I am engaged in pulling children out of educational depression

Published 11.12.2023 | By Йосиф

I am engaged in pulling children out of educational depression

A very interesting interview with Doctor of Psychological Sciences Alexander Lobok.

– Do underachieving children exist? Or are the twos really children with their own educational trajectory, not like their classmates?

– Academic performance comes from the word “keep up”. Progress is speed. A successful student manages to master what the teacher has set and meet the deadline. Many talented people were underachieving students. Albert Einstein did poorly at school. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was, as you know, slow-witted, and did everything slowly. This does not mean that every failing child is a future Einstein or Sakharov. But someone who does not have time to master something at the same time as his class is often a very deep child. And now let’s imagine: this deep child gets into the classroom with a teacher for whom academic performance is speed. Such a teacher begins to get nervous because the child does not have time. Because of this, the student experiences double stress. The worst thing is when parents start to get nervous. A child in relation to his parents is a powerful emotional mirror. He perceives and amplifies all the micro-details that he reads from his parents. When parents are nervous about children’s academic failure, the child has a stronger feeling that he is inferior, that he is worse than others. He sees it in the eyes of adults. They may say to him: everything is wonderful, everything is fine, we are with you, we believe in you. But the parents say it with such intonation that the child sees: This is not true! And he feels the lies right away.

There is such a problem in pedagogy – infantile children. Such a child never takes on difficult tasks. In such a situation, they tend to hide and say: oh, I’m not interested in this at all! I am currently studying in kindergarten with a preparatory group. And there are children who do their best not to get involved in work, demonstrating their independence with all their appearance. And I understand that they are afraid to get involved in an unexpected test because they are not confident in their abilities. These are the children who are not believed in at home.

– But being unsure of your abilities is a natural state for a person…

– It is unnatural for a small child not to believe in himself. If a six–month-old child did not believe in himself, he would be in a state of constant fear of the outside world. And he begins to explore this world, and even so aggressively. Until the age of five, psychologists say, the child is egocentric. A situation of egocentricity is a situation of unconditional self–belief.

The child is charged with the energy of a feat. A feat is not when something is done to me, it’s when I do something to myself. I’m jumping above my head, I’m making efforts that I couldn’t make yesterday. I am bravely entering a zone that is unknown to me. And by doing this, I feel like a hero. And it’s good if there are adults nearby who see and understand these micro-feats. With the sincere praise of adults, the child acquires more and more strength. Efforts turn into strength. A feat is an effort. A feat is a risk. But if parents do not raise the bar, do not increase the testing space, do not set the child truly intriguing and difficult tasks that would develop his inner strength, then they do not trust their child.

But those children in whom their parents believe will be enthusiastically involved in any unfamiliar trials. They will never run away from them to a corner to drive a car quietly… Another thing is that sometimes various trials break a child’s faith in himself.

– We are talking about the fact that an ordinary child needs to take on new heights. Objectively speaking, it is difficult to study in a Russian school. Why do school heights break children in Russia?

– School is not an easy walk around the game room. School involves taking difficult heights. Absolutely! But there are adequate difficulties, there are inadequate ones. There are cheap difficulties, there are expensive ones – what is called “diamond difficulties”. And we wonder: why does the education system that we create naturally, in the family, in the circle of loved ones, have the potential to make a child many times stronger? Why does an artificially created school system often break a child’s ability to be strong?

Imagine: when you were two months old, you were adopted… let me think who the Chinese are! Or not, there is even a more complicated language: you were raised by the Vietnamese. From now on, only Vietnamese is spoken next to you. The truth is that you will easily master this incredibly difficult Vietnamese language. What inner courage it takes to do this! And you will do it with ease. This means that in a month, two, three, four, you had self-confidence. You had courage. There was a place for heroism in your life. It never occurred to you to reject this challenge and refuse to learn Vietnamese. You will naturally penetrate into these strange sound patterns and decipher them. And at the age of two or three you start babbling in Vietnamese, moreover: you master this language space fluently. This task turns out to be within your power.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? But here you go to school, where you are given teachers who begin to teach you according to the program and set you learning tasks. They begin to teach you your native language, they teach you to read and write – and suddenly you start to break down. Why?

– Probably because the school forces you to do what should happen by itself?

