Adults, when they take a child on their lap, also want to be stroked themselves. Janusz Korczak
Dear schoolchildren, teachers, parents,
we invite you to talk about how children teach adults, just at the very time when adults try to teach them something. About the child being a rational being, an expert who best knows their shortcomings, needs, and desires. About the child having the inalienable right to express their opinion. About the fact that in the process of upbringing, the child is an equal partner with adults. About how adults constantly overestimate themselves and thereby create in children a sense of inferiority. About how adults are willing to share their power with children when they try to understand them. About the child being a human being from birth, and not becoming one through upbringing. About how every child should strive to raise their own educator well. About how children cannot be blamed for the family into which they are born, but have the right to a full life. About how school is for many children the only refuge from the hardships of life, and much more. The reflection that follows on the next pages is the starting point and motivation for the conversation we offer you.
The effort with which we buy a child’s soul for crumbs we throw at them, and then selfishly and shamelessly expect gratitude, is exploitation. Janusz Korczak
We were born into a world that for over a hundred years has been called modern. In the 1980s, some French thinkers spoke of their present as the end of the modern era and called it the postmodern age. The reasons were the devastating experiences of World War I and World War II, the division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, the Cold War, the irreversible extinction of animals and plants, and climate change caused by humans. Today this fashionable term is rarely used because it is unjustified. If we ask what is modern about modernity, the answer is that over the last 500 years historical change has continuously accelerated. We cannot find in human history any comparable period marked by such accelerating historical changes. The world certainly changed, but very slowly. For specialists who study the development of human societies, the two most important events in human history are. The first is the event when hunters and gatherers stopped living nomadically and chose a settled way of life, about 8,000 years before our era. The second event is the realization that the ever-accelerating historical shifts in Europe from the 15th century cause world-wide changes.
Medieval Europe was backward. The Ottoman, Indian, and Chinese empires were at a higher cultural and social level. Changes in Europe's development were triggered by technical discoveries beginning in the 15th century, which affected European peoples so much that today we speak of Euro-American civilization, which by the end of the 19th century had colonized the rest of the world through its development. Mechanical clocks placed on church towers made it possible to measure time in minutes instead of days. Eyeglasses, the compass, the printing press, the discovery of America, the knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun, the telescope, the microscope, the production of firearms, the steam engine, motors, turbines are inventions whose gradual use fundamentally changed cultural, social, and political conditions in Europe. While in antiquity and the Middle Ages social crises were solved by preserved tradition in the form of legends and myths, where previous generations solved similar situations, the new European experience of rapid social changes changed people's view of the past. Europeans began to realize the historical conditioning of social life and also that it is within human power to change the world around them and adapt it to their own ideas. This liberated them from dependence on the past. A new tool, an authority for solving social problems, became reason and verifiable experience. Tradition lost its significance. At the end of the 18th century the first critical book editions of ancient and medieval authors began to appear. The new word critical is derived from the Greek verb krinein—to distinguish. Times and past periods were to be distinguished. Criticism pointed out the inappropriate insertion of modern meanings of words into ancient texts. Ancient books were for ancient readers, medieval texts for medieval readers, as they lived in different historical contexts. To this day we continue to develop this experience as critical thinking, even though the word critique now has a different meaning than when it was originally used /Siegfried Zimmer/.
The new organizational structure in the emerging modern society became the family. The ancient world did not know the concept of family as we understand it today. In antiquity, kinship relations depended on the master and his household, which decided life and death in that house. The household included the wife, children, extended family, servants, and slaves with their families. In a patriarchal society, sons had greater value than daughters. They could testify in court, they were future soldiers, they inherited property. From age 7, children participated, as cheap labor, in work around the estate. Daughters were less valued, often killed after giving birth, and from age 13 they were married off and became mothers while barely past adolescence. They were constantly occupied with childbirth and did not have high social value in a patriarchal society. They were not allowed to be educated, could not read or write, and could not testify in court. All ancient texts were written by men for men. Even when women were described, they were masculine views of women aimed at men. We do not know the true opinions or feelings of ancient women. Children were not protected by society; social conditions did not allow time for maturing, and children became adults right away. The value of children lay in their adult utility. The more children a lord had, the higher his social status, the more his potency was admired. Medieval society differed little from ancient society.
