When the "raspberry" ends

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

In two hours, a six-year-old child can: solve a dozen crosswords from a children's collection; watch the thousand and first episodes of "The Cruel Angel"; read up and down the unbearably pink Barbie magazine; drip toothpaste onto the monitor and say that it was a bird flying by, dropped something; Sweep the kitchen floor on your own; call grandfather at work during an important meeting to report on a green horse with a beige rider in a dream the day before.

Supposedly buried in a book, I watched my daughter for two hours. Infantile dirty tricks went well with good deeds, as well as with a dumb TV series, and I liked this scattering. The child has been living in the last months in the “what I want, I can do it” regime. I understand that the regime is not just wrong - it is vicious, but “Farewell of a Slav” is playing in my soul, the conductors poke at the escorts, cigarette butts smolder on the platform. I catch myself wanting to howl, sob and tie a scarf under my throat that I have never worn. Leisya, the song is ta-ra-ra-ra, road-side. We're going to school this fall. We are going to serve the constitutional right to universal secondary education.

Ah, the child does not know what this service is. “To school,” says her grandmother with sacred horror. “To school,” the grandfather says with respect. "To school!" - and my voice is filled with false delight … The child treats school with curiosity, as if it were next Sunday: something like this will happen, although she has a suspicion that the life-raspberry will soon end and a completely different berry will begin.

Bitter berries, as you know, are two buckets. Or ten years. Or even by the Ministry of Education, all twelve. In this case, she will be released "for demobilization" by a mature eighteen-year-old young lady. It’s good, if not my mother… eh, where did I get carried away, although, in fact, what’s wrong with that… I am making up a forecast that will not be useful to anyone and will never come true. I peep at her from under half-closed eyelids. She also wipes the monitor with a sponge for dishes and mutters: "Well, the naughty birds ruined the tool …" The door to the balcony, of course, is tightly closed.

In two hours a six-year-old child will be able to: learn a poem; do your math homework; write a home exercise in Russian. And this is in the best, in the most happy case …

Like all mothers, I am oppressed by future problems in advance. How will your relationship with the school develop? With a teacher and classmates - this is one thing, but there is also another layer: relations with information, with new knowledge, with a new scale. Actually, I would like one thing: that the information collapse does not become a hostile, oppressive, repressive stream.

Trying to comprehend our dialogues in the context of the entire speech background in which her six-year life passed, I suddenly came to a strange and not very gratifying conclusion: you can calmly and confidentially talk with her on any topic. About love and death, about fidelity and betrayal, about children who are not taken from cabbage at all, about money, relations with which I do not develop in any way, but maybe my experience will be useful for her in some way … This is not dialogue, of course, but a "concert at the request of workers", but she acts as a grateful and demanding listener.

- What did Arthur's grandfather die of?

- From cirrhosis of the liver, baby.

- Did he hurt a lot? What is this disease? Why do people get sick with it?

I am telling. I look at the shadows running across her face: horror, amazement, sadness, hopelessness, regret. It takes about half an hour. Then she sits down in front of the TV. Laughs at the cartoon. Forgetting? Switching? Switches - yes. But what does not get out of my head - that's for sure.

Maybe in the same way she will be able to de-energize the negative emotions that are so rich in school life; maybe the stress of the first school year will not become such an irreparable trauma … Realizing the initial incorrectness of all “my pedagogy” (it is too intuitive, haphazard, irresponsible, hurried), I still understand that there were two correct refusals in it.

The first is the rejection of pathos in any of its manifestations. The second - from edification and didacticity. That is, from everything that the traditional school has in abundance. I think that the child will have something to show in response: his ability to listen, tolerance for any intonation, his humble, cunning tolerance. And, watching my unassembled child, I dare to console myself with the hope that the conflict between the nature of childhood and the nature of school is not so fatal. As for the mobility of the mind - I don't know, but confident in the mobility, dynamism of her relationship with the world, I think: the devil is not so terrible, the school is not so scary … them, unpleasant or unfortunate.