– of course. When a child learns oral speech, it happens by itself. If a two-year-old child had a program for mastering oral speech, distributing the educational material into lessons, and pestered him from morning to evening: “Study, study, after you master this set of words, we will move on to the next words”… What would happen? Children would not learn the language. Neither Chinese, nor Vietnamese, nor Russian. Never. But for some reason, kids learn their native language.

I emphasize that they all do this according to their trajectories. It is impossible to tell in advance about any child what words and phrases he will have first, second, etc. Traditional “mom and dad” are signal words. That is, they are not even words. These are appeals. Words are those that have individual semantics. Do you know how unusual a child’s first words can be? One of my friends, a two-year-old girl, had the very first independent word, the word “refrigerator”. But she pronounced it like this: “dee.” That is, I isolated a certain carrier sound combination from a long word. And, of course, she delighted her parents: “Hooray! Our Dusya says the word “refrigerator”!”.

Naturally, in such a situation, no sane parent would think of scolding a two-year-old child for “mispronunciation.” Quite the opposite: nothing but sincere joy and sincere delight. And, of course, very little time passes, and Dusya begins to speak the word “refrigerator” and many other words in a much more familiar form to the ear… All children do this: they pull out some sound or sum of sounds from a word and start using it.

And adults at first do not even understand what the child is saying. But they guess – and REJOICE. And as a result, learning a language becomes a great joy for a child.…

Each child has their own individual trajectory of language acquisition. And literacy is an intuition that is formed at the tip of the tongue in the process of activity. But now a child who has mastered the language space freely and bravely goes to school and discovers that literacy is something else within school walls. This is incessant pressure, which gives rise to a child’s insane fear of making a mistake. And therefore, the technologies of teaching reading, which are accepted at school today, cause rejection in children – with rare exceptions. Let’s remember what parents complain about most often when it comes to school reading lessons?

– “My child knows the letters, but cannot read.” Or: “My child can read, but doesn’t want to…”

– That’s right! “He can read, but he doesn’t want to.” This is an accurate diagnosis. I will tell you what is behind these words: such a child cannot read. Because being able to read means wanting to read. Reading is not putting syllables into words, reading is the generation of meanings. Learning to read means learning to see what is hidden behind the text. A child who just adds letters does not read, that is, does not generate meanings. He just voices the characters on the page of the book. If a child can read, he always wants to read.

And now we come to a very important point. The fact is that there are many children in school who cannot really read and count. If a child cannot read, his problems grow like a snowball every year at school. He cannot read the condition of the task. He can’t read the textbook page with his homework. He can read the symbols on the page, but he cannot understand what meanings are hidden behind them. He does not keep up with the work of the class in the lesson. And they give him more and more new tasks! This is followed by distrust of teachers, distrust of parents, and the destruction of self-esteem… We strive to put the most difficult things into children at school and for this endlessly overload the programs. But in fact, these children are inhibited in relation to elementary things.

– So it’s simple? If a child does not keep up at school, should we try to teach him to read?

– No, it’s just difficult. You can’t teach a child to read by showing letters to a child. It’s useless. It is necessary for him to form a semantic and imaginative reading musculature, just as the musculature of an athlete is formed. So that the child learns to IMAGINE what he is reading. But that’s exactly what the school doesn’t teach.

They sometimes say about me that I “work as a democratic teacher.” No, when I work with children – both successful and underachieving – I quite authoritatively put them through various kinds of trials. This is the only way to teach real reading – reading as the creation of your own images and meanings. I create individual difficulties for each child that can ignite his excitement. The task should be difficult, but at the same time interesting, with a really working intrigue. Then the excitement of meeting difficulties awakens in the child.

– Or maybe the children don’t want to learn to read for another reason? Have they stopped perceiving books and reading, living in the visual world, among computer games? Maybe they can no longer be carried away by reading?

– When teachers say: “Oh, how well we would teach if there were no tablets!” – this is for me a diagnosis of pedagogical failure. Indeed, the poorer the environment, the easier the tasks of the teacher. When my competitor is a tablet with a game that a child holds in his hands, not noticing anything around, I need to puzzle. How can I become more interesting for a child than this tablet? Today I am studying with a group of pre-school children in kindergarten. How many different toys this group has! Every now and then I hear complaints: if only half of these toys were removed, how much easier it would be to deal with children. There are too many temptations! But these temptations are a challenge for me. Who am I in relation to them? Can I become as interesting and even more interesting for children than a tablet game? If I can’t, I’m worthless as a teacher.

