From the author: The idea to write about school was somehow conceived a long time ago, but somehow it didn’t work out. There were not enough words, courage, judgments, but there were a lot of feelings. Thanks to Irina Mlodik for all her books and articles, Katerina Polivanova for her interesting views about school, Olga Yurkovskaya, for her non-standard approach to teaching her own children. Thanks to them, I was inspired and wrote. To live in a world that does not exist. “School prepares you for life in a world that does not exist” Albert Camus The first bell rang and that exciting day came when your child became a first-grader! Left behind are the worries and worries associated with choosing a school and teacher, the child’s readiness to learn and abilities, shopping for school supplies and clothing. Not only for children, but also for parents and grandparents, a new stage begins - schooling. It is this event that changes the entire way of life of the family. This is where it becomes difficult and worrying for many. Questions arise: How to respond to the teacher’s opinions about the child?; What marks will he receive and how should he treat them?; What kind of relationship will the child have with the teacher and classmates?; Should you help your child prepare his homework at home or not? and many others... The answers to these questions are determined by the half-forgotten school experience of the parents themselves. Why do we send our children to school? Parents send their children to school because everyone does it, because we want him to learn knowledge there, to learn something new to find new friends... These are the expectations of parents. And parents also dream about the child’s future, about his success, about his well-paid job, about a happy future life. This is parental motivation (what he needs!). And why does a child need school? To play there with the children, to get good grades, to get a profession, to make it interesting to learn something, and also because everyone does it and mom and dad order it, that is, his motivation (why does he need it)! School – an educational institution for obtaining education. Education is the process of acquiring knowledge. Children must acquire knowledge, and parents act as the customer of the educational process. The responsibilities of the school include not only education, as the acquisition of knowledge, but also the formation of children’s motivation to learn (the desire to obtain this knowledge), that is, to make the process of acquiring knowledge more interesting, exciting and informative. Irina Mlodik believes, and I absolutely agree with her, that a good school can be called one that can teach a child not only to memorize and present what he has read and solve according to a model, that is, to assimilate information, but also to acquire educational skills: the ability to analyze, synthesize, generalize, classify, comprehend, highlight the main thing, the ability reflect and compare, put forward hypotheses and look for evidence, compare and be able to systematize, as well as acquire social skills (build relationships with adults and peers), which parents often neglect and consider unimportant. The presence of social skills in the adult life of a grown child often determines his success, his sense of self from life, emotional fulfillment and satisfaction. Parents choose which school their child will attend and what it will mean to him. Parents choose and build relationships with the system that provides educational services for their children. Sometimes parents believe that they are adults much smarter and more experienced than children. And that on this basis they can place their experience and intelligence in the child, and then he will be one hundred percent protected from life’s misfortunes and, of course, will be happy. It's just an illusion! Why are we so worried? It is during the period when children go to school that the family comes face to face with the rules and norms of the outside world, which are different from the rules of family life. Here the questions are resolved about what is considered success and what is failure, how to become successful and what price the family is willing to pay for external success, compliance with external norms and standards.For example, it will be considered a family success if the child only gets 10s. If there are several 9s, it’s already a disaster. Such a family will not consider any price too high. Parents hear this unspoken message from the school: “If you do not constantly monitor your child’s learning every day, in all subjects, then your child will be unsuccessful in school, and then he has no future!” All forces and resources will be devoted to achieving this goal : additional classes, additional workload, tutors, etc. Losers from this family are excluded, most often, they are not “remembered”, and if they are discussed, it is only in a whisper. At this stage, a parent can begin to thoroughly control his child, his work done, the quality of what he has written, the essence of what he has learned, believing that without help, support, and external control, the child cannot be successful. What's wrong with this? External parental control replaces the development of the child's own internal control (did I do everything, did I do it well, did I check my own mistakes). The child becomes insecure, passive, dependent and irresponsible, because excessive parental responsibility interferes with the development of his own internal responsibility, it is transferred to the checking adult, let him do it, check it, point it out, suggest it, direct it. It’s