Following the example of the character in the story by A. P. Chekhov, some of them kept saying: "This cannot be, because this can never be."
Even 4 years after the appearance of the first satellite in near-earth space, these people refused to believe in the launch of Soviet manned spacecraft.
So, after the flight of German Titov, the editor-in-chief of the influential magazine US News & World Report, David Lawrence, claimed in his publications: there was a tape recorder with recordings of voices in the Vostok-2 spacecraft, which were broadcast on the radio and passed off as negotiations between the cosmonaut and the flight control panel.
At the same time, sober Americans came to the conclusion that their country lagged behind the Soviet Union in a number of important areas of science and technology, and this lag was the result of inattention to the development of education in the United States.
American educators flocked to our country trying to learn more about the Soviet education system. They were forced to admit that the Soviet school curriculum provides for a much deeper study of mathematics, physics, chemistry and other sciences than in American schools.
Following the Soviet example, more scientific disciplines were introduced in American schools.
However, some American scientists saw that the difference between the two countries in preparing the younger generation for an independent life is not limited to the number of lessons on algebra, geometry, physics.
Among them was Professor Uri Bronfenbrenner. The challenge he set for himself was formulated on the cover of his book: “Americans and Russians have two different approaches to children's education.
Promotional video:
The Russian education system produces more educated children and they become better citizens. Why?"
W. Bronfenbrenner outlined his answer in the book "Two Worlds of Childhood: the USA and the USSR". Although this book was first published in 1970, its content is relevant to our time, when the consequences of the destruction of the Soviet system of raising children and the imposition of Western standards of social life have become apparent.
Uri Bronfenbrenner's journey through the world of Soviet childhood
As a real scientist, Professor Bronfenbrenner has conscientiously worked out numerous studies on the methods of education and upbringing of Soviet children.
In his book, he referred to the manuals of prominent Soviet teachers. Their recommendations were introduced into the practice of educational work. The professor paid special attention to the works of A. S. Makarenko, which he highly appreciated and which formed the basis of Soviet pedagogy.
Bronfenbrenner's book lists the main areas of educational work outlined in manuals for teachers and educators.
Parenting tasks for children from 7 to 11 years old included "understanding what good and bad behavior is." (The professor did not mention the corresponding poem by Mayakovsky, which was known to all Soviet children.)
The following were listed:
“Truthfulness, honesty, kindness. Atheism: Science Against Prejudice. Self-discipline. Diligence in work and care of property. Friendship with schoolmates. Love for your area and your homeland.
Interest and craving for knowledge and work skills. Studying diligently. Organization of mental and physical work. The desire to apply their knowledge and abilities in life and work. Accuracy. Politeness and cordiality.
Decent behavior on the street and in public. Cultural speech. Awareness of the beauty in nature, human behavior and creative art. Artistic creativity. Taking care of strengthening your own body.
Compliance with standards of sanitation and hygiene. Sports and Physical Education . (Since this text from Bronfenbrenner's book is a translation from English, some formulations taken by the professor from the Russian original may contain inaccuracies. - Author's note)
U. Bronfenbrenner illustrated his book with drawings from manuals for the education of Octobrists.
One of the drawings for young children showed a boy helping his little sister dress up. The inscription under the picture read: "Why is Fedya considered a good brother?" Obviously, the children, having looked at the picture, should have answered this question.
In another picture, the mother clearly scolded the boy and praised the girl who had just entered the apartment. Unlike her brother, the girl wiped her feet in front of the doorstep.
The professor included in the book five rules for october:
1. The October Revolutions are the future pioneers.
2. The October Revolutionaries are diligent, study well, love school, respect adults.
3. Only those who love work are called october.
4. The October Revolutionaries are honest and truthful guys.
5. The October Revolutionaries are good friends, they read, draw and live happily."
The book included photocopies of posters illustrating the 10 Commandments of the Pioneer. Under the first poster, which depicted the pioneers in formation under the pioneer banner, was the signature: "The pioneer honors the memory of those who gave their lives in the struggle for the freedom and prosperity of the Soviet Motherland."
