As I’ve been browsing my Facebook communities lately, I keep coming across cries for help from moms who are unexpectedly trapped at home with their children. A strange story unfolded. Suddenly no one knows what to do with them, how and what to do with them. And between the lines you can read the indignation and the quiet moaning, when all this will be over and the supposedly normal life will return, when the children are in kindergarten or school, I am at work, and we see each other a couple of hours a day, if not less.
I don’t know when it happened, but for some reason we shifted the responsibility for education from ourselves to professional people in kindergarten and school. For some reason we believed that kindergarteners and teachers were better able to educate our children than we were. I don’t understand what that has to do with it. Maybe with the wild pace of life in today’s society, where everyone is endlessly running after money and consumption. And what do we get?
I worked as a high school English teacher for about a year and a half. Before that I was on the labor exchange for a year. I was ready for any job. But once at school, it was like being in a “cage with tigers. After a year and a half of severe stress, I brought a letter of resignation to the school principal right in the middle of the school year. The children, regardless of class, were so out of control that their egregious behavior was out of bounds. Sometimes I’d hear to myself that we’d already survived the chemist, we’d survive you too. One day after another conflict with a student, I called his parents to the school. His mother told me in no uncertain terms that it was my job to deal with him. It was probably the apotheosis of everything I went through as a schoolteacher.
I often hear that this quarantine will change everyone, that life will no longer be the same. It seems to me that one of the most important aspects of this change would be to pay close attention to educational issues. It may seem too radical to you, but I would suggest that in the face of impending widespread unemployment, making it a woman’s job to raise her children an official job. And not until the age of one and a half or three years, as is now customary, but until adolescence, at least until the age of 12-13 years.
If we return the responsibility for raising children from professional institutions, which do not do any upbringing at all, to the family, then the next generation will be completely different. And in general, it seems to me that the education of the next generation should be the main priority not only of the family, but also of the state.
Let’s try to imagine this new generation of children raised by their parents. They are responsible, caring, and have a sense of empathy and teamwork. They respect their elders and help the younger ones. They feel responsible for their family, their city, their country, and the world at large.
