Love for Life

Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin - Kin's School - Lycee School at Tekos

A model school for the future has been established in Russia under the guidance of Academician Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin.

In a small city in southern Russia there is a remarkable Lyceum school. Its students come from more than 40 different nationalities. New approaches to moral and intellectual education allow students to cover the full school curriculum in the space of a few years, and to earn one or more academic degrees by the time they are 15-17. The preservation and interfusion of ethnic traditions through folklore, song and dances of various nationalities affords the opportunity for children of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths to gain a deeper understanding of each other. The noble ideas of service to one's Motherland and highest moral standards, along with mutual assistance and support, unite children and adults of various nationalities in building a bright future together.

Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin

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What is Shchetinin's school?

This is a school in Southern Russia created by alternative educator Academician Shchetinin, where ordinary pupils with little if any help from adult teachers cover the whole 11-year curriculum of the Russian school system in just two years, get official bachelor's and master's degrees from accredited universities by the time they are seventeen, and also have designed, built and decorated their campus all by themselves. The school is described in Book 3.

Can I visit the school? Do they accept visitors?

Yes. Although no special invitation or prior arrangements have been needed until recently, it is now asked that you contact the school beforehand. Due to the overwhelming interest and the constant stream of visitors all year round, students have been distracted from their studies and it is requested that you do NOT drop in unannounced. The School's location is given in one of the books.

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Bright Tidings

On the pathway to Man

We see education gradually turning into a two-edged lie: the young ones pretend to study, the older ones pretend to teach. The mighty energy of the human spirit gets squeezed out by the rigidity and inflexibility of educational technology.

The integrity of the child as an individual - indeed, the integrity of the environment - this is the mutual relationship of the two basic principles underlying the concept of the school as shared by myself and my like-minded colleagues. The very first lesson in the school ought to touch upon the meaning of human existence.

In our world today the whole educational curriculum is divided up into divergent layers, isolated from each other. The world of perception is transformed into isolated 'corridors' to such an extent that it is sometimes hard for the pupil to believe that they are all part and parcel of a single whole. Art draws its very strength from the fact that it synthesises fractionalised phenomena, offers a holistic system of education and child-raising, and inculcates a holistic world-view.

But art cannot fully address this question if children are not immersed in an atmosphere where genuine life-values are affirmed - an atmosphere of shared labour and searchings, where every lesson is permeated with a sense of creativity. Then we have something to think about. Then we have a basis on which children will be able to appreciate art with understanding. For if there is no opportunity to live and experience this high ideal first-hand, then the high ideal is not truly perceived - it remains an ideal in word only, and hence begins to compromise itself.

In our educational process we work on the basis of a three-part harmony: "I see - I analyse - I act."

It is not just that we place our own tremendous emphasis on music, visual art and dance - they should make themselves felt in the school on a day-by-day basis, and this is the crux of the whole thing.

No programme, no methodology can in and of itself guarantee success in child-raising on the whole.

Together with the educators of the Children's Music School in Kizliar (Daghestan), we emphasise the direct dependence of success in music on the level of a person's overall development, rather than on any special, isolated musical talents. It turns out that skill on one area is manifest when skill is shown in many areas of life.

Young people often conquer summits simply because they have never been persuaded that these summits are unattainable. It is our view that skill in one area of activity is made up of skills in others. Talent is a whole network of different gifts. Which means the task of developing one set of skills is expanded when all of them are set in motion together. And to bring up a specialist, consequently, one has to bring out the overall Man - Man as a unified whole...

...Years are behind us now. I have held on to the conviction that Man can do everything! It is precisely through making sense of this saying that our multifunctional school, the whole school complex, the whole school-Man, has been developed. Our purpose is not 'knowledge-know-how-habits'. It is not endless drilling and rote-learning, or the spoon-feeding of information. Rather, it is the raising of Man to live harmoniously, to act in harmony with society - a Man who, when he sees and analyses the phenomena of life which surround him, can feel their interconnection, can perceive the world as a whole. And no matter what he becomes - an engineer, physicist, chemist, builder, teacher etc. - he will understand that he is going out into a whole, complete, unified world!

