The reasons for the effectiveness of Soviet education, or How to raise the level of school again?
In 1959, NATO formally named the Soviet education system an achievement unparalleled in history. By all the most unbiased estimates, Soviet schoolchildren were much more developed than American ones.
What was so unique about the Soviet education system?
The Soviet system was recognized as one of the best educational models in the world. How did it differ from the rest and what was its advantage? To begin with, a small excursion into history.
The secret weapon of the Bolsheviks
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial Earth satellite. The country, whose economic and demographic situation was undermined by the bloodiest of wars, after spending just over a decade, made a space breakthrough, which was not capable of the most economically strong and not in the least affected by the war. During the Cold War with the USSR and the arms race, the United States took this fact as a national shame.
The US Congress created a special commission to find out: "Who is to blame for the US national shame?" After the conclusions of this commission, the Soviet secondary school was named the secret weapon of the Bolsheviks.
In 1959, NATO formally named the Soviet education system an achievement unparalleled in history. By all the most unbiased estimates, Soviet schoolchildren were much more developed than American ones.
What was so unique about the Soviet education system?
First of all, by its mass character and general availability. By 1936, the Soviet Union had become a country of universal literacy. For the first time in the world, conditions were created so that every child of the country from the age of seven had the opportunity to receive a free education, even if he lives in the taiga, tundra or high in the mountains. The younger generation became totally literate, which no other country in the world had achieved at that time!
Education to the masses
The program was uniform throughout the vast territory of the Soviet Union. This allowed any child, son of a peasant or worker, after graduating from high school, with the help of the system of workers' faculties, to enter a university and there to show their talents for the benefit of their native country. The Soviet system of higher education was the most massive in the world, because the country took a course towards industrialization and was in dire need of highly qualified personnel. The new emerging Soviet intelligentsia is the children of workers and peasants, who later became professors and academicians, artists and actors.
The Soviet educational system, unlike the American one, made it possible for gifted children from the social lower classes to break into the ranks of the intellectual elite and reveal their full potential for the benefit of society.
All the best for children
Soviet slogan "All the best for children!" in the USSR was supported by a serious program of action to educate a new generation of Soviet people. Special children's sanatoriums and pioneer camps were built for the health improvement of young citizens, dozens of varieties of sports clubs and music schools were opened. Children's libraries, Houses of Pioneers and Houses of Technical Creativity were built especially for children. Various circles and sections were opened in the Houses of Culture, where children could develop their talents for free and realize their potential. Children's books of the widest subject were published in huge numbers, illustrations for which were made by the best artists.
All this gave the child the opportunity to develop and try himself in a wide variety of hobbies - from sports and music to creativity, artistic or technical. As a result, the graduate of the Soviet school approached the moment of choosing a profession quite consciously - he chose the job that he liked the most. The Soviet school had a polytechnic orientation. This is understandable - the state took a course towards industrialization, and it was also impossible to forget about the defense capability. But, on the other hand, a network of music and art schools, circles and studios was created in the country, which satisfied the needs of the younger generation in music and art.
Thus, Soviet education provided a system of social lifts that allowed a person from the very bottom to reveal and develop his innate talents, learn and take place in society, or even become its elite. A huge number of factory directors, artists, filmmakers, professors and academicians in the USSR were the children of ordinary workers and peasants.
Public is more valuable than personal
But what was most important, without which the education system would not have been able to take place even with the best organization: a lofty, noble idea - the idea of building a society of the future in which everyone will be happy. To comprehend science, to develop - not in order to earn more money in the future for your individual happiness, but in order to serve your country, in order to replenish the treasury of the "common good" with your contribution. Children from an early age were taught to give - their work, their knowledge, skills, skills for the benefit of their native country. It was an ideology and a personal example: millions of people gave their lives to defend their homeland from fascism; parents, not sparing themselves, gave all the best at work; teachers, regardless of time, tried to give knowledge and educate the next generation.
The educational process in the Soviet school was built on the basis of the communist ideology and ideas of collectivism, canceled 70 years after the revolution: the public is more valuable than the personal, conscientious labor for the good of society, everyone's concern for the preservation and multiplication of the public domain, a person is a friend, comrade and brother. The younger generation was told from a very early age that the social value of an individual is determined not by his official position or material well-being, but by the contribution that he made to the common cause of building a bright future for all.
According to Yuri Burlan's System-Vector Psychology, such values are absolutely complementary to our urethral-muscular mentality, in contrast to the Western cutaneous individualistic mentality. The priority of the public over the personal, collectivism, justice and mercy are the main distinguishing features of the Russian worldview. In the Soviet school, for example, it was customary to help weak students. The weaker one was "attached" to the stronger one in school, who was supposed to pull up his comrade in his studies.
If a person committed an act contrary to public morality, he was collectively “worked out”, put “in appearance” so that he would feel ashamed in front of his comrades, and then they were bailed out. After all, shame in our mentality is the main regulator of behavior. In contrast to the Western, where the regulator of behavior is the law and the fear of it.
