Experts Note Dwindled Interest in Schooling
Four hundred thousand first-graders stepped over the school’s threshold for the first time yesterday, while a total six million pupils entered classrooms all over the country. Are they going to study to their hearts’ content? It is difficult to give a positive answer to this question, for the latest surveys show a rapidly dwindling interest of schoolchildren in the classes. While one of five children found the studies very attractive ten years ago, today this attitude is shared by three times as few children. Half the pupils have lost interest in studies to a considerable extent.
As to adults, some surveys found that parents want the school to give their children education good enough to apply to a higher educational institution, while teachers think their main task is to prepare a child for real life. Conversely, children themselves believe they need a school to study the subjects they like and to be able to socialize! According to Liudmyla Vashchenko, chief of the Resource Center of Experimental Pedagogy, what muffles a child’s interest in studies is the fact that children speak very little in school, for the traditional system of instruction suppresses the child’s natural desire to be heard. Our children speak just for a few seconds a day at classes, while their American counterparts do so for about seven minutes! Research has found that any information is perceived better when it is spoken out, Ms. Vashchenko says. Only about ten percent of information heard and a little more of read information is easily memorized, but if a child finds the necessary information and then discusses it with his/her peers, the results are stunning. A teaching process that involves bringing children to various sources of information and allowing them to communicate with eachother radically changes the teacher’s role. Is our school prepared for such radical changes if pupils usually sit, as before, looking each other in the back of the head, which excludes the very possibility of communication?
Today’s pedagogical science strives to find a way of teaching different to the existing classroom-lesson system, as well as the ways of developing and guiding the child’s personality. Halyna Volchenkova, a research associate at the innovations laboratory of the Ukrainian Institute of Pedagogy, who deals with this kind of issues, explains that this method stems from the theory of multiple intellect. Everyone has his/her own level of different varieties of intellect, be it linguistic, logic-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, inter-personal, etc. Therefore, children should be taught even the same things in different ways.
There is another factor that prevents children from studying with pleasure. It is the stereotype that school is viewed as a place to receive a certain amount of knowledge. However, researchers forecast that the twenty- first century will see about 75 entirely new professions which will, naturally, require new skills to master them. In this country, though, a school is considered the best if it gives a great deal of fundamental knowledge, rather than conserving the child’s health and teaching him/her to learn (incidentally, some educational institutions take advantage of this to attract the children of well-off parents, tempting them with a never-ending list of additional fee-paying services).
The current academic year began with the lesson Knowledge Is a Treasure, and Knowing How to Study Is a Key. A host of scenarios has been drawn up to conduct this lesson as a festive show — with songs, poems, and quotations of great people. Whether this feast will give an impulse to reorienting the mentality of teachers, pupils, and their parents towards different values typical of the era of information technologies is hard to say. Yet, there is at least a hope that this will compel all participants in this process to cast a critical look at their education priorities as a whole.