The second poster depicted a boy of Slavic appearance with a red tie around his neck. To his left was a girl who looked like a Chinese woman, also with a red tie. On the right is a black boy. He also had a red tie. The caption read: "The pioneer is friends with children from all over the world."
On the third poster, a pioneer with chalk in hand stood at the blackboard and wrote the numbers of an arithmetic problem. This drawing illustrated the commandment "A Pioneer Study Diligently, Disciplined, and Polite."
On the fourth poster, a pioneer and a pioneer were at the machine and wielded with some tools. The inscription read: "The pioneer loves to work and protects the people's property."
On the fifth poster, a boy with a red tie was reading a book to the kid, on the cover of which was written: "Tales." From the caption to the poster it followed: "A pioneer is a good friend, takes care of the younger, helps the elders."
A dramatic scene was depicted on the sixth poster: a woman fell into an ice hole, and a pioneer, holding a stick in his hands, helped her get out onto the ice. The poster read: "The pioneer grows bold and is not afraid of difficulties."
The conflict situation was captured by the seventh poster. A boy in a school uniform with a red tie was talking hotly, pointing his finger at a clearly embarrassed classmate. There was a portrait of Pavlik Morozov on the wall behind the young speaker. The caption read: "The pioneer speaks the truth, he values the honor of his squad."
U. Bronefenbrenner briefly told the story of Pavlik Morozov and how he and his younger brother were killed by fists.
The half-naked boy smiled cheerfully as he rubbed his back with a towel. This drawing illustrated the eighth pioneer commandment: "A pioneer strengthens himself, does physical exercises every day."
The ninth poster showed a smiling pioneer woman holding a white rabbit in her arms. There were trees and bushes to the girl's left. The poster read: "The pioneer loves nature, he is the defender of green spaces, useful birds and animals."
Most of the drawings were on the tenth poster. In addition to the pioneer and the pioneer, various scenes were depicted here, which were supposed to illustrate the tenth commandment: "A pioneer is an example for everyone!"
Bronfenbrenner also cited the tasks that were set for adolescents from 16 to 18 years old:
“Collectivism, loyalty to duty, honor and conscience, strengthening of willpower, patience, endurance. Communist attitude towards labor and social property. Socialist humanism. Soviet patriotism and proletarian internationalism.
Understanding the social significance of education. Perseverance and initiative in the classroom. Strengthening one's strength in mental activity (improving the planning of one's own work, developing work skills, self-criticism, etc.).
Assimilation of the norms of socialist community. Good manners and good public conduct. Aesthetic perception of nature, social life and works of art. Maximum development of physical skills. Mastering the rules of personal hygiene and sanitary standards. Physical education and participation in sports. Mastering the skills of tourism in the bosom of nature”.
But the professor did not confine himself to studying the theory, pedagogical instructions and visual aids for the Octobrists and pioneers. For several years, W. Bronfenbrenner attended nurseries, kindergartens, schools, and out-of-school work institutions in cities and villages of several Soviet republics.
He attended meetings of teachers' councils and school lessons, at meetings of councils of pioneer detachments and at Komsomol meetings.
What the professor observed was so unlike America that he tried to describe in as much detail as possible the peculiarities of the upbringing of Soviet children, unusual for his country.
Sometimes the professor did not have enough English words to accurately describe the Soviet methods of dealing with children.
The professor was forced to write in Latin letters the word "education", which has no complete analogue in American life. Bronfenbrenner paid special attention to the labor education of children and adolescents.
He said that in Soviet kindergartens, children's games are aimed at acquainting them with the various activities of adults. Children "treated" the dolls, played in the "store". In addition to games, kindergarten students took part in the maintenance of the garden plot.
This upbringing continued at school. Bronfenbrenner detailed the responsibilities of the classroom attendant and illustrated this list with appropriate photographs.
