The generation of uneducated educators

What a child wishes

Finnish education system is one of the most progressive. The educators’ skills are constantly upgraded.
Children and their parents enjoy hothouse conditions. The infrastructure for the new people’s maturing
is well developed. There are baby-sitters, kindergartens with free attendance and day care for
immigrants’ children. 16 per cent of the public account is spent on education (a corresponding rate is
below 4% in the USA, 11% in France, below 4% in Russia, 13 to 28% in Scandinavia). But at this rate, why
does the education produce such dismal results, even at interim steps?

Among the most notable problems of childhood and adolescence in Finland are modus vivendi and
health. Excess weight, morbidity and mental deviations are spreading across the young age groups. In
addition to them, Internet, game and drug addiction are gaining power.

Somewhat detached from the general complex are troubles in social relations, including difficulties in
adaptation and mental insanity caused by humiliation. By all appearances, these troubles should be
handled by progressive education methods, however for the time being they are only getting
aggravated. No one has a ready solution. Human factor is too powerful in the socialization problems:
children’s socium is far less predictable than adult’s society.

Human factor seems to be more controllable in the lifestyle and health problems. However, this is not
the case, since a child’s lifestyle is formed by his or her peers’ example. This nuance is known, but hardly
evaluable, which is why efforts and money are still invested into ineffective struggle for the “regular”
life, as optimistic Englishmen call the healthy kind of lifestyle.

Describing the causes for the mentioned shortcomings and methods of struggle against them, experts
confine themselves with their own competence neglecting comprehension of the essential nature of
problems. Doctors recommend to observe hygiene rules, psychiatrists give talks, etc. Meanwhile, the
key problem constantly escapes everyone’s notice. The reason why it happens is simple: this problem
does not fall within anyone’s specific competence.

The problem is in the understanding of the shaping value system and expectations of a child. To put it in
simpler words, there is no consistent answer to the question, what a child wishes from this life.
Educational methods are supposed to develop the value system, but their fundamental premises are
nonsense.

First, it is necessarily presumed, that any normal human being wishes to develop. But seeing the adults
who go to sleep and get up in a bad mood, and spend their days settling endless conflicts and criticizing,
finding their only relief in consumption, a child does not want to develop in the same direction. There is
no other option we could offer a child, since we ourselves are confused. What is left is options foisted on
us by the “dealers of happiness”, including advertisement, drug dealers, esotericism and subcultures.

Why are the parents unable to offer a child a worthwhile path of development? The president of the
International association for methodology Sergey Popov put the answer as follows: “Modern society has
no idea about the tendency of this world’s development. No clear shape of the future can be discerned
in the current attempts to build the education system”. Adults are no less disoriented than children
(http://www.ng.ru/education/2011-03-22/8_future.html).

Another nonsense is the human rights protection. European society has made idiocy out of human
rights, including children’s rights. This is a certain victory if rights and freedoms over the sensus
communis. Protecting rights is easier than sensing the causes and consequences.

Disappointing enough, Sweden pioneers in the triumphant parade of rights and freedoms. In Sweden,
there is even a kindergarten eliminating the difference between boys and girls. And corporal
punishments have been prohibited in Sweden since 1979. The observation of child’s rights is guaranteed
by special ombudsmen. Teachers are deprived of indisputable authority and are challenged to gain
respect of the pupils. The latter norm would be of use if children were able to make difference between
a teacher and an educator and comprehend what each of them exists for. Because this is not the case,
all starry-eyed social norms are only harming, helping a child to develop his or her nature’s worst
aspects.

There is no education

Reverently guarding human’s right to be a beast, teaching methods specialists omit the problem of the
lack of motivation. They do so not by evil design, rather due to helplessness.

It was in 2009, that two Finnish parliamentarians from the Centre and the National Coalition parties,
Timo Kalli and Pekka Ravi, started sounding the alarm. 7 per cent of teenagers in Finland quit their
studies after the 9th form. 200 pupils quit secondary school yearly
(http://stat.fi/til/kkesk/2009/kkesk_2009_2011-03-15_tau_002_fi.html). Whatever goal Kalli & Ravi
pursued, no solution was found. Children do not want what they are being “fed” with, however they
have no idea what to want.

If today’s children do not get a consistent value system, the world is going to be plunged in chaos. But
where can one find the bearers of fitting values? There are few people understanding the tendencies of
changes taking place on this planet, and one should take into account that there is a difference between
understanding and values. We are witnessing the generation of uneducated educators.

It appears that modern children and teenagers need values, life expectations and strategies of a new
kind, and 99,9% of grown-ups are lacking the necessary value system. So how will the children get the
way of thinking that would guarantee their successful and comfortable life? If there is any solution, it is
in the shaping of social environment. No other factor of education is efficient without a good
environment. One can repeat mistakes and drop a brick after another if one’s environment doesn’t want
one to learn from mistakes and examples.

In Finland, there are Scout associations, study and hobby groups for additional development, where a
child or a teenager can acquire needful skills, including social skills. However, one finds oneself in such
group already having a definite attitude to all studies and occupations as something that is not
necessary for him, rather required by mother, teacher or the System. One knows one’s development
program written by someone else and is not trained to make the most essential decision on one’s own,
analyzing one’s relationships with one’s environment. As a result, children and teenagers do not get a
good environment even at Scout associations. This kind of occupation may develop survival skills and
make one fitter for life, but the puzzling question is how to dispose of this life.

Some children get in a Montessori kindergarten or a Montessori class at school, thus escaping a clash
with the overwhelming System. However a clash is inevitable. It will take place later, and for the time
being a child develops his or her talents having no opportunity to find or get from environment an
answer to the question, why on Earth he or she is engaged in all those activities.

