“Why do I need a panty pattern?”: what is worth remembering on the Day of necessary and unnecessary knowledge

In the early stages – grade up to the fifth – the school was, it seems to me, quite effective. However, my grandmother taught me how to read. But I still liked studying at school according to the primer. Such beautiful red letters! Such vibrant drawings! Such memorable phrases: “Masha is smart”, “Mom washed Lara”, “Our Roma is small”!

But, to be honest, the first bell (not the first of September, but the bell of fate) rang already then, in elementary school, at a spelling lesson. I was told that my hand was unsteady, the letters were crooked and ugly, “it’s disgusting to look at.”

And soon the first “deuce” happened – in drawing. Wow, I still remember that drawing where my watercolors spread. It was necessary to paint over something with different colors, but it turned out to be a brown-red puddle. The real “twos”, those in the magazine, were not put on us then. But the art teacher announced in front of everyone that I was “two”. And look at my daub again disgusting.

Years passed before I learned that there were numerous pedagogical teachings, that not only great politicians, writers and scientists, but also great teachers remained in history, that the book “I give my heart to children” that stood on our shelf at home was written by V.A. Sukhomlinsky about the teacher’s life choice. Now, having 40 years of teaching experience, I understand how wrong it is to tell a student about his shortcomings from the threshold, to inspire him that he is mediocre, even if he does not demonstrate special abilities in one area or another. What prevented the art teacher from, firstly, simply teaching me how to use watercolor and, secondly, talking to the class about the fact that some artistic movements value harmony above all else, while others value chaos, that the black and red spot I got can be desire to interpret artistically?

But no, over the years, more and more teachers became “disgusted to look” at the results of my student work – the pattern of underpants, the solution of a problem in physics, and especially how I jump over the “goat”. I think it was really terrible. But I really wanted approval and support!

In addition, over time, I was more and more tormented by the question: why? Why learn to cut panties? Even in the conditions of the Soviet deficit, none of my acquaintances sewed underwear for themselves. Why perform feats in a physical education lesson and why can’t you choose a feasible option for physical activity? Why solve problems about some kind of frightening “body” that is thrown up, then lowered from the mountain?

In elementary school, as I said, there were many useful things. I still remember that they pass the bus and trolleybus from the back, and the tram – from the front, that indoor plants do not need to be watered in direct sunlight. Yes, and I regularly put a period at the end of a sentence – unlike many of my students today. But as we moved to middle school, and even more so to high school, educational knowledge became more and more obviously detached from reality. And when random “meetings of the worlds” took place, for us, the students, it turned out to be a shock. In the sixth grade, we solved a problem in the lesson in which it was required to find out what percentage of the meat would be boiled down when preparing the broth. Some of the excellent students who quickly made calculations got 90%. All the rest were written off together. And I thought about it. I won’t say that I already knew how to cook then, but I willingly helped my mother in the kitchen. Therefore, I remembered which piece of meat is put in the pan and which one is taken out of it ready-made. And it was clear to me that it would hardly be worth it to cook meat at all, from which there would be almost nothing left by the end of cooking. I didn’t know how to solve problems, but I realized that my comrades had mixed up: 90% is not what will be boiled down, but what will remain. It seems that I managed to convince the guys of this, and we coped with the task perfectly. But I was left wondering: why are we almost never asked such questions, why are percentages, proportions and other mathematical things not explained using simple everyday examples?

The school was a world of triumphant theory. The geography lessons were also dominated by some calculations of latitude and longitude inaccessible to me, but nothing really was said about travel. Not so long ago, a witty guide drew our attention to such a paradox: the school hammered into the heads of graduates the knowledge of how to find the north when lost in the forest. Yes, the moss on the tree trunks will be on the north side. Only it is absolutely incomprehensible, the guide continued his reasoning, that this knowledge will give us. Why do you need north if you have no idea where you are?

It turns out something like an allegory of secondary education. Here you graduated, capable and conscientious, school. I learned how to draw a sleeve in a section, I remembered the date of the Battle of Kulikovo, you square and cube numbers correctly, you distinguish latitude from longitude. And they tell you, as in the old joke: “That’s understandable. What can you do? To which you probably proudly answer: “Jump over the goat!”

What would I like to be able to do after graduation? Write smartly. Well, with this, thank God, everything is in order: I had the best teacher of Russian language and literature. Speak correctly and expressively in your native language, and not give out tirades like: “I’m like that, in short, I’m going, like …” I don’t complain about oratory skills either, but I shouldn’t thank the school for them. Type text on the computer, quickly working with ten fingers. Hooray, I can: they taught me in the so-called “training and production plant.”

The following are just a few examples of what the school did not prepare me for personally. Perform simple but useful calculations in everyday life. Adequately imagine a map of the world and a map of your country, so as not to confuse, like some of today’s students, Krasnodar with Krasnoyarsk. Bandage and injections. Prepare simple meals. Carefully sew on buttons and darn. Drive.

I understand that in some schools some of these skills are taught to students. But I’m talking about principle. Ten years is a very, very long time! It’s a shame that most often, having lived through them, we are just beginning to learn what we really need.

However, here I have to start contradicting myself. From year to year, I myself, as a university teacher, endure a kind of “battle for theory”. After all, before I start training future journalists in style and literary editing, I try to hammer general information about the language into their heads. And among the students there are always rebels who say: “I don’t need this!” It is practically impossible for them to prove that knowledge of such concepts as “polysemy” or “predicativity” is of some importance even for someone who already feels like a shark of the pen and ether. I give lengthy exhortations, talking about how detailed knowledge of one’s own instrument distinguishes a professional from an amateur, and that grammatical analysis contributes to the development of logical thinking. But sometimes in these moments, a set of other terms treacherously appears on the periphery of consciousness: “sine”, “cosine”, “integral”, “congruence” … Mathematics teachers also sought to improve my logical thinking, which was “disgusting to look at”.

Yes, the school has to solve the most difficult of tasks – to look for a golden mean. On the one hand, not to turn into “cutting and sewing courses”, to continue to form in students not only a set of skills, but also a general idea of ​​the world, to develop thinking, which, of course, cannot be done without completely abandoning any theory whatsoever. On the other hand, do not get bogged down in abstractions that are completely divorced from reality.

It seems to me that there is only one way here – training in working with information. For what am I still grateful to the school, despite the “pattern of panties” and tasks about the falling “body”? In search of the necessary information, I was taught to rely on specialized literature, make extracts, draw up notes, select examples and quotations, build reasoning – and all this allows me today to freely navigate the Internet, which did not exist then. School in the highest sense of the word is the development of the process of information retrieval with mandatory criticism of the source. If you have gone through a good school, then you simply cannot physically copy pieces of text of unknown origin from some garbage site. The school, no matter how trite it may sound, is designed to form a common culture and supplement it with a set of useful technologies.

So Happy Knowledge Day, dear schoolchildren – former, present and future! Happy Lost Knowledge Day, which you still have to fight for if you want to survive in a world of fierce competition. And with the Day of “as if no one needs” knowledge that you should not rush to reject. Maybe some of them just make a person out of you.