We are in the process of shaping Man's ability to get along in this whole, unified world from a very young age. Right from childhood Man must be raised beginning with his roots, with his very essence. And the essence of Man is his humanity. And this consists in re-uniting, one way or another, his life-forces in the struggle against the forces of chaos and disintegration. But the development of Man's essence is not only the goal - it is at the same time the means to achieving this goal.

After all, why is the idea of the harmony of the individual so attractive and so productive? Because it alone is capable of appreciating the harmony of the world as the most valuable treasure, capable of preserving this integrity, this very harmony that has been in the making over millions of years of evolution...

In regular schools we notice how our once attentive, wide-eyed pupils seem to fall away from us. We see education gradually turning into a two-edged lie: the young ones pretend to study, the older ones pretend to teach. The mighty energy of the human spirit gets squeezed out by the rigidity and inflexibility of educational technology. It freezes up, only rarely causing faint and pitiful ripples of disturbance to monotonously long and boring classes. But just look at how the school's energy boils over between classes! During these long moments of despair it reminds one of the convulsions of a dying giant.

As a rule, the overwhelming majority of pupils have only two or three classes a day in which they are active, attentive, concentrated and participate as active creators in the learning process. More than two-thirds of the time spent in school is given over to inactivity. It is as though the brain were asleep. But this is not a sleep of relaxation. It is a sleep that is harmful to one's health.

The activity of exchanging information engenders the activity of energy exchange. A state of sleepiness and a sluggish flow of thought processes is reflected in a slowing down of psychophysical functions, in a retarded flow of energy exchange. The body and its nervous system are literally undergoing a slow death. The situation of the one who is 'sleeping' is exacerbated even further by being in a state of anxiety and tension resulting from an attempt to avoid being discouraged by one's inactivity...

The result is that for most of the time the body is in an oppressed state. Perhaps this is why the health curve on one's educational record falls from grade to grade, along with the extinguishing of one's mental forces. The traditional school is not in tune with children's nature. It is not really for them. It does not contribute either to the flourishing of their talents or to the development of their spiritual, physical and moral health. Like a knife-blade, it is aimed at a very narrow target: knowledge-know-how-habits. The focus is not on the child, not on the individual, not on the development of the immeasurable range of the abilities he is endowed with, of his whole universal selfhood, but simply on producing a product of the instructional process.

Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin
"On the pathway to Man"
Contemporary Pedagogy ( Pedagogika nashikh dnei)
ed. Shalva Amonashvili et al.
Krasnodar : Knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1989, pp. 381-401.

translated by John Woodsworth

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Bright Tidings DVD

A model school for the future has been established in Russia under the guidance of Academician Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin.

In a small city in southern Russia there is a remarkable Lyceum school. Its students come from more than 40 different nationalities. New approaches to moral and intellectual education allow students to cover the full school curriculum in the space of a few years, and to earn one or more academic degrees by the time they are 15-17. The preservation and interfusion of ethnic traditions through folklore, song and dances of various nationalities affords the opportunity for children of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths to gain a deeper understanding of each other. The noble ideas of service to one's Motherland and highest moral standards, along with mutual assistance and support, unite children and adults of various nationalities in building a bright future together.

The movie has been translated into English and subtitled. Note, it is right now only available in NTSC system.

This DVD can be purchased from here: http://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/store.php?id=yar1006

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Kinsman (Rodochelovek)

Every individual Man is the Eternal Primordial. Both the eternal Result and the Eternal source. I am talking about Kinsman. It is on this theory, concept and philosophy that our school, the Russian Kin School is founded.

