Greetings, Khabravians and site guests!
I'll start with gratitude for Habr. Thank you.
I learned about Habré in 2007. I read it. I was even planning to write my thoughts on some burning issue, but I found myself at a time when it was impossible to do this “just like that” (possibly and most likely I was wrong).
Then, as a student at one of the leading universities in the country with a degree in Physical Electronics, I could not imagine where the path of fate would lead. And she took me to school. An ordinary general education school, albeit a gymnasium.
When choosing a hub for publication, I settled on the “Educational Process in IT” hub, although I am writing, rather, about “IT in the Educational Process.”
What brought me to the School were considerations that seemed strange at first glance. In 2008, thinking about the future, I looked around and was somehow not inspired by the system (if there was/is one at all) of the microelectronics industry/infrastructure in Russia. Moreover, I already had a short-term internship behind me at an existing enterprise for the production of electronic components. Around this time, striving for financial independence from his parents, he began to earn “his own money.” Tutoring in mathematics, physics, and computer science was most suitable at that time. Just when tutoring “application pools” began to develop, the Unified State Exam was introduced, which somewhat tore the “feeding troughs” away from schools and threw these same “feeding troughs” to be devoured, including by tutors. In general, I fell in line, as they say.
After graduating from university in 2010, I got a job as a development engineer trainee (how romantic that sounded!) at the above-mentioned company. Gradually, “coming down to earth” and feeling a certain “lifelessness” (at that time) and financial futility of their professional position (many books and articles have been written about the colossal greed coupled with the equally colossal incompetence of my generation), they gradually moved away from engineering and approached educational, training.
An absurd thought flashed through my mind: “We shouldn’t start with factories. We need to start from school.” I managed to think so. As it turned out, if you start, you need to start even earlier, reaching the parents who were children themselves, etc., i.e. the process is endless...
But it is what it is, and here, welcome - School!
Moreover, I was lucky enough to be born a man (a very “scarce product” in the modern Russian School), especially since I always loved to study myself.
At the same time, it was no coincidence that I mentioned my avid visits to Habr in the late 2000s. Since childhood, I have been partial to IT. These first impressions of the computer at my father’s work - my father sometimes took me with him and allowed me to delve into a PC with Windows 95 (those tempting red crosses on the “windows” that you could open a whole lot of, and then close with pleasure, this “minesweeper” "with always, for some reason, an unpredictable result, this incomprehensible "scarf" into which for some reason my father's colleagues were "chopped", some incomprehensible paper ribbons...). All this aroused terrible interest and awe of the “mysterious machine.”
The next episode is related to the summer with my grandmother in the village, where I spent time with a library book on the history of programming. Then I learned about Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, Conrad Zuse, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Douglas Engelbard and many many other classics and pioneers of IT (reading now a book about IT in the USSR, I understand that the summer source was far from complete!) .
Yes, being a bright (in terms of material greed) representative of his generation, he was probably attracted by the huge salaries that IT workers receive. But still, gradually growing up and setting priorities, I began to better understand what is really important in life. Enormous salaries in IT (relative to the average values on the labor market) have become an indicator of the relevance and importance of the IT sector today and in the near future. Constant interaction with children injected the above-mentioned “vitality” into the work and set priorities (between creating a future educated generation and a huge income - few would call working in a modern School profitable, at least today).
Observations collected over the past 10 years of tutoring and teaching activities, persistent and strong interest in IT, allow us to conclude that the situation is unsatisfactory, if not catastrophic, in the modern educational process.
If we follow the thoughts of the classic educator John Dewey, and consider education “not preparation for life, but life itself,” then our modern education system (if we approach it systematically, excluding the pleasant and inspiring examples of some Schools) is not life. And the ability of our modern students to learn is dead.
It’s clear why I mention life and IT together. Today, IT has penetrated and continues to penetrate even deeper into almost all areas of our lives. And this is “almost” where IT has not yet penetrated - this is our education system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging or blaming anyone. I am sure that those who make decisions about what the education system should be and will be in the near future sincerely want improvements and perfection of the Russian education system. I'm just stating a fact.
Today, a school teacher is a “backward creature” in the eyes of a student, a man of the Stone Age, who not only won’t “post a tutorial on TikTok or Insta” in order to become some kind of “crush,” but he can’t even always use the capabilities of his phone (and sometimes the computer appears to the teacher as an “unknown creature” or a “black box”).
And if a student has not received a proper upbringing in the family and has not learned to respect a person, regardless of his qualities and manifestations (a rare adult student has this ability), then such a teacher will have problems with authority, to put it mildly. And those students who turned out to be better educated will not be able to get what they could if their teacher had developed IT competence.
And it’s not even a matter of age (not that the teachers are “over forty” and “have never even seen computers”), nor the practical collapse/absence of the IT industry after the 1970s in the USSR and then Russia. It's about our attitude. The desire and ability to learn. In curiosity, after all, which Isaac Asimov and Richard Feynman and many other authoritative inhabitants of our planet spoke and wrote about.
The teacher, along with the parent, also becomes an involuntary educator. And “the teacher himself must be what he wants the student to be” (Vladimir Dal). “Education lies in the fact that the older generation passes on its experience, its passion, its beliefs to the younger generation” (Anton Makarenko). It “begins with his birth; a person does not yet speak, does not yet listen, but is already learning” (Jean Jacques Rousseau). Education is very important, “the well-being of the whole people depends on the proper education of children” (John Locke).
And pertinent questions arise. Are we really what we want our student to be? What experience are we passing on to him and how relevant will it be to him at the time in which he and not we will live? Are we really sure that the main skill in 20-30 years will be the ability to write beautifully or correctly calculate the results of arithmetic operations?
Will we even write and count at this time? or, as some experts argue, will we already download information directly into the brain, bypassing these rudimentary actions?
It's time to wake up, dear gentlemen, comrades or citizens, as you wish. Otherwise, we risk ruining the lives of our future generations. “Otherwise we will leave our great-grandchildren in the cold,” Vladimir Vysotsky sang about a possible war (at that time this was more than relevant), and this can easily be attributed to our topic.
And a long-standing national question arises - “What to do?”
This is exactly what, if this issue turns out to be interesting and relevant for you, we will discuss in the following publications.
With sincere desire for high quality Russian education with the obligatory participation of IT and with best wishes to the Habra community,
Ruslan Pronkin
Source: habr.com