I've studied a very important and interesting speech of one of the leading experts in the field of age physiology Maryana Bezrukikh.
It seems to me she has touched very essential topics, and I wanna share them with my HiveFam.
Maryana was asked if there is any reason to worry about schoolkids health and educational load during the school year.
Her reply was very thoughtprovoking...
This is how our medical statistics are arranged: data on the kids state of health is divided into two groups: children from 0 to 14 years old (?!) and children from 15 to 18 years old.
Can such data be trusted and guided by if there is a mixture of infants and adolescents? Of course not.
Moreover, mental health disorders are on the 1st place among all kids deseases, BUT according to statistics, everything is not just good, but excellent and there are no problems! And if there are no problems, then nothing needs to be done. That's it...
The state of health of our children is the most serious problem, and this problem raised many years ago.
MaryanaI started working at the Institute of Developmental Physiology of the Russian Academy of Education in 1973, exactly 50 years ago, and at the same time a coordinating council for the health of schoolchildren was created. The first studies in which she took part were devoted to an in-depth study of the health status and workload of schoolchildren.
Already in the mid-70s, these studies showed that the load was excessive and exceeds all established standards (over the past 50 years, the allowable load has been increased!!!), and the health of more than 70% of children was alarming.
The results of this large study became the basis of the government's "overload" decree and the "unload programs" decision. But, as always, decisions are made quickly, and the reaction to them are not so fast - something was reduced, something was rearranged, but in fact nothing has changed!!
An increase in workload, a wave of new subjects, certifications, digitalization, intensification, innovations, none of which had health risks calculated ... There is no time to think about a child....
There is actually noone who CAN do it, because higher pedagogical education has become “narrowly focused” in recent decades.
For some reason someone decided that the knowledge about the patterns of growth and development, modern knowledge about the development of the brain and cognitive activity is not necessary for the teacher, and they excluded age physiology from the number of compulsory disciplines in pedagogical universities!!
The result is deplorable: more than 90% of teachers at all levels of education have no idea about the cognitive activity of the child and the development of the brain.
It is evidenced by a population study of 2019-2020, in which more than 60 thousand teachers took part in 10 regions of Russia.
And the strangest thing is that the Ministry of Education, having received this data, stopped funding the second stage of the project, according to which a modern textbook "Pedagogical Physiology" should be developed and a series of video lectures prepared for free access.
A teacher who does not know the child, who does not understand how the stress of an endless race with obstacles affects the growth and development, but who knows how to hide behind the so-called health-saving technologies, cannot and will not change anything in his work.
And when Maryana was asked about unschooling and her opinion about it, she said that unschooling is a great way to free a kid from the system's workload and give him a chance to grow and develop with HIS OWN speed and according to his own desires and possibilities.
+1 intelligent and wise person who supports our unschooling choice✨