Upbringing In Schools In Russia: From Problems To An Approximate Program

Abstract

The authors analyze the challenges confronting the modern system of upbringing. Among them the actions‘ inconsistency of upbringing subjects, ignoring the upbringing potential of information technologies, the lack of teachers' skills in certain upbringing technologies and techniques, standardization of upbringing process, low level of professional development and training of teachers as educators both in higher education institutions and in the system of improvement qualifications. It is noted that consideration of upbringing in the logic of implementation of its individual areas is not productive, upbringing is a holistic process. The authors present an upbringing program based on the values of our society, such as family, labor, motherland, nature, peace, knowledge, culture, health, human being. It provides teachers with upbringing tools and implements certain approaches: goal unity of upbringing; activity logic of a program building; modular principle of building a program; program as a constructor; one program for the entire school. The purpose of approximate upbringing program is to help schools to create and put into practice their own upbringing programs that can solve the problems of students‘ harmonious entry into social world, to establish responsible relationships with people around them and to prevent extremism and illegal behavior. The approximate program sets the pattern for the development of work programs, but cannot substitute them. The presented conclusions are the result of a study conducted by the Laboratory of Strategy and Theory of Personality Upbringing, which operates within the framework of the Federal State Budget Scientific Institution “Institute for Strategy of Education Development of the Russian Academy of Education”.

Keywords: Upbringingupbringing programeducational organization

Introduction

The current situation in society is characterized by the fact that problems in the sphere of upbringing of children and adolescents are directly correlated with the human security, economic and well-being growth. An approximate upbringing program is based on the values of our society, such as family, labor, motherland, nature, peace, knowledge, culture, health, human being. The involvement of a growing person in culture allows him to build full-fledged dialogues not only within native culture, but with other cultures as well. An approximate upbringing program developed by the Laboratory of Strategy and Theory of Personality Upbringing gives the teacher a tool for more effective construction of upbringing activity.

Problem Statement

Russian upbringing has an extensive experience in developing of upbringing programs. These programs had their advantages and disadvantages. The authors had a task to create an upbringing program, which, on the one hand, could systematize all the accumulated positive experience of upbringing and, in its essence, would be systemic, and on the other hand, involves everything new that has appeared in this sphere.

The program has a common goal of upbringing, which is specified in the tasks. These tasks should be varied and, above all, reflect the characteristics of the educational organization. Tasks are reflected in the modules presented in the program. It is the formulation of tasks and the choice of modules that provides teachers with maximum freedom in organizing the upbringing process; they also provide its variability.

The upbringing program should be working, that is, it should be in demand every day. This requires the need for its simple and understandable structure.

Research Questions

In the course of the study, the authors answered the question of what should be the working upbringing program to be in teachers‘ demand. How should be the goals and objectives of upbringing designed in order to provide teachers with maximum freedom in organizing the upbringing process and ensure its variability. How to formulate the tasks of upbringing, so that they reflect the peculiarities of the educational organization? How to present the program modules so that they reflect the tasks of upbringing?

Purpose of the Study

To justify the feasibility, relevance, optimality of the approximate upbringing program as a teacher’s tool, organizing effective upbringing activities. To show that the purpose of an approximate upbringing program is to help schools to create and to put into practice their own upbringing programs that can solve the problems of harmonious students’ entry into the social world, establish responsible relationships with people around them and prevent extremism and illegal behavior.

Research Methods

The main methods of this study were:

- analysis of the scientific literature on the problem, allowing to rely on the results of other studies related to the problem under consideration;

- analysis of monographic descriptions of the past and modern, Russian and foreign upbringing experience in educational organizations;

- empirical methods: questioning and interviewing various categories of teachers in order to determine their problems in the organization of the upbringing process, included observation, the method of independent characteristics, analysis of documents of educational organizations. The complex of empirical methods allows, firstly, to obtain data and facts of the state of upbringing in educational organizations, and secondly, to determine possible ways of its development.

