It is a great pity that for many the first of September is bound up with traumatic experience
It is a great pity that for many the first of September is bound up with traumatic experience. Plenty of far from stupid people will tell you, in one voice, that school was the most useless time of their lives; some even liken those ten or eleven years to captivity.
Not long ago, at a round table devoted to the start of the school year, I could not recall a single painful story from my own school years. I honestly tried to sift through my memory, down to the smallest episodes, but nothing stirred in me a wish to mount the rostrum to complain or condemn, to call anyone to account, to shed light on some hidden evil. On the contrary, what came back to me were things that could have been better understood, learnt thoroughly at once, or gone through a second time, only with greater diligence.
It is clear that for many, school years were anything but easy. We all differ in ability and character, in circumstances and surroundings, in the situation at home, in the level of prosperity and in the quality of the teaching staff at school. But we should not picture ourselves merely as hostages to external factors.
Let us agree that study, learning and development are truly difficult. And the very value of what study yields only confirms that the process of learning cannot be all that simple. Is anything good and important in this world ever boundlessly easy and within everyone's reach?
I do not know how many of my readers are schoolchildren at present. But each of us will have a few young acquaintances for whom school is not the past but the present. So I would ask you to be careful in what you say about this period. Careless abuse of school may install a stereotype in the minds of pupils who have not yet met such difficulties themselves.
Yes, everyone's experience is different, but no one's trauma, already suffered, should be turned into someone else's fear. And beyond all the conceivable, visible and audible difficulties, and at times even horrors, of school, there remains the indisputable benefit of universal schooling. However mistaken and wrong it may seem to you personally.
Whole eleven years are granted to us to acquire pupil's diligence and academic discipline, to form the skills of learning, to build social ties, not only horizontal but vertical ones, and of course to accumulate a baggage of knowledge. And if anyone speaks of useless knowledge, it should be sought not at school but, say, in discussions of the private lives of celebrities.
For how many years running were we told that knowledge is like bricks from which we can build a house ourselves? Naturally, if we do not lay those bricks in our school years, when willy-nilly we spend every day in the classroom, then it will only be harder afterwards to place the blocks of higher education on anything.
Why do we revile the school, where entirely free of charge we are able to go through a dozen teachers and mentors, find a favourite subject and learn something unexpected, yet listen with pleasure to lady bloggers explaining that, it turns out, one can make notes and mark important passages in a book? We dislike school textbooks, systematic and checked, yet we rejoice in scraps of information gleaned from the internet. We say it is impossible to remember all those figures and names, yet we effortlessly reel off musicians, their mistresses, album release dates and the prices of fashionable drops. We scold the tedious geography teacher, yet find our way among the names of resorts, coastlines and tourist destinations.
The matter lies not only in the school but in our attitude to it. As with any undertaking in life. So let us not whip up negativity around school with our whining: it is still, happily, compulsory in our country and meets the requirements of a single curriculum. Everyone, after all, loves courses of every kind and self-improvement in all its varieties; school does not merely give the very same thing, it expects you to ask it for it. If some people must inevitably pass through all the vicissitudes of the school path, would it not be better to walk that road without imposed prejudices, haughty distrust and a bias formed in advance?
