I have a hobby. It’s kind of a hobby. I love reading various pro-feminist communities like Happy Motherhood and ancestral mom forums. I only go to anonymous sections where women write to talk. Also sometimes I recommend reading them – in general, for development, so to speak.
There is a standard set of complaints in the complaints: the husband plays in the evening, does not sit with the children, does not give money on maternity leave, drags everything unnecessary to his mother and disappears in his hut. But whatever the anonymous complaint is, whatever another exhausted woman writes about, when she has children over the age of three, she always begins her story by driving and transporting children to “developers” without exception. . At the same time, the monstrous deprivations of the family, the rejection of personal time, getting into debt, embarrassing delays in loan payments are often described – all for the sake of these developments.
“I have been trying to be a good mother, educator for years.” “We’ve been going to developmental schools for seven, five years, everything is for him, today my son called me stupid.”
Many women complain about the structure of life, which is damn – damn! – razvrashki hang dead weight only on them. It looks like heroism from the outside: the value of education, an attempt to get a good start in life, responsible parenting and everything else. But if you take a closer look at which special classes children are taken to, questions arise about responsibility, luck, values.
I will start with myself. When those of us living outside the city faced the problem of additional education for the child, it never occurred to us to take our daughter to private studios – we enrolled her in an art school. And again, not in a commercial studio, where everything is aimed at entertainment – the boy was sent from the age of five to the worst public school, a group. The third year daughter is more or less busy. We consider these lessons at his age just as an additional development. After all, it is better than studying in an incomprehensible studio, where graduates of pedagogical colleges supposedly raise children.
As I understand it, Razvivashki is a sports school (immediately under the supervision of professionals and doctors), foreign languages from philologists, dances in real ensembles or the same sports schools. And of course, this is a music school. Maybe chess too. At an older age – scientific circles, drama, photography and maritime affairs. It’s not just in theaters, and as it sometimes happens: a provincial TV news presenter, after spending several years in the frame, immediately opens a children’s studio, where she teaches babies both acting, modeling, and rhythm with diction. In each regional center, more often – there are several. Also called developers.
This word – development – is often obscenely simple. What is being developed on developers?
For example, many people take their children to the pool almost from infancy. It seems to be improving. Actually, mom just wants to get out of the house. It is uncomfortable and unhealthy for a baby to flounder in chlorinated water among strangers. They have been going to some classes in early development since the year. I even found a children’s center in St. Petersburg, where they take from eight months. Inside there are soft rugs, cabinets, shelves with wooden toys, cardboard books. For 5-8 thousand rubles a month, a spotty student shows a boy in pictures and calls with words a watermelon, a teapot, a stool … Who said that he is improving? Not to mention the courses, such books are not even worth buying. Don’t people have stools at home? Can’t parents show their kids a tiger? A mother with a one-year-old baby sits on a pouf for an hour, is shown flower cards. “Yellow”. “Green”. “Purple”. It’s worth paying a few thousand for the purple, of course. Not talking to the child at home.
The phenomenon of the popularity of these emerging centers amazes me. Rather, the primitiveness of activities for children. Nonsense under the guise of early development. Going for nothing – there is no point in wasting time, but also for money!
Or dance. The darkness of children’s dance studios, where children are allowed to jump for forty minutes. Over the years I have seen many examples of children going to dance studios, being taught incomprehensible things, and then it turns out that they mark the time simultaneously with breaks for free games. This happens even in foreign languages. The Soviet joke about teaching a rare Mingrelian dialect under the guise of English in a remote Georgian village for ten years is not so funny today: such conjugations are found in children’s language development books! There was a scandalous post on Telegram recently that was quickly deleted: A school English teacher described how a child who was homeschooled for the first four years and learned English on development boards was brought into his classroom. The boy used this language as Latin Emperor II. He spoke like Peter: with English words, but with Russian grammar.
The same is true in acting circles. If specially trained actors-teachers do not take care of the children, but once again you do not understand who they are, it will be just a waste of time and money. It also turns into a tragedy, especially when it comes to this kind of development: the child is infected with beauty pageants, dreams of a modeling career – you can not imagine worse. Because children in general are rarely artistic, many are met with failure and resentment at the school of models and actors, overflowing with lavishly paid accolades. As a result, we have a person who is not only broken but also broken by unmet expectations. Advanced is very advanced.
Developers have many unexpected effects. I read about a case when in a family in Moscow a child, after attending certain classes according to the Montessori system, began to cough and say “turn around”, “smile” – he had such teachers. I personally heard the teacher say “buter”, “varik”, “gouache” in children’s drawing master classes. Or “gouache”? I can’t even imagine how to write it in Russian letters.
I have specific questions about the development of drawings because we see what children do in an art school and compare it to the absurdity that young visitors to master classes are doomed to. There’s already a whole trend in the so-called education industry: a thousand and two kids sit in a nice place, put a canvas in front of them and show them how to draw. And I know of many examples when parents took their children to such master classes by deliberately refusing to study at an art school because they believed they were ready to provide the best for their children. “I’d rather eat doshik, but I’ll pay for the boy’s regular lessons and not take him to your shabby school.” “Doshik” is a relative of “varik”, if someone does not understand. And the normal lessons are ten kids sitting in a nice cafe and imitating a dog. You won’t believe how many parents are proud to pay for these kind of developmental rice pads.
Recently, after tax audits, businessmen who sell online courses to fulfill their whims, “marathon runners” as I call them, have started talking again about the need to approve their training activities.
Yet every wretched horse in our country teaches people to strive for a dream and sells them lottery entries under the guise of a self-disclosure webinar! Then they started talking about how nice it would be to somehow systematize the gurus and coaches. Perhaps some kind of body should be set up to check them for at least basic literacy. And ideally, I would figure out how to keep all this shurum-burum not only on taxes, but also under certificate.
You need to be even tougher with the developers. Let them get paid to throw a ball next to a spotty teacher who says “Here you go”. Let the children jump on the walls instead of dancing, and draw instead of painting. Force them to call their activities leisure rather than educational. After all, there were various entertainment centers where people somehow danced, allegedly did yoga, knitted macrame hoodies for teapots and crocheted bottle caps. All this was before us, and then it will not go anywhere. Swimming in the pool with inflatable armbands and water aerobics is fun, not learning to swim. A private dance studio where anyone can come from scratch to an existing group is also fun. Gather the children in the art space, give them cardboard with printed outlines and offer to circle the drawing with acrylic – the organization of entertainment.
There is also robotics for the little ones. Karting for preschool children. Centers for the development of aesthetic appreciation with tasteless-dressed teachers. All this and much more should be honestly called leisure. Translated into Russian – fun.
Parents tear their veins for development, they themselves do not sleep enough, they do not get enough sleep for their children, but they take them there, some of them take four or five different classes, the child is discharged in the evenings and does homework until the night. Thus, people, in their opinion, accumulate a reserve for the future of their children. But call a voice and speech school, master classes in drawing or a communication dance studio for fun, because they will immediately stop paying for them. Maybe buy the kids books. Instead of development, they go to the theater. They will enroll in the library: they know how to thrive there, and for nothing.
How many family scandals, how many neuroses, how many divorces could have been avoided if our state had to name everything that concerns children by proper names. Painting master class in a cafe is fun. Developing classes according to the author’s incomprehensible method of girls – babysitting services, children’s modeling courses – earnings from parental vanity and incomprehensible dances in a fitness club – pumping money from the population. If the child does not have a place to socialize, you can give him an after-school program where he will spend a few hours with teachers with higher specialized training. True, in this case it will be necessary to accept that the child is sitting and not developing.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.