Uneducated youth. Babylonian babies

Greetings to you, Habrosocommunity! This article is a reflection of a series of articles on “Uneducated youth”: “ Uneducated youth ”, “ Uneducated youth. Answer of a part-time teacher ” and “ Uneducated youth. Answer of business ”. The content is largely based on my personal experience. Therefore, it may seem that I am trying to convince you of something. But the only purpose of my article is an attempt to realize the essence of reality, in which I found myself, to share some thoughts. Perhaps after this publication, I may have some problems. The article covers not only the IT sphere, but also some ethical aspects.

About social order

The education system in its essence, in the form in which we are now seeing it, has not undergone any total, fundamental changes. The so-called social order, which the education system must fulfill, is largely based not on a scientific approach, but on subjective beliefs. This leads to many contradictions.

In fact, technological progress is the improvement of labor tools. Mechanization, automation, intellectualization of many technological processes significantly reduces the need for human labor, with the exception of research and creative. Given this, in each area of ​​human activity can be identified skills and abilities that may be as relevant or not. Therefore, it is obvious that the beginning of the educational process involves the development of not only those skills and abilities that are relevant here and now, but also those that will be relevant after the educational process.

The first and most obvious contradiction is the discrepancy between the ordered and the completed. This is the main reason for all articles - disturbances that have appeared, appear and will appear.

Depth

I don’t know to what extent I’m right, but I’m sure that the real reason for the appearance of incompetent employees, and not only in IT, lies much deeper, namely, in school. It is very difficult to relate to the experience and memory of almost all adults for quite objective reasons. First, we remember the university much better than the school. Secondly, the problems of lack of education in adults are much more acutely felt in their professional activities. And the lack of professional skills and abilities is immediately associated with poor education in the same universities.

Here I would like to remind you of the wonderful hacker, Alexei Michurin (I apologize for the personalization). A few years ago, it was in his articles, and especially on his personal website, that I found quite a lot of food for thought, in particular, about working inside a higher educational institution. This information is enough to understand - the problems of young students arise even before entering the university.

Habrahabr is an IT resource. It was here that I learned about Scratch, Python, Arduino, and it was he who prompted me to implement them in school. Perhaps an article about the problems of introducing these innovations would be closer to the subject of Habrahabr. But it seems to me that this is not the case.

The problem is not even in school. The problem is how we solve it.

Problem? Or situation?

Salvation of drowning people is the work of drowning people themselves. Intuitively or obviously, one way or another, many who are interested in education understand that they are the very same drowning people. If you discard emotions, the problem becomes a situation in which you can make both constructive and destructive decisions. We need constructive, but first try to describe the situation.

I'll try the points, but to be honest, every single item deserves a separate article.

• In kindergartens and schools, the best teaching experience (Montesori and others), as well as research in the field of sociology, psychology, and physiology (for example, the Dunedin study) is almost everywhere and completely ignored. Formally, their elements are mentioned in the documents regulating the activities of gardens and schools. But formally. A banal, long-term presence in the same kindergartens and schools will help to verify this.
• Children are not so stupid as they are taken to treat. An example is the experience of Jacob Abramson or this article . In general, there are more examples in favor of children than counterexamples. Mentioning this would be superfluous, but with Scratch, children can quite easily master an extensive list of seemingly complex (adult) concepts, not to mention basic programming skills. But in schools, lessons are taught mainly in computer science, the expediency of which can easily be doubted if you study at least textbooks .
• At the lessons of Scratch and other innovations, it is very risky to teach, since there is an educational program, the non-fulfillment of which threatens with a large fine . Teaching is limited to the scope of the lessons in the approved educational program and the teacher’s resourcefulness. There is also a time limit in front of the monitor, for children it is no more than 25-30 minutes in primary school and a little more in primary and secondary. Exceeding this limit can also result in a sizeable penalty .
• Teaching Scratch is also quite a difficult task, since there are no training and didactic materials. There are enough books and materials on the Internet, however, they are not as useful in teaching as they would be desirable. For example, a teacher teaches computer science from grades 2 to 6, 34 lessons per year in each class, a total of 170 lessons. And now imagine that the material of the lessons should be consistent, take into account age and even gender features. It is also desirable to be personally oriented. Conducting quality lessons is an extremely difficult task.
• As for the quality of lessons, lectures, seminars, it is difficult not to agree with Valery Idelevich’s opinion in his book “30,000 lessons of mathematics”: “The only thing that determines the quality of classes is the time spent by the teacher on preparing for classes”. However, the situation is such that the teacher has to work in a system in which it is very difficult to allocate time for preparing for classes.
• The situation in which the teacher is located can be called extremely unfair. For example, poor academic performance is the fault of the teacher. Moreover, the quality of education is measured as a percentage of drummers and excellent students, and if it turns out to be lower than in the municipal task, then for the first time the teacher faces a fine of 100 to 1,000 rubles, and if this happens again, from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles. This can lead to extremely negative consequences.
• In parallel, the guys are also in a very unfair situation, especially in the final exams. The state final certification has very few points of contact with a real educational program. This is easy to see if you compare textbooks, say, in mathematics and official documents of the Unified State Exam . In this case, the guys are required to demonstrate that in reality is not required.