all very simple. Everything you do for a child on your adult resource: collect a briefcase, be responsible for completing homework, get upset about bad grades, etc. Then the child has less of this. The more responsibility you have for all the child’s actions, the less he develops his own skills. Thus, following the message of the school: control everything, intervene, get involved in everything, parents do not get the result they want. Instead of an active, responsible, motivated child, they raise a passive, weak-willed, demotivated and irresponsible child. Such a child stops enjoying the educational process; in fact, he no longer needs it. Only parents need this! Why are parents so involved in this process? Often because parents cannot distinguish their fear of failure (derived from their own childhood) from the fear of failure of the child, because they do not know how to trust their child, cannot accept him as he is. Our emotional state depends on you When the teacher talks about the child, parents experience various feelings from joy and pride to feelings of bitterness and shame. Some parents say that they don’t want to go to parent-teacher meetings (“Again, I will be ashamed in front of the whole class for his behavior”), some get angry and severely punish their children (“There’s no point in making me blush for him!”). In other words, it could sound like this: “Lead and study well so that I don’t feel bad!” And then the child must bear a double burden of responsibility - for himself and for the emotional state of the parent. Excessive load causes disgust from school, from parents and from learning. And the child has two options left: either fight or resign himself. The way of struggle can be defiant behavior, or hidden damage to school property, or skipping classes... This is how resistance to pressure from parents manifests itself, because the psyche tends to resist what is imposed from the outside. The child accumulates so much anger and dissatisfaction in response to injustice and emotional (and sometimes physical) violence that children want to show retaliatory aggression, at least in an implicit, hidden form, in the form of sabotage and evasion of their own activity. The path of humility manifests itself in indecision, frequent illness, and insensitivity to one’s desires. Children who have walked the path of humility can graduate from school with a gold medal and continue to study brilliantly at the institute that their parents offer them. But often they cannot get pleasure from either the profession they received, or from the studies and knowledge gained, because they are no longer sensitive to their desires. We are super parents Parents are very concernedassessments of your children. This happens because, on an unconscious level, parents treat the assessment given to the child as an assessment given for their parenting. This means that the higher the score, the better parents they are. Thus, when looking through their child’s diary or notebook, parents often forget that they are mothers and fathers, and not the children of a Supermother or Superfather, whose symbol is the teacher. Parents begin to force their children to study, push them, demand and suppress them. It’s as if they believe that if you don’t show force to them and don’t shame, intimidate and punish, then children won’t study for high grades. Parents’ fixation on “success or failure” creates in the child the feeling that “I” and “ success” is the same thing, that people love me only when I have high grades, that they will treat me well only if I study well. Any mistake is then perceived as a tragedy, a small failure, a catastrophe, and life then consists of constant anxiety and fear of defeat, uncertainty and dissatisfaction with oneself. In adulthood, they are afraid of failure, refuse lucrative offers, and do not believe in themselves. And it may happen that the parent will never know about these experiences. Because such children are sure that their parents are not interested in them, but only in their success. Parental anxiety about their own imperfections can decrease when the parent recognizes their own right to make mistakes and their own imperfection. By recognizing this in themselves, the parent recognizes this in the child. Because by depriving a child of the right to make mistakes, parents deprive him of experience. How will you go to college? Questions: can the child be successful, graduate from college, find a prestigious job - these are precisely those oriented towards the family’s hope for the future. When I ask parents, what bothers them if their child has poor handwriting, lower reading ability, or average math grades? You can often hear the answer: “I want him to go to college.” Parents, as it were, “compress” time and thereby impose demands that are not according to the child’s age (after all, he is not going to college now), without taking into account his interests (no one knows what interests he will have in the future). Both adults and children have an opinion the situation is different: child - so that this situation is useful now; adult - so that this situation will be useful later. The point of contact between the differences in perception causes disappointment both in the child (You are only interested in my grades! “If you say that I study for myself, then why are you so worried about my grades?”) and in the adult (I do so much for you, and you don’t appreciate! “I don’t want you to have difficulties in the future”). Fears for the future prevent parents from appreciating everything that happens “here and now,” enjoying successes, being upset by