Marina Yardaeva Why family education at school is a bad idea 09/01/2023, 12:16

In the new academic year, a new topic may emerge in schools: family studies. The format of the new discipline is not yet clear: will it be a compulsory course, an elective course, or will it be distributed in separate sections in other subjects, or will it be a series of lecture hours? The target audience is also not clearly defined: they either offer to talk to high school students about family structure or convince them that it is necessary to start already in the first grades, otherwise the situation is disastrous. It is also not clear who will teach: either psychologists or priests, or they will again hang everything on their classroom teachers. It is known that they will focus only on traditional family values ​​and one of the goals of the initiative is to improve the demographic situation in the country.

The situation where there is an end but no one has any idea about the means, that somehow everything has to work itself out, you just have to want it, is pretty weird in general. And here the causes and crisis of the family institution, hence the demographic problem, are clearly ignored. By the way, it is of course necessary to talk with children about the relationship between family, spouses, parents and children. And in this sense, the results of sociological studies can be understood, in which almost half of Russians support the idea of ​​family studies at school. Everyone wants their children to live better than their parents, not to repeat their mistakes, and the breakdown of families that divorce statistics scream is still not a success.

But still it is worth going beyond the narrow-minded ideas about simple human happiness, you need to analyze the causes of demographic and family problems in the country (and by the way, not only in the country, but also in the world). And these reasons lie on two planes: socio-economic and psychological.

And if it is still difficult to influence the first through school, then the second is more a matter of education. It is only better to solve this problem in a traditional (since we love all things traditional) scientific way – by including in the school curriculum a discipline that is understandable and recommended in the world of science – psychology, in fact. Sure, there may be a separate section on family psychology in the course, but it’s still better to start with the basics – from understanding yourself and the other, to studying interpersonal relationships in general.

You see, there are already many incomprehensible disciplines in our school that are not specifically tied to certain sciences and have no practical or moral value. There is an ORCHSE (Foundations of Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics), it seems to be about religion and a bit of history, but actually it has nothing to do with religious studies or history. There was a lot of noise on the subject, they feared the instigation of the priests and the stuffing up of God’s Law, but in fact it was all based on the fact that in most schools the humanities or classroom teachers were loaded with discipline. even if they are mathematicians or biologists. People have just completed the two-month online courses for the show and went to hand out materials according to the training manual.

Same with ODNR (Foundations of the spiritual and moral culture of the peoples of Russia). Something spiritual and moral, something about culture, something about the peoples of Russia. A strange hybrid of world art culture, regional studies and ethnography? NO. Is it something historical? No again. So what is it? Why? So does it make sense? Hell knows! But he also takes humanities courses after express courses. There are no special results. At the same time, it was decided to extend the one-year education period to two years. They seem to think it’s all about volume.

And you can’t write anything about “Conversations About the Important,” which is about everything and nothing, which for some reason is pretty much the same for first and eleventh graders, and is again thrown at the unfortunate classroom teachers. requires them to be experts in every subject.

Yes, there are a lot of strange lessons in the modern school, either broken off from the general sciences and as if mixed up, hastily modified, or invented out of nothing, absolutely unstructured, not even scientific after all. Now they want to introduce another one of the same. And the fact that it will be the same according to what has already been announced is almost beyond doubt. Because the message that “we must revive traditional family values” is not science.

Science should tell us in general what kinds of families exist, how they can be arranged, how laws work. And by the way, such material is given in the social sciences course for high school students.

Here is the fear! – even talking about non-traditional joint families, for example, even – take a deep breath! – polygamous. It just doesn’t tell you how to deal with all this. What does a person have to do with all this? Because the latter is only the domain of psychology.

A maturing person must understand how he and others are organized before he can understand what the family is and what interactions can be made in it. In part, these questions are asked in literature classes. But firstly, this is always some kind of sideline, secondly, most of the material in the literary program is not suitable for explaining the psychology of a modern person, and thirdly, it lacks a suitable theoretical basis. Literary theory talks about genres, styles, allusions, and the like. Psychology theory, temperament types, personality types, perception types, attachment types, etc. about the operation of information.

Modern teenagers are extremely lacking in psychology and understand that in principle many mental processes and human interactions are subject to some kind of laws that are often worth paying attention to. This is great. This is paradoxical even against the background of how the social sphere has been taken over by the fashions of introspection, injury seeking, and boundary protection. But that is the truth.

But in fact, this fact is easily explained: Detecting injuries and measuring limits often has nothing to do with real psychology. And it is not surprising that this only leads to an even greater misunderstanding about oneself and people, and what is quite sad is the person himself among people.

Psychology courses are needed, very much needed. Yes, of course, while showing my respect for academic science, they should be lively and debatable, with analysis of situations involving schoolchildren. You need to learn how to resolve conflict situations with friends, parents, teachers. You can then move on to the analysis of cases related to work, career and romantic relationships. Talking about, among other things, the role that money plays in human relationships, especially in relationships between the sexes, and why money in relationships isn’t really a money issue, it’s definitely worth analyzing a variety of difficult cases. It is clear that those who favor ties and various spiritual and moral ties can be sufficiently chondratic. But these are all very important, really exciting questions for young people. You can talk about family later. And as a more complex phenomenon. In this case though, consistency seems important.

But if we still start from the end, and moreover approach the problem not from the point of view of explaining the phenomenon, but to invoke something there, then again we get nonsense. Yes again. Numerous lectures in the style of “All good against all evil”, in which the school curriculum grew like a hydra, has already demonstrated its depressing uselessness.

Do you know how easy it is to control? Ask students about their favorite topics. Someone will say physical education, someone – mathematics, someone – literature, someone – fine arts, someone – music. However, I have not come across a single living student who says that he likes ORKSE or ODNKNR more than any other subject. Even their names are depressing. If you approach the issue only from the point of view of state interests, if you approach it formally, ignoring causal relationships, the fate of family science will be the same.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.