W. Bronfenbrenner stated that not only parents and schools, but also extracurricular institutions and mass organizations of children and adolescents were engaged in the upbringing of Soviet children.
The professor was surprised to find that in the country that the United States portrayed as a prison, the children did not look like tortured prisoners.
Bronfenbrenner accompanied his photograph, which captured five plump and smiling toddlers, with the caption: “Judging by their appearance, babies thrive in a“regime”.
The upbringing was carried out mainly by conviction. The professor was struck by the affectionate tone with which the educators addressed children in nurseries and kindergartens. He noted the melodious intonation with which the children read books or the texts of film strips.
Bronfenbrenner wrote about “the positive attitude of children and the whole society towards teachers. This positive orientation is maintained throughout the school years.
Teachers are perceived as a friend. There is nothing unusual in the fact that after school hours you can see a teacher surrounded by chatting kids who came to a play, concert, circus performance, or just went for a collective walk …
Although, of course, there are exceptions, the relationship between children and teachers in the USSR can be characterized as friendly respect."
The professor was especially delighted by the holiday of September 1, during which children gave flowers to teachers, and in the morning neatly dressed children walked the streets with bouquets of flowers in their hands.
A friendly attitude towards teachers and their students dominated the atmosphere of Soviet society. The American professor showed a warm attitude towards children from personal experience.
More than once, bystanders on the street smiled at his son, and sometimes offered their advice to parents on how to take care of their child. The advice was unsolicited and not always successful, but it came from a pure heart.
Sometimes the warmth of feelings that passersby felt for the child amazed the professor, who was accustomed to the restrained behavior of people on the city streets of the United States.
The professor recalled how one day, walking down the street, he met a group of teenagers with his wife and his two-year-old son. To the surprise of the professor, they ran up to their offspring with the words: "That's it baby!" - and began to hug him in turn.
Bronfenbrenner was sure that if this happened in the United States, the teenagers would be taken to a psychiatrist. But by this time Bronfenbenner had already realized that the atmosphere in the Soviet country was different from the one in which he was used to living and working.
What was the professor concerned about?
Like a true American, Uri Bronfenbrenner meticulously collected information for practical purposes. Of course, the professor did not think that American kids would observe the five rules of the October and the ten commandments of the pioneers.
He did not think that someday American educators would talk affectionately with their students. He did not imagine that unfamiliar Americans would run up to children and hug them affectionately.
However, the experience of raising Soviet children convinced Bronfenbrenner that Soviet children are more diligent students and become more reliable citizens of their country, because from the first years of their life they are shown what is good, with convincing examples.
The professor cited many psychological experiments, which showed that children and adolescents are "infected" with positive examples much more readily than negative ones. The professor wanted the Americans to carefully study the Soviet example to solve the problems of the youth of their country, which became acute by the beginning of the 70s.
The baby boom that began in the United States after 1945 meant a sharp increase in childbearing. The great crisis that hit the United States since late 1929, and then World War II, left Americans in no hurry to start families.
It was only after peace reigned and the economy stabilized that the number of marriages and then childbirths increased sharply.
American industry focused on new consumers increased the production of goods for children, and then teenagers, diligently fueling consumer needs in the young people of the country for the necessary and not necessarily necessary products.
The childhood and adolescence of baby boomers coincided with the spread of television in the United States. From two to five years old, the average American child watched 5,000 hours of television.
Children devoured endless TV series and TV commercials. Sociologist Landon Jones wrote that baby boomers first learned the word "washing powder", and only then "dad" and "mom." Uri Bronfenbrenner considered television series and television commercials to be the most important weapons in destroying the minds of American youth.
Trying to please their long-awaited children, charged with the appeal of TV advertising, their parents often worked two jobs or overtime.
Calculations showed that the average American father in the 60s spent an average of about 10 minutes a day talking with his children. To get mothers in slum Harlem to be considerate of their children, social workers paid the mothers to read books to their children.