This is an example of a list that everyone can compile. Moreover, although this is unpleasant, the list should be made more objective, long and demonstrative. Such lists are a way to see and understand those rules of the game that leave no chance of winning, to understand how to break these rules. Realize that the game is not, can not and will not be fair. In this situation, it is easy for a teacher to lose his dignity and become bogged down in corruption, bureaucracy, careerism, or, at best, find another job. For someone who studies, this is the first reason to give up.

But this is a situation, not a problem.

Puzzle game

Need a strategy of behavior, and you can give a lot of useful tips on this matter. But what is strange, we are able to control this game, we can change the rules, set the tone.

The only thing that hinders this is our disunity. And it is supported and encouraged. For example, each teacher should have his own website and demonstrate not only his own achievements on this site, but also educational materials created independently. If to exaggerate, then at 30,000 teachers of computer science we will find 30,000 different variants of one lesson. 30,000 people are forced to try to outdo each other and make sure that no one takes over your personal work. This is WEB 2.0 and it's not just about teachers. How many blogs, websites, paid courses and free videos, say, about Python? How many of them are exhaustive at least 50%?

The worldview of a person with significant experience is such that he does not see, does not notice, does not even suspect the problem. For him, the Internet is the source of 100% comprehensive information. Finding the necessary information does not cause any difficulties.

The analogy of a person who has mastered, say, the same Python, is the person who assembled the puzzle. For someone who is forced to learn himself, the task is complicated by the fact that the details of the puzzle are scattered within a radius of 10 km and you do not know what you do not know. The task of the teacher is to collect these parts of the puzzle in at least one room and make it clear that the student does not know what the puzzle picture looks like.

Ego and hardcore

Imagine, I publish an article on Habrahabr that I plan and have already begun to create for children a very large textbook on Scratch - about 250 lessons that could be used both at school and outside of its walls. The textbook is designed mainly for independent work of children, that is, it contains a lot of illustrations and explanations. At the same time, it is planned to create an extensive reference book for the textbook, again designed for children, and supporting materials for parents and teachers.

At the same time, I explain that I am going to publish materials in Wikibooks, hand over all the rights to them to the public and give everyone the opportunity to improve the published materials.

It is quite predictable that in the comments to the article I will find useful tips and, possibly, even co-authors.

We work hard, but even in spite of joint efforts, work moves slowly. It is clear that we work in our spare time, and we lose a lot. We lose the opportunity to fully spend time with the family, earn, relax in the end. Sooner or later, work on the textbook slows down even more. At the same time, it’s not a thought that if we left the copyright behind us and published it on a joint site, we could make money from advertising. Yes, in a beast would show the children advertising. Would have advertised children's breakfasts, chocolate eggs, spinners in the end. And maybe something would work.

As a result, we publish another article in which we say that we are exhausted. We have achieved a lot, have done a lot. Of course, we would sincerely thank many for our contribution, constructive criticism, comments and advice. We announce that we are leaving the project and offer to intercept the baton to everyone.

It is unpleasant, to be forced to give up what has been spent so much energy, what you see in so much sense.

It would be possible to ask for financial assistance from corporations and companies, but at least from someone. But…

We wanted to help educators. To help concentrate not on what to teach, but on how to teach. Perhaps it would be teachers from other, just starting to develop or recover from the wars of countries. Children would get a good tutorial that would teach them to study and work independently.

And it could be not only Scratch, but also other programming languages, various sections of mathematics, algorithms, applied software, other sciences. And everyone could improve these materials, expand, deepen, adapt, translate into another language.

But...

No hope ahead?

I’m sure we all need WEB 3.0. Not only teachers, but all of us. Creating high-quality, comprehensive, comprehensive content, work, is orders of magnitude more difficult than creating sites on which it will be placed.

We already have Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity is a great place to create better educational content. But as in any business, there must also be leaders. Leaders who know what to do and how can pull and direct. Naturally they will not be until their work begins to be valued and paid.

Education is a very strange place. Here it is absolutely unimportant who you are, what you can do or know. You may be able to catch bullets with your teeth, or know how to turn lead into gold. But all this is unimportant and will leave with you if you cannot teach this to others.

Every child, teenager, student, employee is a gifted person. Implement this talent interfere with some internal shortcomings or the disadvantages of the surrounding reality. But all these flaws are not carved in stone.

Most likely, if we ourselves do not begin to take measures, then the problems will begin for all of us, and not only with new personnel, but problems in general associated with the lack of education of the generations, among which we will have to grow old, and our children will live.