Schetinin School

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The Schetinin School , officially lyceum-boarding for complex character of children and adolescents ( Russian Лицей-интернат комплексного формирования личности детей и подростков ), is a state-owned company founded by former music teacher Mikhail Petrovich Schetinin and guided boarding school in the Russian town Tekos in Krasnodar Territory . Attending the school is free; however, the students do a lot of work.

Founder and History

Mikhail Petrovich Schetinin (2014)

Mikhail Petrovich Schetinin (actually Schtschetinin , Russian Михаил Петрович Щетинин ) was 1944 in the Soviet village Novyi Birjuzjak in District Kisljarski in Dagestan born. He graduated from the Saratov State University in 1973 with a degree in music and singing. In the following years he was successively director of a music school and several schools at which new educational methods such as a special focus on music and dance were experimented with. In 1977 Schetinin joined the CPSU . He developed pedagogical innovations designed to simplify and shorten lessons and received various state awards for his work, while later critics viewed it as unsuccessful. A state-sponsored agricultural school project in Ukraine , which he directed, was discontinued.

In 1988 Schetinin founded a school in the town of Azovskaya (Krasnodar), then moved to Tekos in 1994 and founded the Lyceum boarding school for complex personal development of children and adolescents on a former barracks site . In 2003 the school buildings burned down; they were rebuilt together with the students. From 2003 to 2007, the school operated without financial support following a conflict between the director and the authorities. In 2017 the school received the state license to issue high school diploma certificates.

From July 2019, the school was closed by the authorities. This was justified, among other things, with deficiencies in fire protection, the lack of school books and inadequate qualifications of two teachers. In addition, there are no educational publications. Around 9,500 people signed a petition to keep the school. Mikhail Petrovich Schetinin died on November 10, 2019.

Since the school is still closed, the Schetinin pedagogy has been spreading through seminars since June 2020, especially in German-speaking countries.

Of the numerous alternative school concepts that emerged in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, the Schetinin School is the most famous project that has survived to this day.

Boarding school life and methodology

The school year at the Schetinin boarding school begins on November 1st after the harvest season in which the students work. There is a strictly prescribed daily rhythm, from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Learning and physical activity alternate. In addition to the usual school material, learning the martial art of sambo and manual activities is mandatory. The students set up their own accommodation, build furniture, cook, sew, etc. Some students stay in the boarding school after completing their training and work in the local craft businesses, the profits of which are used to finance the school. The boarding school's diet is largely vegetarian ; the use of smartphones is permitted.

In addition to the headmaster, there are only two employed teachers out of 300 pupils (the latter as of 2010); There are just as few subject teachers as there are grades or a class system . Instead, the learning content is developed by the students themselves and passed on to each other; Schetinin speaks of "300 students and 300 teachers". For this purpose, mixed-age groups of around 5–6 students each (“laboratories”) are formed, who deal with a topic at intervals of around one to one and a half weeks. This is called "immersion" (Russian погружения , for example: "immersion") in a topic. The knowledge gained from specialist literature is then passed on to another group. One visitor and advocate of the Schetinin School described this process, which takes place under the guidance of former alumni of the school, as four steps that students go through:

  1. Learn content
  2. Learn to teach
  3. to teach
  4. Teach the teaching

The central concept of pedagogy is the networking of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. That is why the daily routine alternates the imparting of knowledge with dance, song, art and (martial) sports. This so-called "rhythmic learning" is characterized by the catchwords "thinking - moving - singing - pause".

The method mainly used in the learning groups is the joint development and artistic creation of diagrams. Each child collects the individual posters in a folder and reports the subject matter at a later point in time using the diagram.

Based on questions from everyday life, the students try to research and collect all knowledge.

In everyday school life, only one subject is taught during a certain period of time. If mathematics is taught, all of the material to be learned is covered once (at a rapid pace) from the first to the eleventh grade. (Only exemplary examples, which have the character of a recipe, are calculated and memorized.) Then the next subject is in line, until after a while mathematics is due again. The ideal cycle (for all subjects) lasts three months, so that the subject matter of 11 years is covered four times within one year. (There are no holidays, but every student can take a break of up to 3 months by arrangement.)

Mikhail Schetinin claims that this way the material would be conveyed ten times faster than with traditional educational systems. This is made possible by the students' special understanding for one another, which would arise in an atmosphere of "open and free togetherness". Schetinin spoke of a “contact of the bioenergetic field” or “forces touching one another” between the teaching and learning students; Proponents of the Schetinin method in German-speaking countries refer to this as "knowledge osmosis". Thanks to the ten times faster transfer of knowledge, the schooling time is compressed from 10 years to 1 year, so that model students of the Tekos school already passed the Abitur at the age of 7.

The Schetinin methodology has been adopted by various other Russian schools. In the 2010s it also found widespread use in Austria . The LAIS learning concept is based on this, and the Weinbergschule near Salzburg (officially closed in 2019) switched its secondary level to Schetinin pedagogy. Schetinin himself warned against idealizing his method:

“No program, no method can guarantee successful child rearing on its own ... Our method is not the main thing, not the method, but the purpose that we pursue with it. ... to educate people to live in harmony and to act in harmony with society ... "

Since the school in Tekos was closed, day seminars, 3-day seminars and three 3-week seminars that build on each other have been offered. A 3-week seminar conveys the learning content of a school semester. In the first 3-week seminar, for example, “Mathera” (mathematics from 1st to 11th grade), “Choreography”, “Culture”, “Self-defense / Sport”, “Biology”, “Art / Painting”, “ Singing / making music "," Group dynamics "and" Russian "taught.