Findings

Today's attention of the state to the problems of upbringing is undeniable. What is evidenced by such facts as the development of the “Strategy for the Development of Upbringing in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025” (“Strategija razvitiya vospitaniya …”, 2015) the speeches of high-ranking state officials and, above all, speeches the President of the Russian Federation utin schel vospitanie vazhnee obrazovaniya dlya razvitiya lichnosti (2017) about the need for reorganization domestic upbringing. All this, on the one hand, indicates that we have reached a dangerous line when the lack of proper attention to the upbringing of modern children, adolescents, youth can be fraught with serious consequences for the security of the country, and, on the other hand, creates a favorable situation for changes in in the practice of upbringing.

The main problem of upbringing, which is to be resolved in a timely manner, is to determine those changes that will allow the child, teenager, young person to ensure his personal growth, taking into account the social situation in which he develops.

Today, there are many problems in the field of children's upbringing.

It should be noted that not all subjects of modern socialization and upbringing are able to cope with their task at the appropriate level (“Who influence the child…”, 2018). It is a question of both traditional subjects: family, school, teachers, children's community, collective and subjects that have declared themselves in full voice recently: religious organizations, children's social associations, youth sub-cultural communities.

Nevertheless, it has been shown that these subjects have great upbringing potential.

It is also necessary to recognize that a huge positive experience has been accumulated in solving problems of upbringing of its various participants, but it is either not known to the general public and not only pedagogical or it remains unclaimed.

We are now witnessing an intensive penetration of information technologies, primarily in the process of learning. Today no one has to prove that information technologies can radically change education, creating new conditions in this process for the development of the personality of a child, a young person.

The penetration of information technology in the process of upbringing looks much more modest, however, researchers have already shown their potential for the renewal of upbringing. Of course, in the first place we are talking about the formation of an information culture of the student’s personality.

These technologies also allow to create conditions for the construction of a single information space in an educational institution; to develop creativity, independence, cognitive interest, skills in using information technologies, the ability to receive, analyze and evaluate the received information. All this can be identified as a positive potential for changing education.

Information technologies bring not only positive aspects to our life in general and to the upbringing process in particular (Wrigh, 2013).

It is known that modern children spend a significant part of their life on the Internet. This greatly affects their lives, because very often they lose touch with the reality. The Internet space absorbs them, replacing real communication with virtual.

The educational problems caused by these facts are widely discussed. Among them: immersion of children and young people into virtual reality, first of all, into various social networks; substitution of real communication for online communication; visiting extremist, porn, religious sect websites, websites promoting drugs and suicide; fascination with aggressive computer games that create the illusion of the ease of killing a person, propagating various forms of violence. (Selivanova, 2017, p. 10)

There is a lot of negative information on the Internet, many sites advertising drugs, suicides, and extremism, sites that allow you to create various types of weapons. More and more we are faced with Internet addiction, which is getting younger from year to year.

Unfortunately, the above is to a small degree taken into account both in family upbringing and in other types of upbringing, and, above all, in upbringing in educational system. Modern parents and teachers rarely seek to restrict the upbringing process, with due regard for the positive impact of information technology. Not enough attention is paid to the need to neutralize the negative effects of these technologies.

Scientific and methodological support play a very important role in the development of upbringing. But the teachers‘ training as educators is in high priority.

Today you can still meet the opinion that a teacher brings up primarily with his subject. This opinion is connected with the underestimation of the role of upbringing in the education system and the lack of understanding that the upbringing activities of teachers are not an application to the teaching of the subject. (Selivanova, 2017, p.10)

According to one of the famous school director Karakovskij (2008), ‘upbringing is the teacher's work with meanings, values, relationships of another person, a child’ (p.55).

It is very important when future teachers are in possession of knowledge and technologies; when they are well versed in their subject and master the methodology of its teaching. However, it is not the least important to concentrate efforts on the creation of their personal and professional position as educators.

During the training at pedagogical universities should begin the formation of the personal and professional position of a teacher as an educator.

It is time to think about a new teacher training system as educators, because this is a direct path to the development of upbringing today. However, at present this remains a big problem.

The basis for the construction of a modern system of training and retraining teachers as educators must be interdisciplinary scientific knowledge of the human being and the personality as a phenomenon of historical, anthropological, psychological, cultural, social, philosophical and pedagogical, as well as the development of the societies in which a person lives. (Selivanova, 2017, p.10).

