My 15-year-old niece is actively studying chemistry at school, with immersion and supplemental textbooks. She is a very hard worker, to the delight of her parents. One day she came to my sister (her mother) and said “I’m not getting anywhere! I’m not earning anything!”. Later it turned out that my niece’s classmates are earning up to $1000 a week by playing computer games. It took the parents a week to convince the child to continue studying chemistry. This was done through a study of the possibility of further education, the development of a positive scenario for the application of the skills acquired at school, as well as the decision-making of the employee/entrepreneur/director of the company. As a result, the niece agreed to continue her chemistry studies. My sister breathed a sigh of relief. And I thought that I was getting A’s at school to please the boys. But why? Where are those boys now? My niece’s approach, while not childish at all, seems to be quite right.
We’ve All Been Taught a Little…
Let the educational system solve its own problems. Now it has to answer to the children, not even to the parents, why and what it teaches, what methods it uses and what it gives. I would talk about the education we receive in adulthood, when we spend not only financial resources, but also our time, which, as my niece logically noted, can be used more efficiently. The system of “something and somehow” is not only unhelpful, but it can also be harmful if you only get one look at a question or a problem, or if you study one particular thing out of the whole. A course has to give you an idea of the whole system in the area it is dedicated to in order to bring you benefit and later money (recognition, fame). I’m going to give you an example. Once I studied art criticism at a post-secondary institution (I won’t name it). Why I did this is still a mystery to me, but I studied there very little and ran away quickly. Not only did Voronezh turn out to be the cradle of contemporary Russian art, and there was no special information about it (here I tried to show some weighty books, but the teacher did not like it), but for some reason the philosophical thought was reduced to a single cosmism. Seemed like there was nothing interesting, neither before nor after. We were fully told about the cosmists, their personal lives and the graves of their followers. Why do I need only cosmism out of many fields of philosophy? God knows! They promised me a lot of hours of education, and they kept their promise. I had to listen to various lectures, read texts and do homework. Probably this institution would have allowed me to increase my knowledge, but it certainly would not have given me a system and understanding of the processes in art. Could I have made money out of it? Hardly. And would I have been able to keep up the conversation while sipping wine by the fireplace? Probably, yes, but for that an ordinary book will do just fine.
Not to …