failures, talking about difficulties and accepting their child for who he is. Janusz Korczak wrote: “For the sake of tomorrow, they neglect what pleases, saddens, surprises, angers, and occupies the child today. For the sake of tomorrow, which the child does not understand and does not feel the need to understand, years of life are wasted." When parents follow the idea of ​​fixation on the results of centralized testing (CT), catching the message of the school, the sooner you think about CT, the better, then they lose their child as a person. It’s as if he doesn’t exist, there is only the CT, and the child is only the result of the test taken at the end. And for a child, a lot happens at school besides learning: friendship, love, betrayal, victories, quarrels, reconciliation, injustice and much more. The child’s personality is not noticed, what he loves, what he is interested in, what he wants, what really worries him. At this time, the parent follows his grandiose plans to become a lawyer, economist, doctor. At that moment, they don’t think about the fact that, without seeing their child as an individual, they are depriving him of his path in life. It’s great when the plans of parents and children coincide, but if not, then society will get a stupid economist, a worthless doctor, a worthless lawyer, and a untalented artist.Perhaps, following his parental plan and not seeing the personality of his child, the parent is trying to live a second life for himself, to do what he could not. “I couldn’t become a great ballerina, but my daughter will be!” Parents often forget that time changes so much and the knowledge that school gives becomes outdated, new professions appear, new skills are more valuable. The mysterious figure of the teacher Teachers have two tasks: to provide effectiveness of knowledge transfer and maintain children's interest in learning. When the salary and status of the teacher are low, despite the fact that many parents have no less knowledge and sometimes even more than the teacher at school, when the teacher is overloaded with responsibilities not related to teaching, despite the fact that not all classes are technically equipped in a timely manner, teachers carry out the transfer knowledge, and only to a small extent maintaining interest in knowledge. Then the school, represented by the teacher, gives the following message: “without your help the child will not master the school curriculum, without your lectures and prodding the child will not learn.” The parent becomes involved in the learning process, forgetting that he is copying the teacher’s role. Thus, the child has two teachers and no parents. Instead of a mom and dad, he gets, at best, a patient and wise teacher, at worst, a Cerberus, a supervisor, a hysterical woman, an evil woman, etc. depending on the character of the parent and his attitude towards how her child studies. There are few truly wise teachers who can teach a child to learn, because it is not for nothing that they say: “a teacher is a profession and a calling.” Ya.L. Kolominsky noted: “To be a teacher you must have talent, but can we count on such a rare phenomenon as talent, given such a mass profession as a teacher?” The teacher received an education in his specialty, then why are these trained and professional people (teachers) pushing parents engage in something that your parents did not learn? Most likely, when non-professionals do the work, the results will be “so-so.” There are parents who do an excellent job of teaching other children, but with their own children they are often impatient and irritated during the learning process. Because the teacher-student relationship is different from the parent-child relationship. Because these are different roles, different tasks, different relationships and different ways of interacting. The parent’s task is to help, suggest, support with advice or explanation if asked. The teacher’s task is to teach, control, check, and make the learning process interesting. By mixing and confusing roles, parents deprive their children of their love, support, interest, and the opportunity to be different with them, and not just do their homework well. Perhaps in this way the school abdicates responsibility for learning outcomes? The Ministry of Education, the school principal and parents are not responsible for the results of education, but teachers and students. What is the parent's responsibility? And it is important for a parent to remember, when helping their child with homework at home, not to replace the teacher’s role, i.e. continued to pass on knowledge (forgetting about maintaining interest in learning), but to support with advice or explanation, to love their child. A parent can do a lot before the child goes to school. The main thing that parents think is that the main thing is to teach children to read and count at 4-5 years old. Forgetting that in order to master knowledge, you need to teach the child to manage himself, help organize his time, teach him to be responsible for his deeds and actions, allowing him to face their consequences. It is important to support in a child the ability to trust his own sensations and feelings, the ability to cope on his own and ask for help when this does not work out, the ability to be diligent. It is important not to discourage his interest in the world, people, to preserve his ability to ask questions and wonder, the desire to learn, read, explore, reflect, put forward hypotheses, and have an opinion. Do not suppress his imagination, the ability to create and compose, the desire to express himself, to dream, to want, to move. Experience