Particular attention is required to the selection of different principles and forms of organization that will become the basis for the development of the skills of real educators (Rodriguez, n.d.).

Recently, there has been a tendency to unify and standardize the organization of the upbringing process. Undoubtedly, a standardization process has its advantages. Under certain conditions, standardization can contribute to improving the quality of upbringing, without taking into account various factors. For example, such as the type of educational organization, its location (city, town, village), the experience of teachers as educators.

Nevertheless, the variability is an unconditional value of upbringing, because it allows you to take into account the features of the educational organization, the region in which it is located and other factors affecting the organization of the upbringing process. The variability of upbringing also stimulates the need for educators to be creative in their upbringing.

When the variability of upbringing is lost, there are not any specifics of the educational organizations; there is no scope for pedagogical creativity.

Because of this approach, it occurs to identify upbringing with extracurricular activity or animation.

It is necessary to note such a risk of developing upbringing reducing it to the implementation of only one, albeit important, direction of upbringing. For example, today they talk a lot about patriotic education, although often it comes down to military-patriotic education. The importance of this direction can hardly be overestimated, but it should be noted that such a path leads to the depletion of the upbringing process, it is obvious that the formation of patriotism takes place in connection with other areas of upbringing, and, above all, with the spiritual and moral. In general, the consideration of upbringing in the logic of the implementation of its separate areas is not productive, since it does not take into account the fact that the teacher’s work is aimed at developing the personality of the child as a whole and is not divided into work on patriotic upbringing, work on moral upbringing, etc.

The next risk consists in the gradual loss of teachers' possession of certain upbringing technologies and techniques. So, for example, it happened with the methods of collective upbringing, with the technologies for creating the upbringing system of an educational institution, upbringing space, with the methodology of organizing collective creative affairs.

There is a danger in introduction of unreasoned innovations in the upbringing process.

In educational organizations, most often we deal with innovations that either arose abroad and could be used in domestic pedagogical practice, for example, tutoring, or that have shown their effectiveness in Soviet times, and which have received new meaningful content today, for example, elements of a communard technique.

Upbringing innovations, however, like any, require careful attention to their implementation in a specific educational organization.

It is known that the age and life experience of the main subjects of upbringing, namely teachers and students, significantly affect not only the perception of the realities of the modern world, but also, first and foremost, the formation of relations between them (12 Skills…, 2018; Craig, 2015; Mahoney, 2017). The result of this is often a wrong choice of the goals, content and methods of upbringing by teachers without taking into account the changes that have occurred with a modern child, young man.

Based on everything that has gone before, it is necessary to think seriously about the tools available to a modern teacher in the field of upbringing. The choice of these instruments can be provided by the upbringing program, but not by any, but that implements certain approaches.

It should be noted that in domestic upbringing there is a great experience in the development of programs. These programs had their advantages and disadvantages.

Today, we were faced with the task of developing an upbringing program, which, on the one hand, could systematize all the positive upbringing experience, and, in its essence, would be systemic and, on the other, would involve all the new things that have appeared in this sphere.

The program has a single goal of upbringing, which is specified in the tasks. These tasks should be varied and, above all, reflect the characteristics of the educational organization. Tasks are reflected in the modules presented in the program. It is the formulation of tasks and the choice of modules that provide teachers with maximum freedom in organizing the upbringing process, they provide its variability.

The upbringing program should be working, that is, it should be in demand every day. This dictates the need for its simple and understandable structure.

Consistency, variability, simplicity in writing and using will allow the use of the program without prejudice to the organization of the process of upbringing, whether for mass or author’s school.

The developed program of upbringing has a number of peculiarities.

The unity of the purpose of upbringing. One country - one goal of upbringing in the country's schools. This is one of the principles underlying the program. The aim of upbringing announced by the program is based on such basic values for our society as human being, family, work, fatherland, nature, peace, knowledge, culture, health (Karakovskij, 1993). This is what unite all of us, what we value, regardless of which region of Russia we live in, what nationality we belong to, or what faith we profess. The program guides teachers to ensure positive dynamics in the development of the personality of schoolchildren, which manifests itself:

  • in their assimilation of knowledge of the basic norms that society has developed on the basis of these values;

  • in the development of their positive attitudes towards these social values;

  • in the acquisition by them of the experience of behavior corresponding to these values, the experience of applying the generated knowledge and relationships in practice (Stepanov, 2017).

