style="font-size:15px;"> Analyst, Positive Changes Factory
What are the most common requests parents ask you as a consultant?
I can quote the most popular query: "Help me find a school that will help my child get into a prestigious university on his/her own.” Few parents actually come in asking for "a school that will develop a personality." This is mentioned sometimes, but this is not really a popular demand. In short, most parents are just focused on academic knowledge. I think we are observing a substantial shift of our value system towards academic skills. I attribute this primarily to the fact that free education is currently leaving the market. Applicants have to compete hard to get a state-funded place at the university. We are not yet ready to accept this future expense as inevitable and to plan this as part of the process of raising a child. Accordingly, parents have a great deal of anxiety about whether they will be able to provide their children with a decent higher education.
In your opinion, what knowledge, skills, and abilities does a student need to develop now, because they will be needed in the near future?
In my opinion, the School of the Future should take care of the child’s health first and foremost. This is something today’s system misses altogether – a culture of mental and physical health. I’ve only seen one school that at least had an articulated approach to managing the students’ health resources.
Physical health is the place to start, obviously: who you are, what you are, how your body functions, what healthy sleeping, eating and socializing is. In some schools, this comes in the early forms of some emotional intelligence courses or communication workshops. I mean, some schools are doing this, but we cannot talk about widespread implementation. Because it is closely tied to the infrastructure.
What kind of infrastructure should be created for a health school?
The school should have exciting recreational areas, sports halls, 3D physical education equipment, and sensory rooms. Too many children today are susceptible to sensory overload, children with ASD, who need these spaces. It is a story about a child being able to learn whether or not he or she wants to be friends with their body.
I am not just talking about physical culture, I am talking about a culture of health. It is great when kids can learn to cook in school, for example. And not just to cook, but also can learn about the peculiarities of cooking. But then again, I have not seen this as an integral element anywhere. Some schools have workshops, kitchens, children learning to cook, but, for example, they do not understand why they do it, what it is about, they do not learn the chemical composition of food. In general, school should be about life.
What can you say about the teachers of the future and the role of the school in general? The teacher is no longer the sole source of knowledge. A good teacher must constantly change in a positive way. But often teachers do not have the time to do that. That is, they just keep replaying some experience that they have accumulated. So often a child can get knowledge faster and more effectively in extended education. And most importantly, at their own pace.
Then what is the school supposed to do? All it can do is to make sense of things. Because life is full of actions these days. The parents objectively have little time to invest in their children, to pass on their experiences, to nurture and to pass on culture. It is great if the school can share the family values. So the main block is what I call "health school”, i.e. everything that has to do with culture. This includes everything: physical culture, communication culture or emotional intelligence, mental hygiene and mindfulness.
The School of the Future should take care of the child’s health first and foremost. This is something today’s system misses altogether – a culture of mental and physical health.
What else do modern schools lack?
Oddly enough, creativity, which we understand in a broad sense – painting, music, sculpture, architecture. What our compatriots always talk about when they go, for example, to study in a British school: "I couldn’t make my kid draw, and now he is producing masterpieces.” Because first of all, they have the equipment for this and, secondly, they have great teachers who can teach anyone. Also, a good school should be technological, hands-on. The child should be able to translate his ideas into reality. And, of course, we are not talking about aprons and oven mitts. If what you can do is strictly regulated, it gets too far from reality.
It is like IKEA: you can read the instructions first, or you can just start assembling the stool and see what happens. I think that today’s children do not concentrate on the material as well, if they have not done anything with their own hands. Therefore, the school should be more practice-oriented in this regard, in my opinion. In principle, this isn’t something new. Because it is already there in an ordinary Western school, it just takes time to appear in our country.
Today's kids use apps extensively, where you can skip something quickly, move to other levels, go at your own pace. Can the School of the Future work as a learning app?
It seems to me that there should be some kind of variability, so that the child can study at his or her own pace and depth of learning the disciplines. Some schools already have this.
Now because all children have very different preschool experiences, they start school with very different levels of preparation. Some kids are cognitively overwhelmed, their heads already "bursting." Some children have just learned the alphabet. Plus, there are children with dysgraphia, dyslexia. There are a lot of children who have learning difficulties, who have a hard time working with text information. In this regard, the perfect school for me is not one that selects the best kids by giving them a bunch of tests at the entrance, but a school that will tell them: "Okay, come in." Just "come in," that’s all. And then, after testing the child, after working with him/her, they will build a certain learning path.
What does it look like in practice?
Let’s suppose there is a cohort of students. The children are divided into two subgroups, or even three, if the school can afford maintaining that much staff. That is, instead of three small classes of 12 people, we have one class, but with subgroups of 12. One subgroup consists of children that are ahead of the curriculum, the second group has students of average performance, and the last subgroup has children that have, for example, difficulty mastering spatial concepts and mathematics, in particular. In the last subgroup, we introduce correctional initiatives: we work with didactic material, use game aids, give visual supports.
Or, for example, the Russian language. There are kids who have a knack for the languages, then we just go with them through a good program at a fast pace. There are children with dysgraphia, with dyslexia, these are curated by a speech therapist. Also, a child can be in an advanced math group, but as regards the Russian language, he/she can be in a group of children with dysgraphia and dyslexia. And some kid can be in the top group in all disciplines.
This way, all children learn together. That is, in fact, instead of three classes there are several levels for each core subject. For some lessons, the children get together in one big classroom, do some projects together, communicate together. But I did not see that in elementary school, only in middle school. Yet things are not exactly implemented like that in practice. I believe that education should become fully personalized (and in fact, it already is, if you look at the rise of the tutoring institution). But how do you reconcile the personalized track with the need to socialize and interact with children? Probably, the School of the Future is an attempt to combine collective activity with an individual academic route.
You described three big blocks in the educational program of the school of the future: academics, creativity, and health. And you spoke in sufficient detail about the academic part –