October asterisks, pioneer and Komsomol detachments helped unite children on the basis of the highest moral values: honor, duty, patriotism, mercy. A system of counselors was introduced: among the Octobrists, the best pioneer was appointed as counselor, and among the pioneers, the best Komsomol member. The leaders were responsible for their squad and its successes in front of their organization and their comrades. Both older and younger children rallied not according to the archetypal mechanism of searching for a victim (as is often the case in modern schools), but on the basis of a common noble cause: be it a clean-up day, collecting scrap metal, preparing a festive concert, or helping a sick comrade in school.
Who did not have time, he was late
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, old value systems also collapsed. The Soviet education system was recognized as overly ideologized, and the principles of Soviet education were overly communist, so it was decided to remove all ideology from the school and introduce humanistic and democratic values. We decided that the school should provide knowledge, and that the child should be raised in the family.
This decision caused colossal damage to the state and society as a whole. By removing ideology from the school, it was completely deprived of its educational functions. It was no longer the teachers who taught the children about life, but on the contrary, the children and their rich parents began to dictate their terms to the teachers. The education sector has de facto turned into a service sector.
The collapsed ideology disorientated the parents themselves. What is good and what is bad in new conditions and circumstances that are not at all similar to Soviet ones? How to bring up children, what principles should be guided by: urethral “perish yourself, and help your friend out” or archetypal skin principles “if you want to live, be able to turn around”?
Many parents, forced to deal with the problem of making money, had no time for upbringing - they barely had enough strength to ensure their survival. Having given the best years of their lives to the state and having survived the collapse of the values in which they believed, adults, succumbing to their own despair and the influence of Western propaganda, began to teach their children the opposite: that you need to live only for yourself and your family, “do not do good, you will not receive evil”and that in this world everyone is for himself.
Of course, the change in views, which had tragic consequences for our country, was also influenced by the skin phase of human development, which came into its own after the Second World War, and on the territory of the former USSR - in the 90s.
In the education system, free (or, in other words, paid by the state, general labor) circles and sections disappeared very soon. Many paid activities appeared, which quickly divided children according to property. The orientation of education also changed to the opposite. The value became not to raise people useful to society, but to give the child the tools in order to get more for himself in adulthood. And who could not - he found himself on the sidelines of life.
Do people brought up on this principle become happy? Not always, because the basis of happiness is the ability to exist harmoniously among other people, to have a favorite business, loved ones, to be needed. An egoist, by definition, cannot experience the joy of realization among people.
Who are they, the country's future elite?
From the point of view of the system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan, the future intellectual and cultural elite of the country is formed from children with visual and sound vectors. The percentage of such children does not depend on the status and income of the parents. The developed properties of the vector give the society a happy person and an excellent professional who has been realized in his profession for the benefit of people. Underdeveloped properties increase the number of psychopathologies.
Developing some and leaving others undeveloped, we lay a time bomb, which is already starting to work. Teenage suicides, drugs, murder in schools - this is still a small part of the payback for the selfish upbringing, disorientation and underdevelopment of our children.
How to raise the level of school education again?
All children need to be developed and educated. How can this be done without unifying, without driving education and upbringing into the Procrustean bed of equalization, taking into account the individual abilities of each? The exact and practical answer to this question is given by the system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan.
The problem of teaching and raising children is directly related to the understanding of psychological laws. Parents and teachers should be clearly aware of the processes that take place in the child's psyche, in a particular school and in society as a whole. This is the only way to influence the current situation. In the meantime, there is no such understanding, we will swim in the syrup of Western ideas that are alien to us about what education should be. An example of this is the introduction of the USE system at school, which does not reveal knowledge and does not contribute to their deep assimilation, but is aimed only at stupid memorization of tests.
The secret of effective education lies in the individual approach to each student. This does not mean that you need to completely return to the former Soviet education system or switch to a Western standard and abandon successfully working methods. It is only necessary to bring them to the modern format, which system-vector psychology tells us about. Thanks to the knowledge about human vectors, it becomes possible to reveal the child's natural predisposition, his potential abilities at a very early age. And then even the most "incapable" student acquires an interest in learning and a desire to perceive knowledge that will help him to realize himself as much as possible in later life.
It is necessary to return the educational aspect to the school. The Soviet school instilled in children basic values in line with our urethral mentality, which is why real citizens and patriots of our country emerged from it. But not only this is important. You need to teach the child to live among other people, interact with them and enjoy the realization in society. And this can be taught only at school, among other people.
When a positive psychological climate is created in the family and at school, a personality grows out of a child, he realizes his potential, and if not, he will have to fight his environment all his life. If there are children in school, in a class who have a difficult life situation or psychological problems, everyone suffers from this. And if with the help of elite schools it is possible to give a certain part of children an elite education, then this is not a guarantee that they will be able to be happy in a society torn apart by hostility. It is necessary to create a system that promotes the upbringing and development of all children. Only then can you hope for a happy future for your children.
System-vector psychology tells how to establish communication with a child, create a comfortable microclimate in the family and school, make the class friendly, raise the level of education and upbringing at school. Register for free introductory online lectures by Yuri Burlan using the link.