The very thought that Man is part of the Great Cosmos gives pause for reflection on the thought that the human self must be, as Vernadsky put it, a ‘cosmic something’ which guarantees his active existence in the whole unlimited cosmic river of life. To live in the Cosmos means understanding and carrying its structure within one’s self, it means clearly knowing the laws by which it operates, the meaning of its existence, and to have mastered the techniques of existing in it.

The spatial dimensions of the Cosmos (i.e., infinity), its life in time (i.e., eternity), the infinite variations taking place with each of its component elements, all make Man realize the necessity of not only knowing about everything taking place in the Cosmic river of life, but also actively participating in it, being in perfect tune with its aspirations during each moment of cosmic happenings. All of this presupposes the existence within the human self of a power and ability to grasp (or ‘catch’) the innumerable signals of the immeasurable cosmos — to possess within one’s self a database that will facilitate an accurate, instantaneous response to constantly changing cosmic information, so that one who is inherently thinking about this will come to the following conclusions:

(1) The ‘cosmic something’ is some kind of matrix-like informational structure, engendered and nurtured over billions of millennia of Man’s life. Hence we cannot imagine this Man to be an entity limited to a single age, a single manifestation, or especially to the space of a few years or decades. Man is a child of Eternity, and so he constitutes his own Kin (Russian: rod), consisting within himself of an infinite number of manifestations of his existence.

(2) Man as a Kin (Rod), by any stretch of the imagination, cannot be fully accommodated within the artificial, impersonal stream of learning organized by our contemporary schools, all calculated on the basis of a miniscule, partial, primitive entity with a single manifestation of existence. And so the Child-Giant — Kinsman — rebels, protests and rejects; he comes across as the exact opposite of his social surroundings, of the society which has prepared him in such a strange manner for life and work. The School of Kinsman should be prepared by Kinsman. This means the children, just like the adults, should become teacher-researchers and creators of the school of Kinsman. By the same token the adults, just like the children, should become students in partnership with the children of this model educational system.

Hence the principles of the Kin school should be as follows:

1. The principle of nationality (narod), or Kin alike image (Rodoobraznost). Language, national songs, dances, handicrafts, customs, traditions, military arts, along with the culture of visual perception, sound and movement — all components of the concept of nationality — these are the living conditions for introducing the child - Kinsman into a world developed by the Kin, represented and unfolded in him and by him.

2. The principle of the supremacy of truth or fact-meaning correspondence. For “I am Truth,” says the Lord. The significance of all the happenings in the cosmos ultimately comes down to achieving the full mutual harmony of all components — of all elements of Love or Truth. Everything that makes up the life of the school — every law of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, as discovered by the children together with adults — should serve to completely align their relationship to the world and to themselves. Only in this way will the school correspond to its students’ meaning of life. The aspiration for Truth, for a harmonized, just existence in the world and the correspondence of one’s actions to truth provide the only atmosphere in which healthy, moral and spiritual individuals can be developed.

3. The principle of ageless existence. The Kinsman has no age. The memory of the Kin — concentrated in us, or manifested (as it seems to us) in concepts such as conscience, the Divine spark, the matrix foundation of the individual, the spirit — is a priceless treasure which is unfolded in us through the inexhaustible might derived from relying on it and turning to it. We can see that the division of a school population into age-groups establishes the dominance of a single-manifestation Man and his experience in a single-manifestation life, thereby cutting off the memory of the Kin, or the Cosmic knowledge present in Man. The principle of agelessness establishes in the child the Pristine Man, and shifts the emphasis away from the miniscule body to the Great Spirit.

An age-free school population takes upon itself the task of creating the actual system of education, assigns and reassigns roles among the members of the population in accordance with the quality and characteristics of the fruits of their labours, individuals’ traits of character, their inclinations etc., but never according to age statistics. The primogenitor did not merely play with words. The primogenitor used words to designate the essence of each phenomenon, object or process he beheld.