UNESCO

On page 9 of an advertising brochure of the Schetinin School, the UNESCO certificate of joining the network of UNESCO-associated schools on April 9, 1999 (issued in Paris, in French) is printed. This was headed "At the forefront of the world's educational systems" and on the front page and on the back cover of the brochure a seal was added with the text "Lyceum recognized by UNESCO as one of the best educational systems in the world". On various websites it became "It has been a UNESCO school since 1999 and was named" Best Educational System of the World "in Paris." In various lectures (youtube), the Schetinin School is described as the "Best School in the World" awarded by UNESCO.

The network of UNESCO project schools currently includes 11,500 schools worldwide. The Russian side of UNESCO states that there are 369 certified UNESCO-associated schools in Russia.

Any school can join the network. The school is committed to implementing the principles of a "UNESCO school" within two years. UNESCO does not award any further award as "Best School".

The Schetinin School has meanwhile been excluded from the network after an examination by UNESCO, as the strongly nationalistic and military training contradicts the principles.

Problems with the transfer of the pedagogical concept into the Austrian school system

In Austria there is no compulsory education, but a compulsory education. It is therefore possible that children do not attend school, but are taught at home (by their parents, for example) (in the 2018/2019 school year there were 2300 children). This status includes the "learning groups" set up in Austria such as the Weinbergschule or the LAIS group in Klagenfurt, the "Laisu learning world" in Erl or the LAIS learning group in Elsbethen. (All LAIS group homepages are offline as of August 2020.) Legally, they are not schools. However, the term "school" is not legally protected. You are therefore in a legal gray area. In order to attain the status of a " private school ", the teachers would have to have completed a state-recognized pedagogical training and teaching would have to be based on a fixed curriculum.

It is difficult to integrate Schetinin pedagogy into the mainstream school system, as it thrives on the fact that students are grouped together in learning groups of mixed ages and not in classes with students of the same age. To some extent, this could be implemented in an all-day school , for example in the afternoon care. See also learning in mixed-year learning groups .

In the Schetinin pedagogy, only one subject is taught each day (about three times 90 minutes of mathematics, interrupted by artistic and sporting activities). Such " epoch lessons " can be found in Waldorf schools .

criticism

The Russian priest and university professor Alexej Kasatschikow considers the method of immersion to be very promising: When used in traditional schools, under the supervision of specialist teachers and within the framework of an orderly curriculum , it has led to above-average learning success. In Schetinin students, however, he sees no signs of particular success; the teaching structure at the boarding school is unsuitable. He rated the nature-loving life in the boarding school positively, but the students were exploited as workers. Other Russian Orthodox sect researchers classified the school as " sectarian ".

The German sect researcher Matthias Pöhlmann criticized the esoteric Anastasia philosophy, which is omnipresent in school. The Schetinin school became known in particular through the Anastasia novels, in which it was presented several times as an ideal . It was also criticized that the children hardly had any freedom for personal development. Visitors to the school reported:

“Alertness, intelligence, a sense of responsibility and dignity are written on the children's faces. However: they hardly seem like exuberant children. The day is organized from five in the morning until nine in the evening, they don't have time for free play, being alone or playing games for children. Books are only available in academic or high-level literature. There are also no holidays in the true sense of the word. In this context, critics speak of »robot and zombie children.« "

The Wiener Zeitung reported that the children of the Schetinin school were indoctrinated with folk - nationalistic ideas. In a report in Komsomolskaya Pravda , Shetinin was accused of glorifying the Soviet Union, including Stalinism .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Matthias Pöhlmann : Esoteric pedagogy on the rise: Comments on "LAISING", "LAIS schools", "Natural learning" , sektenwatch.de, accessed on November 28, 2017. (PDF)
  2. ↑ UNESCO associated schools in Russia . unesco.ru. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  3. ↑ Information on the Activities of the UNESCO Associated Schools International Project , unesco.ru, accessed on November 28, 2017. (English)
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Лицей Михаила Щетинина: Уникальная школа или заурядная секта? (The School of Mikhail Shetinin: A Unique School or an Ordinary Sect?), Komsomolskaya Pravda , November 16, 2010. (Russian)
  5. ↑ a b c Михаил Щетинин и его школа (справка) (Michail Schetinin and his school), Center for Religious Studies on behalf of the holy martyr Irenaeus of Lyon, February 25, 2013. (Russian)
  6. ↑ In the Kuban they are fighting for an experimental lyceum , Izvestia , September 3, 2019
  7. ↑ Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin has died , Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, November 11, 2019
  8. ↑ [1]
  9. ↑ a b c d Axinia Samoilova: The Schetinin School and the future of education . In: Edushifts , socialinnovationacademy.org, accessed on November 29, 2017. (English)
  10. ↑ a b Schetinin School TEKOS Russian Lyceum on the Black Sea 1 , Youtube , minute 3:10 to 4:00.
  11. ↑ a b "Education is denied my child!" on wienerzeitung.at from June 24, 2017, accessed on November 25, 2017
  12. ↑ [2] Homepage of the ISKA Academy
  13. ↑ LYZEUM Integrated personality development for children and young people. Pilot development of the educational model "School of the 21st Century". Retrieved on August 17, 2020 (German).
  14. ^ Vineyard School. Retrieved on August 12, 2020 (German).
  15. ↑ UNESCO-associated school network. Retrieved on August 12, 2020 .

Coordinates: 44 ° 26 ′ 31.7 ″  N , 38 ° 27 ′ 37.4 ″  E