Fewer tests, less workload: what will the instruction of President Putin change in schools
Novye Izvestia figured out what awaits Russian schools in the nearest future.
Irina Mishina
Former Russian Education Minister Edouard Dneprov once calculated that a high school student needs 169 hours a week to complete all of his homework. As you know, there are only 168 hours a week. With a school workload of 65–70 hours a week, the child has only 29 minutes a day to go for a walk. It is estimated that high school students spend up to 11 hours a day without movement.
The facts about the health of today's schoolchildren, which scientists cite, make us think about the future of the nation.
Fact one. Now there are only 10-15% of absolutely healthy schoolchildren, the rest have various deviations. During the period of study at school, the health of children deteriorates by an average of 4–5 times. By the time of graduation, every third graduate has a pathology of vision, posture, or cardiovascular system. This suggests that schooling undermines health.
The second fact. According to the Scientific Center of Children's Health of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, over the past decade, the number of underweight schoolchildren has increased by 1.5 times.
Fact three. Among schoolchildren, the number of diseases of the nervous system is increasing every year. These are neuroses, phobias, depression.
Studies by a Russian psychiatrist, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Dmitry Isaev have shown that one of the main reasons for the deterioration of the neuropsychic health of children is the inability to cope with an exorbitant study load. In schools with an intensive learning process and increased requirements (in gymnasiums, lyceums), the time spent in class and spent on homework leads to an increase in the student's working day up to 10-12 hours for primary school students and reaches 15-16 hours in middle and high school. All this many times exceeds the load of an adult, who, as you know, is assigned an 8-hour working day by the Labor Code. Why are children forced to spend almost twice as much on mental stress as adults?
...A variety of "early development schools" fall on parents literally right after the birth of a child. Numerous commercial centers assure: if you do not start on time, then "you can be left behind forever." Centers working according to the methods of Zaitsev, Nikitin, Doman, Montessori put forward theories that the human brain develops only up to 6–7 years old, and therefore “time must not be wasted, you can be late”. As evidence, the Japanese author Masaru Ibuka and his book "After Three It's Late" are cited. As a result, parents begin to prepare their child for school almost from the age of three.
By the time they enter school, most children already have an advanced level of development. True, all this comes at a price. Not to the parents, but to the child. The result is a drop in cognitive interest, fatigue and workload even in kindergarten age, physical inactivity, which negatively affects overall development. And at school, children are bombarded with a constantly changing curriculum, disproportionate homework, an excess of content in each subject, a reduction in changes, a concentration of control and independent ones in one day, a complication of curricula comparable to the reduced university ones. At the same time, complication does not always imply quality and age-appropriateness, and at some point the child can no longer do without a tutor. This in turn continues to eat up the extra hours of his childhood.
Now every school and every region has the right to approve their programs and, accordingly, their curricula. School administrations are in a fierce battle for points that provide access to funding and grants. The guarantee of these points is the victory of schoolchildren in Olympiads and various intellectual competitions organized by regional departments of education. For this, schools do not skimp on anything. First of all, for the free time of children.
The requirements for the regime of the educational process in schools are regulated by the sanitary and epidemiological rules and norms of SanPiN. According to these norms, the number of hours allotted for lesson and extracurricular activities should not, in aggregate, exceed the value of the maximum weekly educational load. For junior students, it ranges from 21 to 32 hours for a five-day week, and from 33 to 34 hours for high school students. But in fact, after lessons in most schools, optional classes begin. Some are in preparation for the OGE and the Unified State Exam, others are simply to improve academic performance.
“For now, we record this load by the number of hours, not seeing what's inside, because a child can be driven to such an extent even in an hour that he is completely exhausted. And you can organize the work so that the load is rational, the academic load is replaced by extracurricular ones. But, unfortunately, this is our problem today", - said the director of the Institute of Developmental Physiology of the Russian Academy of Education, representative of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, Maryana Bezrukikh.
According to her, the society today chooses the wrong priorities. “Unfortunately, the priority of parents and school is knowledge at any cost, and at any cost it is always at the cost of health. Most children are not completely healthy. According to our data, more than a third of children in the first health group, i.e. absolutely healthy, in our country, in fact, do not. At the same time, the Ministry of Health notes that there are 85% of healthy children in the country. I do not know where the figures for 85% of absolutely healthy children came from, "the expert said.
The President's instruction to reduce the number of control tests and streamline the workload at school, given to the Ministry of Education, Rosobrnadzor and Rospotrebnadzor, has another side. It is no secret that the shortage of teachers, the overload of Russian schools with migrant children who barely understand what they are being taught, leads to the fact that most educational institutions with low academic performance do not reach the cherished bar of “compliance with standards” and, accordingly, the necessary funding.
Valery Gorelovsky: “When I look at our class (secondary school in Serpukhov - editor's note), I understand that these children are not afraid of any educational reforms. Children from our ghetto do not do their homework and do not work in class in the classroom, even if you increase the load or decrease it. And teachers have one job - to keep the routine and to portray learning. They understand perfectly well that half of their students can safely not be taken to school, it is just an extra hassle for them and a waste of their own and others' time... Several girls study well, the rest can be released from school ahead of schedule".
“It is known that there were a large number of complaints about the excessive number of tests, in particular, about the dominance of the All-Russian Testing Works (VPR). But the VPRs have not actually been canceled, and Rosobrnadzor is unlikely to go for it: this department receives huge budget money for organizing and conducting these very All-Russian audits, this is almost the main activity of this department. Schools now have a lot of independence in choosing a learning path, in drawing up programs and schedules, so this presidential order can be considered populist and parallel to the real learning process. It is unlikely that something will change”, - Olga Miryasova, organizing secretary of the Uchitel interregional trade union, told NovyeIzvestia.
From conversations with teachers, we came to the conclusion: the instructions of the president will hardly really change anything in the work of schools, each of which in our time received independence, approximately equal to the rights of an appanage principality in medieval Russia.
“The parents are primarily responsible for the children. They are the ones who should choose the school that suits their education request. It is significant that many have recently chosen home or family education. Or they simply put the children in “courtyard” schools, obviously weak schools, where they will not make excessive demands on the child”, - Olga Miryasova explained to Novye Izvestia.
By burdening children with meaningless and ruthless activities, we probably want them to be successful. But whose success do we mean by this: ours or our children? And is a successful person always happy?
“The parents are primarily responsible for the children. They are the ones who should choose the school that suits their education request. It is significant that many have recently chosen home or family education. Or they simply put the children in “courtyard” schools, obviously weak schools, where they will not make excessive demands on the child, ”Olga Miryasova explained to“ NI ”.