Attitudes toward school very well characterize our perceptions about the future, since education is an area that deals exclusively with prospects. School may be perceived as pleasure, prison, or uninteresting, but mandatory work. 

Waldorf School teacher Ara Atayan compares a good school to a garden where any flower can develop (grow) healthy. Like a person who develops to his hidden and undiscovered potential. Which is more important for children living in a dense and saturated information environment. 

Can we say that schools know what sort of person they want to see in the future, when what is paramount will be not information, but the ability to interpret it?

The public educational system doesn’t at all prepare a person for the future. What is called information science classes are simply aimed at mastering the computer. But that’s not what prepares children for the future.

Everyone, especially children, is today at the center of an information attack. And so that people don’t get lost in that ocean and don’t disappear as a species, we have to understand that the path to fortify people begins from the opposite pole. This pole is a strong internal pillar and the ability to make your way in different situations in life. 

And this means that the educational system must become human-centered. 

To live in the media field and to not lose human nature completely other skills are necessary: creativity, live imagination, certain characteristics of morality and will, which in the case of premature computer education only weaken, not get stronger.

We must get rid of the illusion that the earlier we teach children computer literacy, the better. No one will need this literacy 10 years later because when today’s children become adults, working with computers will be essentially something else. Perhaps it will be enough to give instructions to devices with voice or hand gestures. 

This is simply a loss of time and strength. It’s more important to keep the childhood and natural environment, where it will be possible to see the starry sky, green trees, and colorful butterflies. 

This environment is already disappearing. Children direct their gaze now not outside; you will no longer see children playing in the yard. Even if they’re standing in groups in the yard, they’re all staring at their phones. 

That’s neither good nor bad; it’s already a fact.

It’s bad. And it shouldn’t be like this if we have sufficient will. Otherwise, we’ll be raising weak-willed generations who will be unable not only to choose in the onrush of media currents, but also to take any independent steps. 

This is a challenge, the resistance of which is from the opposite pole: through taking care of and saving childhood, developing their fantasies, and as much as possible ensuring live human contact.

Our school offers a ready package that must be memorized, without questioning, criticizing, and ultimately, opposing. Being critical is not encouraged. Don’t you think that critical thinking is an important element of schooling?

I don’t like the phrase “critical thinking”; I prefer the word “independent.”

A person is not just a head, and moreover, a head that must be filled with information. Ultimately, receiving information is very easy, and the internet provides that opportunity; there’s no longer a need to store a large volume of information in memory. A person is both a head and a heart, and hands and feet. We are acting and feeling and thinking people. 

At the same time, we must admit that when we’re dealing with young people, it’s more important to take the ability to think out of the area of acting and feeling.

School is not a place where people simply acquire knowledge. School is a place where a person’s capabilities are shaped. 

In the world of the future, knowledge will be something available in one second — also something very quickly forgotten. Whereas capabilities are never lost. For example, if you know how to swim, then you’ll swim until the end of your life. If you learn to think, you’ll be able to think until the end of your life, and you’ll use this ability any time and anywhere.

It’s a potential that is needed both in professional life and in difficult personal situations. People who think and create are stronger.

But our educational system doesn’t tackle this problem. 

Students are required to be obedient, not to object, and to listen. As in the army or in prison.

Everything is done to get rid of the ability to think independently. Even if the child doesn’t object, the school already has a picture of the standard person in which it wants to fit all children. 

But the standard person is he who has learned a certain amount and content of texts well. As a result, the child perceives school as a place he must suffer for 12 years — with school phobia, dreading and hating the teachers and classes. Feeling happy when he gets sick and has to stay home…

The method of training educators should be completely revised. More movement is needed than abstract theory. 

The teacher is a gardener who cannot wish that all the plants grow and flourish identically. Each flower should receive its unique appearance as a result. Ultimately, we don’t rely on the idea that we must all be roses because roses are valued in the market. 

Can the structure of schools be changed through subtle intervention, or this should happen only by government decision?

I don’t think the school model can be changed from above because for this there is a need for will and courage, which I don’t see.

The system can be changed today only through individual precedents. If small precedents are created that change the environment, that is also a way.

According to a network principle?

Yes. Small private schools will start to find a certain field of cooperation, later being brave, defending their ideas. It’s now very difficult to do creative pedagogical work because in our country the state doesn’t want that. It even does everything so that it doesn’t exist. 

It seems there’s no resistance also from the parents.

Parents’ dissatisfaction with the state system is growing, but they too are a result of the Soviet system and they cannot image that there may be another school.

The digital generation perceives reality without a hierarchy (this too is important, that too, this other thing too). This is a new challenge for schools. 

I would say the opposite — this is also not important, that is also not important. If we pay attention, when a child is simultaneously on the internet, interacts on social media, is doing something else at the same time and answers questions, in reality it is an illusion. Every act is superficial, not to mention that also an illusion is interacting on social media, where human warmth is lacking.

Any act split into several parallel actions doesn’t give one a chance to dive or sink [into the task]. You constantly remain on the surface. And on the surface you can solve only external problems, but you never reach the layer where you are manifested as a person.

There’s a more dangerous issue: modern children are deprived of loneliness and boredom (I mean the positive meaning of these words), when you think, well what should I to do? Say, to lie down and look at the sky or the ceiling, then read a book or embark on something interesting. 

Now when a child is alone, he immediately reaches for his phone and it seems to him he is no longer alone. And the tragedy is that he is more alone in the virtual world. Truly alone.

Interview by Nune Hakhverdyan.