The secondary school system is a topic for a separate investigation. The fundament for the modern
school was created at the time of Industrial revolution, when it was necessary to train millions of
workers. 200 years have passed, and the children are gathered in classes, filled with stereotyped data
and released to the adult lie, just as before. Education as shaping of personality that would be ready for
a full life in harmonic relationships with the society, is not carried out, despite the amounts of public
account money spent on this. No one is to blame, except for the system itself.

The case is somewhat better in Waldorf schools (Steiner education) and other so to say special schools,
which are teens in Finland. But even if these schools per se were excellent in terms of education, they
would be corrupt as long as they are embedded in the general education system. These schools have to
fit the national and international standards so that their certificate is recognized. As a result, children
face the same abstract “marks”, conventionalities and the external world, where everything is different
from the way it is at their Steiner school. In the long term, external world turns out to be the hard truth.

Summarizing, the education system has to be designed anew from scratch. This is a giant project that
requires total deinstallation of the existing education system. It is sure to be extremely costly, but the
life actualities, most of all the globalization, necessitate a radical change. Turning into a self-contained
integral system, the world sets its inhabitants in a perplexing situation: we depend on each other and
using one’s neighbor appears disadvantageous. So far grown-ups have been teaching their children
honesty, while neglecting it in their own life. As a result children did not grasp the lesson right and
repeated their parents’ way. Nowadays we have to get more artful than our forefathers, not to deceive
our children and to keep the boat the entire humanity find themselves in, afloat. Our survival depends
on mutuality between all elements of our society, as in any integral system, e.g. an organism. Global
education appears to be the only fair way to mutuality.

The crucial elements in the environment

A child’s environment includes all kinds of influences and examples, from one’s own mother to a
monkey in a zoo. Anyway, the most important influence upon a child is provided by the peers, especially
those of them who are a bit older. Their authority is such that a child is incapable of contradicting them,
even if they summon him or her to ignore his or her mother’s opinion. That is why the questionnaires
for parents with questions about their children’s relationships with their peers, which are in use in
Finland, produce insignificant effect. Noting that their child sets his or her peers’ opinion above their
own one, parents and other relatives get indignant and complain of their destiny that has burdened
them with such ungrateful offspring. The clever way would be considering the infant consciousness and
perception features, and use them.

In that case the problem would boil down to building the part of the child’s environment composed of
his or her peers in a way that would facilitate the child’s deriving motivation from this environment and
develop in a positive interaction with the society. The child can acquire life expectations that the grown-
ups cannot endow him or her with, only on condition that he or she enters a group where all the
children learn to help each other actualize oneself in the group. Interrelations between members of
such group must be based on careful attitude towards each member’s personal qualities as an
irreplaceable heritage of the group.

If the “common touch” feeling exists in such group, each child’s natural inclinations will develop in the
best way. Having found him- or herself in such environment, a child will be free for unlimited
socialization and protected from ambiguous influence. Figuring out his or her role in the society, a child
will acquire the necessary motivation and energy to grow. Additionally, the surrounding children will
endow him or her with complementary skills and qualities, and what is even of a greater importance,
with supplementary aspects of intellection and world-view.

All this will be efficient if such education system engages all the children in the country, and even in
many countries, while grown-ups know about this system and participate in it, trying not to impose any
misleading judgments on their children.

Creating the progressive environment

Our education has been based on deceit. We have been concealing the features of adult life from our
children at every turn, instead of repairing the intolerable details in our actual relationships. But the
mission of education is to prepare a person for adult life. It is a kind of rehearsal, and so far it has been
taking place spontaneously. We all were at school and we remember that the class was divided into
groupings. There were the humiliated ones and the freaks, the leaders, their suite, girls had their own
groupings. After such rehearsal, young people go on “stage” that is rapidly changing in the beginning of
the 21st century. The world has never been so globalized, with a rigid interdependence of all on all.

That is why the rehearsal should be carried out in a different way, with a class organized as a kind of a
mini-society, as it was organized at Janusz Korczak school in Warsaw. In such mini-society, there is a
place for rights and liabilities, as well as various roles that the children can use in order to fine-tune their
modi procedendi and approaches to evaluation. Let them gradually receive firsthand and adequate
information about the adult world life peculiarities, visiting factories, farms, bureaus, banks, etc.
However, the adequate information does not have to appear as heaps of facts, rather children should be
trained to set questions and carry out investigations in order to find out the facts on their own.

Children should work through all situations that take place in their everyday life, and analyze them.
Among this situations are showings of envy, struggle for power, deceit, etc. This can be done in the form
of a court simulation with prosecutors, barristers and attorneys, only the accused is not a member of the
group, but a feature that has shown itself in his or her behavior today, and tomorrow it may appear in
another member. This is the only way to learn that every man and every assertion have their place in
the world, and to comprehend each phenomenon’s nature and destination.

So far, in order to bail our children out from bad companies, we had to send them to all kinds of music
schools and sports classes, even if the institutions we happened to find were in no way fitting our
children and absolutely uninteresting. Now parents will be relieved from conjecturing how to occupy
their offspring: the child will figure out on his or her own, what to demand from this life. This discovery
will be anticipated by the influence of a good environment that values its member.

If we do not bring up a generation where people of integrity hold a majority, the humanity is on the
verge of catastrophe. But the role of educators is entrusted to people who have never gone through
such education. The approach described above is a know-how that resolves this dilemma. The
educators are responsible only for building the groups, and the education itself will be carried out by the
Nature. By way of this work, educators and adults in general will learn much about themselves and
about the natural laws that work in the society. Thanks to this influence upon grown-ups, the new
education system will give results long before the full age of those who are babies today.

Gleb Bogatskiy, 12.2011