– Will you tell me how you can make reading a book more interesting for a child than a computer game?

– of course. The first condition is to take a book without pictures. Unfortunately, there are only picture books on the shelves of the kindergarten library where we are talking. Let’s take “Winnie the Pooh” and cover the picture with our hand. The first magic that I can do by looking at this page is to turn letters – and for a child, these are still dots and strokes – into meanings. We read: “Sometimes,” said Eeyore, “when people take someone’s house, there remains a piece or two that they do not need, which they will gladly return to the former owner.” I performed a technical miracle: I turned symbols into words. But when I read the letters, they had not yet been spiritualized, because this is a special work of the imagination that goes on at the same time. “Sometimes”… – after reading this, I pause… and suddenly, it’s in this pause that you realize what “sometimes” means. Sometimes… tell me what happens to you sometimes. Imagine that you are a child…

– Sometimes I feel like crying.… Sometimes I want to listen to music.

– Super! You suggested two phrases, and through these phrases the word “sometimes” was inspired, filled with meaning. We read the word “sometimes” – and a chain of internal associations immediately starts inside us. For you, the word “sometimes” is soulful and real. It has been revealed to you. This is something that no picture can depict, this is your inner work. There are six-year-olds who still do not feel the difference between the words “sometimes”, “always”, “never”. The word “sometimes” did not have time to appear to them. And we must try to show it. What is the difference between a reading child and a non-reading one? He sees a flash of an image with every word he reads. It happens at lightning speed. And in this flash, the word appears to him. A child’s imagination is a saving thing. If we learn how to use its thermonuclear energy, much will be possible.

A child in our world saves himself with his imagination. But the school has not learned how to convert the energy of his imagination into educational things. She always wants to give the children something of her own. And we still strive very little to listen to children’s speech, we do not know how to cultivate it. And that’s why the book is incredibly necessary in the modern world. Especially a book without pictures. Because a book without pictures is the only thing that really allows a person to develop their imagination. Reading it, you are constantly creating characters inside yourself, constantly creating visual images in yourself. Humanity has not yet come up with another tool so effective.

What we practiced, I call “hole reading.” What happens to you at the moment when I pause and suggest that you continue the sentence? Your imagination is awakening. During these pauses, the child begins to perceive the word in a multidimensional way. He learns to distinguish between word endings and cases. He quickly begins to develop syntactic, spelling and semantic hearing. That’s how he starts learning to read. And when children begin to feel the text, they realize that it is much more interesting than watching a movie. Reading defeats visualization, which has become too much in the world over the past thirty or forty years. But I say thank you to computer games and visual culture in general for creating this level for us.

– Now we are talking about babies. Is it possible to teach an underachieving high school student to read? It is sometimes said that teenagers at this age are already spoiled by the school system…

– No one is spoiled by anything! In life, each of us encounters different practices: among them, the right, the wrong, the questionable…So what? Do we say to ourselves that we are spoiled by them? I also practice “hole reading” with high school students. We are not reading Winnie the Pooh with them, but the most incomprehensible (and therefore boring) physics textbook for them. The most interesting thing is that the content of the chapters they read is absorbed by them firmly, although they do not think about physics as such at this moment.

– And the last question: what should parents of two-year-olds do? Waiting for the miracle of meeting with a teacher who will help their child?

– Parents need to learn this by themselves. They can and should learn a lot by themselves. No matter how critically we speak about the school, the problem of the double is, in most cases, the problem of his parents. When parents are unsure of themselves, they begin to project this insecurity onto their children. They say: “We didn’t take place, but it has to take place!” It all depends on the willingness of the parents themselves to perform feats from time to time. Then the child will have the desire to break through, to take his height.

– For parents of two–year-olds, the biggest feat is to believe in their child…

– And he should feel parental faith in everything: in words, intonations, in our views. The worst thing that can happen is to pretend that you believe in this child. Faith must be real. That’s the main thing.

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