But a considerable part of the children were left unattended and without supervision. In August 1982, Readers Digest magazine reported that up to 100,000 children and adolescents disappear in the United States every year.
"Cars, guns and silver can be registered, tracked down and returned easier than children," the magazine admitted. “Apparently, children are not that important to us,” stated Ken Wooden, director of the National Coalition for a Fair Treatment of Children.
The outdated US education system provided children with a lighter education, but even these simplified programs were getting worse for schoolchildren.
Since 1963, American schools have seen a steady drop in average grades in the course of passing the so-called school skills test, which made it possible to assess the level of proficiency in speech, writing, and mathematics.
The test was taken by 2/3 of all applicants entering higher education institutions. To enroll in universities, applicants were forced to take special additional courses.
Not too burdensome schooling was combined with the absence in the United States of a system for educating the younger generation. Children and adolescents left without the attention of parents and school teachers were united in informal groups.
The leaders of such groups were often guys with asocial and criminal inclinations. According to the National Institute of Education, in the mid-1970s, 282,000 schoolchildren and 6,000 teachers were subjected to physical violence every month.
Drug addiction quickly spread among informal youth groups. Drug use has become the norm among the student body. When I spoke in October 1977 to students at Ohio State University, I was asked the question: "Will the USSR be punished for possession of marijuana?"
My positive response caused a storm of indignation. Over time, the problem of drug addiction among American youth only worsened. To stem the rise in drug addiction and crime, American society, so proud of its freedoms, has embarked on a path of expanding police measures and prison sentences.
Currently, the United States, which accounts for about 6% of the world's population, accounts for a quarter of all prisoners in prisons around the world.
Bronfenbrenner emphasized that educating young people in youth groups is a sure way to moral, intellectual and spiritual degradation. At the same time, he referred to Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, whose young heroes quickly run wild, finding themselves without adults on a desert island.
The Soviet system of upbringing children and adolescents seemed to the professor a saving beacon for solving the problems of American youth.
Which way did Russia go?
Even in the course of the struggle for the establishment of a counter-revolutionary capitalist system, the "foremen of perestroika" took a course to support informal youth groups that began to appear everywhere like mushrooms after rain.
TV reporters willingly invited young people to the studio, who demanded to provide them with premises, funding, and often ideological support. Without any clear program, the informals demonstrated their opposition to everything Soviet, which attracted the "foremen of perestroika".
The destruction of everything Soviet led to the elimination of those institutions that the American professor admired. In the very first months after the ban of the Communist Party in the country, the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth Union, the Pioneer and Octobrist organizations were disbanded.
There is no doubt that in these organizations there was a lot of outdated, a lot of formalism that stifled living principles. However, the necessary improvement of children's and adolescent organizations should not have led to their destruction.
The liquidation of children's and adolescent organizations created conditions conducive to the degradation of youth. While the organizations were guided by high social ideals, and they were led by people with considerable life experience and deep knowledge, they served the intellectual and spiritual growth of young people.
Of course, in the lives of children and adolescents there is a need to be without an adult mentor.
However, even to drive a motorcycle or run after a soccer ball, mature masters will better teach than the peers of young bikers or football players.
Isolation from a positive example and guidance from the more experienced and worldly wise inevitably leads to an orientation towards limited knowledge and defective morality, the squalor of which in the informal gang is covered up with profanity and hooligan behavior, vicious addictions.
The rapid spread of drug addiction, alcoholism among young people, the growth of crime - these are the consequences of our country's introduction to Western "civilization". There is no doubt that many Russian teachers are still fighting for the souls of children and adolescents.
There are organizations of children and adolescents in the country that remain faithful to good traditions. However, these efforts are opposed by those who are interested in further decaying our youth.
The collapse of the Soviet system was accompanied by the introduction of tools into our life, which, according to Bronfenbrenner, especially contributed to the disintegration of the consciousness of the younger generation.
