information, to help find the necessary information, to distinguish true information from distorted and structure it.

And the teacher as an authoritative adult, it turns out, is no longer needed?

For me, this question is very acute. Of course, the teacher is still important – as a role model. As a person who knows how to listen without judgment and inspire the child to believe in himself, in his ability to achieve a lot in the future.

Is it possible to derive practical benefit from the knowledge that you have received by traveling to different schools and describing them in a book?

I don’t expect educators to read the book and begin to introduce the principles of free schools everywhere. But, according to my feelings, the school system will change. Many old schemes do not work. Children are overloaded with homework and are deadly tired. More and more parents are concerned about finding a good school where the child’s personality will not be corroded.

The book helps to learn about other methods of education, to expand your understanding of how differently you can build a learning trajectory, and this, I think, is useful for everyone.

What will be the final point of your trips?

I want to see education in all countries of the world, to understand the nuances of different systems. And still get answers to the questions, what is the school for now and what is a good teacher. However, the book may end even at the moment when I find the only school of my dreams, about which I will definitely understand that I myself want to study there.