In Belgium, schools have opened for the first time after the quarantine, but not many children are coming yet. Notably, one school principal said that the first priority now would not be educating students, but having frank conversations about their experiences of isolation. All so that the children could see and talk to their friends and get reacquainted with the school environment. In short, the school creates a comfortable and friendly atmosphere of communication for children. This news made me think back to my brief experience as a schoolteacher and prompted some thoughts and even dreams.
I want to admit right away that for me the experience was not easy. I tried to teach a traditional lesson and often wondered: what am I teaching if the kids aren’t interested at all? The students did not want to listen to me, refused to do the exercises, constantly played with each other and only stopped for tiny moments at the end of the lesson to write down their homework. This applied to everyone – underachievers as well as top scorers.
One day in one of my conversations with colleagues it dawned on me that today’s children are different. They are completely different! The desires, the inner impulses that drive them, have changed greatly. And this is the normal, natural process of our evolution. Man is the only element of nature that is constantly evolving. But the more I observed children from this point of view, the more I realized that the modern school does not correspond to these internal changes in the desires, interests, and attitudes of the younger generation.
The kids have changed, but the school has stayed the same. In it, as before, the first place is education, a strict disciplinary approach, clear adherence to the instructions of the teacher. At the same time, I would not like to dwell on the shortcomings of school education, but to dream more about a school for and for children.
Undoubtedly, many countries around the world, including Russia, have long established schools with a creative bias, with new pedagogical approaches and practices. But these are just small islands of innovation in the ocean of the school world. When we look at the overall education system, the questions that pierce our hearts are: What kind of school do the children themselves want to attend? How do they wish to spend their time within its walls? And finally, what generation do we want to see after school? A generation of workers? Office plankton? Intellectuals? Or maybe a generation of happy people?
In my opinion, what modern children especially need is environment and communication with peers. This new generation is quickly assimilating the achievements of civilization – from the smartphone, with which they are “on their toes” while still in crawlers, to the computer with the Internet. It is ripe to devote its life to creating a new society and a new world. Today’s children want to come to school not to gain knowledge, which is abundant everywhere, but to socialize with friends, to play, to develop creatively – in music, in literature, in dance, in invention, etc.
They will be drawn to a school where the spirit of freedom is in the air, where the teacher is a mentor and senior comrade, where the classroom is a laboratory for creative experimentation, workshops, and discussions about who “I” am: my thoughts, my desires, why “I” am the way I am, and what I should arrive at. It will be transformed from an educational institution into a center of leisure and education. From its walls, first of all, will emerge a happy man, who knows how to find his place in society and his vocation, how to create a family, how to make people around him happy. And in the second place – the future scientist, artist, entrepreneur, worker, inventor, etc.
I am convinced that if we really want to, we can build the kind of dream school that will raise a happy generation of people.