Endless TV shows about adultery, bloody fights, sophisticated poisoning, burning and dismemberment of corpses are interrupted only to convince viewers to wash their hair with a certain shampoo, eat sausages of a certain brand, and use the services of certain telephone companies.
What positive role models does television offer us? Day after day we get to know the life of actors, often of secondary importance, and their many wives, the division of property.
If we are shown programs about famous Soviet art workers, then only in order to tell tales about how they suffered and suffered during the Soviet years. We learn about the complex family relationships of completely undistinguished people, for which DNA tests are used to unravel.
The content of the overwhelming majority of TV programs is quite harmful. But the form of this television production is no better.
Among self-respecting people, it is not customary to repeat the same joke several times. Even a good joke, which is so rare in TV commercials, is repeated dozens of times throughout the day. Then it is repeated from day to day.
The plot of the TV series is very similar to the plots of other series. Series with different characters are a lot like other series. The stamping of plots and images leads to the fact that viewers quickly forget the content of the next episodes.
Look like twins and numerous talk shows. Continuous repetition inevitably leads to dullness. The brain ceases to accept new information, to operate with original observations and deep thoughts.
The advent of the World Wide Web, which did not yet exist at the time of the publication of Bronfenbrenner's book, did not lead to the liberation of humanity from the destructive forces that dominate most of the media.
Like television, the World Wide Web offers us, among the most important news of the day, messages about the lives of TV stars. At the same time, the Internet opened up space for informals. Any user of social networks can put on public display a detailed story about himself, accompanied by photographs and videos.
The informal got the opportunity to brazenly and aggressively express his primitive judgments in a semi-literate dialect, which he passes off as the great Russian language.
Owners of computers and smartphones have learned to quickly find a variety of information on the World Wide Web, passing it off as their own compositions.
After reading the essay of one student, I said that I had two questions for him: “What is the difference between cyclical crises and stage crises? How old were you in 1996? The student was unable to distinguish between crises, but answered me that he was one year old in 1996.
Then I said to him: “But you write:“In 1996 I discovered the difference between cyclical and stage-by-stage crises”. The student did not even bother to read the work of an economist, which he presented as his own creation.
Having received innumerable information riches at their disposal, many young people, not possessing systematic knowledge, are not able to master the treasures that open before them.
The graduate students of the institute with an international bias, in which I teach the course, usually have little knowledge of geography and history. When asked where Honduras is located, I received the answer: "South of Moscow …" The student immediately corrected herself:
"Oh, I confused with Karaganda." Another student insisted that Iran borders on Kazakhstan. To my question, what is the name of the current leader of the People's Republic of China, no one answered for a long time until I heard a timid whisper: "Mao Zedong?"
Once I told about a superdeep well, the drilling of which was suspended after the collapse of the Soviet regime.
I added: "True, some say that the well was closed because voices from the depths of hell began to be heard." And suddenly one student exclaimed indignantly: "Don't you believe this ?!" None of the students condemned this question, and I found another example of wildness in the digital age.
***
A couple of decades ago, on the occasion of Victory Day, a meeting of the institute where I worked was held. Former front-line soldier, and then Doctor of Historical Sciences Alexander Galkin told how he and his comrades participated in the liberation of Soviet lands.
Speaking about the destruction of cities and the devastation of villages, A. Galkin unexpectedly remarked: “An acquaintance with children and adolescents, who during the occupation did not have the opportunity to attend schools, be pioneers, and Komsomol members, left no less painful impression. After all, a whole generation was deprived of education and upbringing for three years!"
The damage inflicted on our country since the early 1990s exceeds in scale the devastation described by the war veteran.
In addition to the factories that stopped working, the ruined collective and state farms, the decline in the birth rate, the consciousness of the younger generation suffered a heavy loss.
The contrast between the USSR and the USA in raising children, described by the American professor, allowed him to name his book "The Two Worlds of Childhood." Now, no less deep contrast can be seen when comparing the world of the rising generation of the USSR and modern Russia.
Yuri Emelyanov