The rise of modern capitalism and the related industrialization highlighted a problem that until then had not concerned anyone. In the newly emerging factory mass-production, children became cheaper labor than their parents. Children worked in factories instead of their parents. Migration of rural people to cities, where new jobs were emerging, accelerated the building of small rental flats, further worsening workers’ health and social conditions. In order for children to operate factory machines, compulsory school attendance was introduced. Employing children in industrial society was simply the natural continuation of their exploitation. The survival of many poor children depended on family cohesion. The high financial gains that capital created brought new rules. Everything began to have a price. A worker’s labor in the factory and its added value became commodities with a set monetary value. The worker was not motivated by future profit that did not belong to him, which caused alienation from the production process. Feudal division of society into wealthy burghers and ordinary people ended with the French Revolution. The people became the sole sovereign and holder of power. For the first time, the real poverty of the people appeared as an obstacle, an intolerable scandal for society’s further development (Giorgio Agamben). A new social division into poor and rich emerged. The legacy of the French Revolution in the form of freedom and equality shaped poor people’s thinking. The poor demanded equality for themselves, for women, and for children. At the end of the 18th century, the first attempts appeared to provide protection for poor children in rapidly developing cities. Often help came from aristocrats who founded schools, orphanages, boarding homes for poor children. When 19th-century socialists began criticizing capitalist practices and the poverty they caused, they stimulated the emergence of new political arrangements in the form of socialist states. The historical project in Eastern Europe called socialism failed and did not eliminate poverty. Nationalization of industry, wealthy elite communists who kept Eastern European nations under the illusion they were owners of the state, frightened Western society so deeply that it had to incorporate many social programs of communists into the functioning of capitalist society. Post-war Western European capitalism was more socially minded than the endless communist effort to create a just social society. Post-communist democracies in Eastern Europe, through their populist political culture, sent Eastern European countries back to early 19th-century capitalism. Karl Marx’s ideas came back to life. The bitter experience of Eastern Europeans in distrusting the state supported this unfavorable state of affairs. Today, populist parties win elections, weakening state competencies and having no interest in systemic reduction of poverty. In the modern process of advancing digitization of work, flexibility and qualification of workers are required. Employers do not offer long-term employment contracts. Workers are indirectly forced (Slavoj Žižek) to sign short-term contracts, which threatens the existence of their families, increases the inability to repay loans, and creates the threat of enforcement.
If I said at the beginning that we are born into the modern world, it was to stop making excuses and to begin solving poverty-related problems together. We should prepare ourselves and our children for modern reality. In the ideal case, children spend their first 25 years in study, ending at university. This applies to about 40% of children in Slovakia. I could not find statistics on the number of children from poor circumstances studying at universities. Already in kindergartens, teachers notice that children from poor families are often socially and cognitively behind. This may relate to a lack of material means, books, and toys through which parents communicate with their children and spend their free time with them. Children from poor families are also traumatized in school age by the adverse social and financial situation of their parents. They are usually more poorly dressed and do not invite classmates for visits because they feel ashamed of their living conditions. Poor social conditions influence the decision of whether to study further or not. Many times they do not finish secondary school because they want to help themselves and their family financially. The school system evaluates only students’ rational knowledge; the emotional and social state of adolescents is not taken into account. Even today children are afraid of teachers. Many abuse their authority position and transfer their personal failures from private and professional life onto students. The image of factory production without the psychological participation of the worker, from which he became a commodity, also applies to many schools. Children come to primary school like workers to a factory where they must endure so their parents are not sanctioned. Likewise, teachers do what is expected of them in teaching and are not motivated to improve teaching quality. Teachers teach children how to get by in individual subjects, and then students are graded for demonstrated ability or competence in navigating school subjects. What is meaningful, namely to awaken in children a desire to understand, personal interest, and engagement with the topic being taught, happens only rarely. School should primarily teach children to be capable, to show interest in learning. According to Niklas Luhmann, social systems function only on the basis of communication. If school, as a social system, loses communication with children and parents, it endangers its ability to educate. Children’s mental state, childhood, is a unique and irreversible phenomenon that should actively participate in shaping school teaching. From children we expect, on the one hand, originality—so a child can be themselves—and, on the other hand, the ability to create social relationships with others. This complex mental process of socialization and individual development causes confusion in schoolchildren. Therefore school should care about, support, and develop children’s emotional intelligence, introduce social and emotional skills programs, and unconditionally help and materially support (for teaching purposes) socially weaker children. Parents who work professionally in a school subject should be invited into the school teaching process. Their presence and practical experience can make the subject more engaging. Mutual communication and oversight, which support trust and the school’s development, would be strengthened. Some students in secondary schools have better knowledge of foreign languages than a teacher who, thirty years after finishing university, managed with, for example, his English. In physical education classes, some physical education teachers imitate the rivalry of professional sports clubs instead of using the opportunity to engage less physically gifted children in the benefits sport offers. Many students cannot manage mathematics instruction in primary schools. Mathematics teaching is set for the smartest children. Children who need more time to understand mathematical relations are exposed to escalating psychological pressure, which makes fluent learning impossible. Mathematics should receive more attention, more time, and more teaching hours. Many adults do not master basic school mathematics, which disadvantages their employment and social participation in modern society. Therefore teachers should have more opportunities to continue their education and every five years revalidate their qualification to teach at a given school. Young teachers who use modern digital tools and methods make it easier for students to understand the material. A friendly approach by young teachers to students is often the only motivation for children to want to go to school. Education should lead to interest in students' own self-education.
When Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela presented the idea of autopoiesis (Greek – self-creation), showing that biological systems can build, even in very adverse hopeless conditions, a new life-capable structure through their own resources, they gave hope to everyone who cannot cope with old, dysfunctional, conservative systems. A condition for the viability of social systems is the right theme that, through communication, connects all involved parties. Children become adults who, on the basis of acquired knowledge and experience, will participate in the political distribution of power in society. According to Aristotle, it is bad for democracy if it contains too many poor people. There is always someone who promises to lead the poor out of their precarious situation. So far, everyone who promised heaven brought hell. Therefore we should ensure the greatest possible access to education for all children and legal protection especially for socially weaker children. The historical European effort to preserve values in the form of parliamentary democracy is not a given; it can collapse at any time.
Review of the article
Jaro Zázrivý’s article is a remarkable essay. There are many stimulating and wise ideas in it. It should be translated into Czech, and for example, I think it should be mandatory in pedagogical departments of philosophical faculties. As for some theses: in the first historicalizing part, an interesting thesis is that he gives significant importance to myths, which were meant to advise people on how to behave in such situations. For Zázrivý it is important to define poverty and wealth in terms of the environment in which children are raised, for the generation that follows.
At present, poverty is not such a determining fact; rather, it is poverty of spirit, contempt for spiritual values, the absence of cultural needs. Today’s children from socially weaker layers do not suffer material deprivation, but a lack of respect for books, music, and painting. And this is where school should intervene. But it does not happen. Personally, I believe that teacher training schools do not prepare good teachers.
In Zázrivý’s article, I value the insight that school prepares children rationally, but not emotionally. That is a big truth. As a specialist in Czech language and literature, I can assess this well. In literature, and especially poetry, there is an influence on the emotional side of a child’s personality.
An excellent observation by Zázrivý is that assessment, that is, grading children, is often reduced only to “competence” rather than awakening in them a desire to understand phenomena, the world, history, emotional currents, and finally even subjects such as chemistry, physics, and mathematics.
He has very thought-provoking ideas about mathematics. It is an ancient burden for those oriented toward humanities. Zázrivý claims—rightly—that mathematics and its recipients deserve time. Much more time.
Excellent theses are found in the part devoted to communication. There is a bold, but true, thesis that school is losing its ability to educate.
What is missing here is understanding between children, parents, and teachers. Teachers care too much about their authority (because they do not naturally have it), enforce it with punishment, strictness, and do not care to draw closer to students, to enchant them, and to infect them with their own enthusiasm for the subject. And there is also the thing no one resists: genuine interest in another person. No student resists a teacher’s approach and their demands when the teacher shows real interest in them—their suffering and problems, but also their pride, joy, and delight.
The last notable authorial thought is the building of children’s personality. Zázrivý says that somehow we demand originality from children, that the child be themselves, but we should also guide them toward the ability to harmonize with society, municipality, club, and community. Zázrivý very aptly calls this emotional intellectuality of children.
In this context, I would like to point out the still undervalued contribution to the philosophy of education represented by the work of Jan Amos Komenský. His Didactica magna and, not least, the brilliant Orbis pictus.
Jaro Zázrivý can only be thanked for dealing with this issue more deeply and very wisely.
With thanks, Eva Štolbová 20 September 2022