In addition, for this general goal of upbringing, individual target priorities have been identified that correspond to the age characteristics of younger schoolchildren, adolescents, and high school students.

The conscientious work of teachers aimed at achieving the goal will allow the child to obtain the necessary social skills that will help him more effectively establish communication with others, to collaborate more productively with other people, boldly seek and find solutions to difficult life situations, to make more meaningful choice of his life path (Potashnik & Levit, 2016).

The activity logic of the program building. Upbringing is carried out only in the process of joint activity of teachers, children, and social partners of school. Therefore, it is precisely this activity – its forms and content – that must be reflected in the upbringing program. In this case, it is necessary to overcome the event nature of upbringing. What is important here is not the organization of events by the teacher for children, but the organization by the teacher together with the children of their joint activities - interesting, useful, and being the subject of their common concern. Moreover, the main thing in such matters is not the fact of their conduct and, moreover, not their quantity, but what relations develop in a child-adult community (Pinter & Mathew, 2016) what emotions are experienced by children and teachers, what the content of their joint activity is (“Perspektivnye modeli vospitaniya …”, 2015). Such an approach will make it possible to organize an interesting and eventful life at school, which will become an effective way to prevent schoolchildren from antisocial behavior (Mercer et al., 2017).

The modular principle of building a program. The spectrum of the main areas of activity through which the school can carry out the upbringing process is presented in separate modules of the program. Some of them are invariant, as they are implemented in each school. Some are variable. An educational organization has the right to include in its program those modules, which will help it to realize its upbringing potential to the greatest extent, taking into account its human and material resources. Since the practice of upbringing in Russian schools is diverse, and the approximate program cannot cover all this diversity, it is assumed that each school can add its own modules to its program according to the model. This principle makes the program more flexible. The school’s work is not driven into a certain “Procrustean bed” of an abstract document.

The program as a constructor. An approximate upbringing program should be taken as a constructor, based on which each educational organization can “assemble” its school upbringing program. It can take as a basis the content of its sections and only correct them where necessary – add the necessary materials or delete irrelevant materials, thereby bringing its program in line with the real activities that it will carry out in the field of upbringing. This is done in order to free educational institutions from excessive “paper” work. In fact, the developers of school programs can only adjust the existing text of the approximate program to their specifics and add to it an annual plan of upbringing work.

Program unity. One educational organization – and one upbringing program in this organization. Schools are invited to develop not three programs corresponding to three levels of education (as it was before), but one general upbringing program. It is only proposed to specify upbringing work at educational levels only in the annual upbringing work plans - and only when it corresponds to the actual division of the work into educational levels. In practice, many forms of working with children are focused on students of different parallels. Many joint activities involve inter-age interaction between students. And this should be welcomed, and not hard to divide the work of teachers to work with kids, work with adolescents and work with high school students. This is far from being the case.

Conclusion

Today, an approximate upbringing program is being tested in all federal districts. It covers more than 700 schools. A large community of experts was involved in testing, consisting of teachers of educational institutions that implement the functions of upbringing, heads and deputy leaders of educational organizations, specialists of the continuing education system for educators, and representatives of the scientific community studying the problems of upbringing. The task of testing is to identify the weaknesses and strengths of the program, to finalize it taking into account the proposals from schools and experts, and, finally, to prepare it for implementation in Russian schools. The implementation of the program, in particular, will create a basis for teaching students to overcome xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and conflict in intercultural communication.

Acknowledgments

The work is performed within the State task ISED RAE for 2020 № 073-00007-20-01.

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Publication Date

20 November 2020

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95

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Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, bilingualism, multilingualism

Cite this article as:

Selivanova, N. L., Stepanov, P. V., Stepanova, I. V., & Parfyonova, I. S. (2020). Upbringing In Schools In Russia: From Problems To An Approximate Program. In Е. Tareva, & T. N. Bokova (Eds.), Dialogue of Cultures - Culture of Dialogue: from Conflicting to Understanding, vol 95. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 873-880). European Publisher. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.11.03.92