THE SCHETININ SCHOOL AND THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION by Axinia Samoilova

Excerpt from Axinia Samoilova’s chapter in EDUshifts Now! book.

THE SCHETININ SCHOOL IN TEKOS, RUSSIA

The founder of the school is an academician of the Russian Academy of Education, Mikhail Petrovich Schetinin, one of the most remarkable teachers and educational visionaries of our times.

Mikhail Petrovich discovered his “secret” already in the first years of teaching. His, at that time, musical students showed amazing results, and when asked “How do you work on the music pieces?”, he answered: “We work on the human being”. This statement encapsulates the key tenets of the Russian educational tradition, i.e. upbringing and working with the soul of a child as the primary aim of education. The success in studies follows automatically. The structural organization and some tools of working with the groups/collectives Schetinin borrowed from Anton Makarenko, such as: mixed-ages groups producing some material or educational results/products, or collective discussions about the results/feelings/perception of oneself and others at the end of the day. Similar to Makarenko’s Colony, the Tekos School has groups of 5–6 people, with their senior leader reporting to the council. The seniors are former pupils who are now 18–25 years old, having one pedagogical and one other higher education qualification. They grew up on high ideals inspired by Schetinin, and thus serve as mature, natural authority models for the younger ones. Each group chooses one educational subject or educational field as being central for its members. It can be mathematics, chemistry, biology, and history etc. The learning group may extend the initiative to expand the educational field, or to create an entire-
ly new field for the school, for instance oceanography. The work involves several levels of pupil’s activity:

» I study (studying subjects).

» I’m learning how to teach (knowledge and comprehension of the teaching methods).

» I teach (mutual teaching of students).

» I teach teaching (the transmission level — teaching methods).

This is another key principle which is the turning point in learning: children know that they learn not only for themselves, but also for others. Initially, there is this collaborative, collective feeling of being connected and the need to pass the knowledge on. It is an entirely different motivation and access to learning. In my opinion, this is what makes it especially effective.

“We do not have students as such. Everyone is a teacher or expert. Students actually create manuals and tutorials. These textbooks we use is a system for development of the kids themselves, because in the future Russian school textbooks will be done by the students. Thus everyone is a researcher at our school. We pay special attention to stories, folk dance, folk singing, folk crafts and folk Russian martial art, which is not based on aggression, but on love”. M. Schetinin.

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