Two arms of one rocker: in modern pedagogy it is necessary to combine traditions and innovation

The passage of time is rapid. Modern civilization has literally gone haywire. Progress, along with obvious technical achievements, gives rise to new threats and challenges. Among them are the problems of cloning, artificial intelligence, the growing terrorist threat and many others. It should be recalled that today, due to the development of technology, a compact nuclear device can be manufactured in a small laboratory. The same applies to toxic substances, one gram of which is enough to destroy an entire city.

Scary! This makes me want to return to the good old days, when, it seems, everything was so predictable and calm. “Down with threatening progress, back to the archaic!” – a slogan that many people of my generation profess. After all, in “our” time the water was wetter and the trees were greener. Alas, it won’t work. The situation was brilliantly described by the great masters of words back in the last century, in particular B. Pasternak:

Around the bend, in the depths

forest ravine,

The future is ready for me

More than a deposit.

You can’t drag him into an argument anymore

And you won’t get it.

It’s wide open like a forest

Everything deep, everything wide open.

There is really no point in arguing with the future. You can’t “smooth over” it, you can’t slow it down with empty incantations about the need to hold on to traditions with your hands and teeth. Neural networks and artificial intelligence are already a reality from which you cannot hide or escape. Learning to use these achievements of progress for the benefit of the child and adolescent is a new difficult task that the teacher will have to solve. Where to go when even fifth graders have their own telegram channels and blogs today? A dozen years ago, when asked “what do you want to be?”, girls most often answered: a doctor, a teacher. But at the end of last year, one fifth-grader wrote: blogger.

But are traditions and innovation really so incompatible? When fanatical supporters of progress tell me that the lesson as a form of teaching is outdated, I invariably answer that the wheel is even older, but for some reason modern machines continue to use it. But at the same time, airplanes and drones appeared, not to mention the Internet, which entangled our small planet. Hence the conclusion: you can preserve traditions and be open to innovation. It’s like two arms of a rocker that must be kept in balance so as not to splash the water and throw out the baby with it.

In other words, the alternative between modernization and tradition is false. If only she was alone. Due to the specifics of the profession and the current civilizational situation, it is perhaps more difficult for teachers than for everyone else. In an age when ten commandments are no longer enough, 110 commandments are needed, because the Bible says nothing about artificial insemination, surrogacy, cloning, and educators have to make moral decisions at their own risk. There is a revaluation of values. Let’s wait until everything settles down. But a school is not a supermarket that can be temporarily closed for revaluation of goods. You have to work with children here and now.

Among the false alternatives is the opposition between freedom and personal responsibility. In fact, what is the ultimate goal of our training and education? What kind of personality are we called to develop? A creative, free person, capable of making non-standard decisions? Or a clear, reliable performer who works strictly according to the rules? Alas, wittingly or unwittingly, people confuse the concepts of “freedom” and “liberty”. Liberty or self-will is when a free man has his way, but a drunk man can do what I want.

True freedom is inseparable from responsibility and self-restraint. Which is all the more important because the resources of our planet are not limitless. Therefore, we will need creative people who are capable of self-restraint. Or, in church language, to asceticism. Hence, the strategic task of training and education (these tasks are inseparable) is the coordinated growth of freedom and responsibility of the individual.

The task of responding to these global challenges facing humanity leads to the need to consider false alternatives facing the professional teaching community.

In particular, another false choice is the opposition between the need for fundamental subject training of a teacher and the formation of the necessary psychological and pedagogical competencies.

As you know, progress has two sides: light and shadow. Advances in medicine have led to the fact that today we can save even five-hundred-gram premature babies in special flasks. And soon four hundred and fifty grams will become the norm. And this is right, because you have to fight for any life. But at the same time we are faced with the formidable problem of genetic fatigue, since natural selection has been disrupted. Five-hundred-gram children will give birth to the next ones – even weaker ones. In other words, each next generation will be more frail than the previous one. I’m not even talking about the fact that modern information overload in children leads to an increase in neuropsychic pathologies. Consequently, today in schools we are dealing with a huge number of children with disabilities. How to respond to this challenge?

You can be an excellent specialist in the field of chemistry, physics, mathematics or history, but without the teacher mastering new psychological and pedagogical competencies, the process of teaching and raising children will not be possible. All these new competencies that teachers will have to master are enshrined in the new professional standard for teachers, which came into force at the beginning of the school year.

The idea of ​​​​developing and implementing a new professional standard for a teacher was born as a result of the objective need to respond to the challenges and threats of our time. But the very first publications of his project gave rise to another false alternative. This is creativity versus craft.

The authors were accused that the proposed standard fetters the freedom of creativity of the teacher, limits his activities to rigid boundaries and revives authoritarian-command pedagogy. In reality, everything is different. As an example, I’ll use an analogy from figure skating. We all admire the performance of our stars in the free program, where they demonstrate incredible jumps and complex lifts. But before moving on to creativity, athletes undergo a test, working through a compulsory program (school), where their professional competencies are tested. Why is this analogy appropriate? Because it so happens that many of our teachers reinvent the wheel and are surprised that it does not move at the speed of a Mercedes. The professional standard of a teacher is accepted in many civilized countries, where no one considers it as a limiter of freedom.

These are the complex tasks that schools will have to solve as the new academic year begins. In solving them, we, teachers, need to rely on the understanding of fathers and mothers, grandparents. The whole world needs to act here.