The principle of agelessness is supported by the identification of the Russian word deti (children) with dedy (grandfathers). This shows us that the edges of the family tree presented to our contemporary age were called by a single name: deti, dedy or dedi. This points to the underlying unity of children (deti) with grandfathers (dedy). Talking with a child as one would with a grandfather means talking with a grandfather. We can see that what pertains to children is nothing less than immeasurable. The chief distinguishing characteristic of children is the immeasurability of their aspirations, which we frequently define as maximalism. Unable to fathom the depths of children’s thinking with our imagination, we, in an effort to cover ourselves, end up stifling our children, we cause them to fool around, we turn them into puppets, we minimize them.

4. The principle of purity and clarity of information. The world is a stream of God’s Word. The Word Pantareimerem signifies that everything that exists is informed and itself informs — a thought which lies lightly on the soul. The two axioms: (1) the cosmos is a system and (2) the cosmos is infinite - would not be possible without a third and fourth:

(3) The cosmos as a system would be impossible without a mutual information exchange among its component elements.

(4) The incredible expanses of cosmic space are possible only under the conditions of harmony and mutual harmonization of movement according to a Whole Meaning, according to a Whole image of one’s life-journey, accepted by all as an incontrovertible, indestructible constant.

The acceptance within one’s self of a Whole meaning for one’s journey by each component of that Whole provides life to the system of elements as well as each element in particular. The acceptance of the meaning by each one is a condition of their mutual harmonization as a system. This was the basis of the Russian veche and the Cossack lava — indeed, for the formation of any people as a single whole. It is the basic condition of existence of any organism or body, or any micro or macro symbiosis. When we accept the meaning of the Whole within, its image is evidently what we discover everywhere as our own likeness.

This likeness to all that is found within us links us — relates us — to everyone else. All are related to us by Knowledge, and the awareness within himself of the meaning of the Whole allows Man not only to read the book of the stars but to live according to what he reads in the stars in a single formation with them…

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1. Man (with a capital M) an equivalent of the Russian word Chelovek, referring to a human individual as representing the species, without reference to sex – the human race, humankind.

2. Kinsman (with a capital K) an equivalent of the Russian word Rodochelovek, — A man sharing the same racial, cultural, or national background as another.

3. Kin School (Russian: Rodovaya shkola) — like Rodochelovek (here translated ‘Kinsman’).

4. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (March 12, 1863 [O.S. February 28] - January 6, 1945) was a Russian-Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist whose ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to the Russian cosmism. He was a founding father of several new disciplines, including geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology.

5. Kin (with a capital K) an equivalent of the Russian word Rod – indicate conection with close and far parents, right to our first parent the God. King (initial capital letter ) – God (Kin, –ing) Rod — an ancient Slavic word first denoting God as the source of all life, but also including the concept of family. The root rod also appears in several other Russian words, including (rodstvenik) ‘kinfolk’, (srodni) ‘akin’, (Rodina) ‘Motherland’ and (priroda) ‘nature’.

6. deti, dedy — the author takes this a step further and posits an original combined root dedi.

7. veche — old Russian popular assembly, a kind of parliament. Ancient Russian form of self-government which brought to life understanding of true freedom of a Man and his self expression. Existed in Russia up until approximately the middle of sixteenth century.

8. lava — same principals of self-government as in veche. Cossack ultimately derived from a Turkic social term qazaq meaning "adventurer" or "free man". This term is first mentioned in a Ruthenian chronicle dated 1395.

Mikhail Shchetinin Professor, Director of State Lycee, Distinguished Teacher of Russia Full Member, “RAO” (Russian Academy of Education) Article originally from Uchitel’skaya gazeta, No 31 (1999) Translated by John Woodsworth

Presented by Kin's School - Lycee of Tekos, Russia, 1999. Original article available in Russian on www.Tekos.SourceofLife.ca

These articles come directly from researchers and are passed on to everybody. The company assumes no liability for any content in these articles.

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Click on this link to view or print this document (including photos) regarding Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin Bright Tidings: http://www.loveforlife.com.au/files/Mikhail%20Petrovich%20Shchetinin%20B...