EDUCATIONAL DARKNESS

In our time, there's a very clear trend: educational institutions of various formats are trying to move away from the classical educational paradigm, academic science, and common sense. They position themselves as a "fundamentally new approach," but in reality, they turn into hobby clubs.

Let's figure out what's wrong with this and why turning an educational institution into a hippie commune is dangerous and destructive.

My extensive experience in organizing educational environments, working with private and public institutions, as well as developing my own educational platform, speaks for itself.

The Roots of the Problem

The roots of the problem grow from the transition from a disciplinary model (which, admittedly, turned out to be insufficiently adaptive) to a conditionally neoliberal model. But this new model turned out to be unstable: it bends under market pressure, sacrificing quality.

Let's Define the Roles

Teacher is a person who organizes the process, creates conditions for transferring knowledge and experience. They a priori cannot have equal status with students in a collective. This is a leader, an authority, an architect.

Dialogue and respect for the student as an individual, personalized support, situational decisions based on specifics — absolutely YES. But in the context of the educational process, not vice versa.

Different rights in the context of responsibility ≠ authoritarianism.

Teacher has the right to: - Define methodology - Set requirements - Evaluate results - Correct the process

Student has the right to: - Ask questions - Get explanations - Be heard - Not be subjected to humiliation

This is not "equal rights in decision-making" — this is mutual respect within a clear hierarchy of responsibility.

Foundation or Decorations?

Let's compare the learning process with building construction. First — the foundation, frame, load-bearing structures. Only then — the details. Construction doesn't involve organizing feasts or a dance floor.

The teacher handles their tasks and is definitely not obligated to handle upbringing instead of parents or therapy instead of doctors.

However, modern schools selling the metanarrative of "alternative education" hang tasks incompatible with normal process on teachers. Hence — staff turnover, unhealthy fixation on client requests, and turning the school into a marketplace of fashionable words from popular psychology.

System Diagnosis: Psychologist Instead of Pedagogue

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many "progressive" schools are run not by methodologists, but by psychologists. A substitution of concepts is occurring.

Goal of a pedagogue — results, knowledge, and the ability to overcome "I don't want to." Goal of a psychologist — comfort, process, and anxiety reduction.

When a school is managed by therapeutic logic, any conflict (necessary for personality growth!) is suppressed, and the curriculum bends to mood. This is no longer education — it's paid childcare of children in greenhouse conditions.

Going Deeper

The main task of pedagogy is developing methodology for preparing for adulthood. The goal is gradual introduction into the child's experience of everything they will face in life. This implies not only joy and "personal boundaries," but also conflicts, labor, assertiveness, and competition.

A child must receive an adequate reality check — honest feedback from the environment. Natural consequences of the causes they create.

If this doesn't happen, we lay a time-delayed mine in the head of a naive, weak person. When they encounter adulthood on their own, it will turn into a personal tragedy.

**Fact:** Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind) directly links "safety culture" and hyperprotection with the explosive growth of anxiety disorders and depression among young people (growth of more than 100% since 2010). We are creating a generation of traumatized, stressed, infantile individualists for whom any event that goes against their worldview becomes a catastrophe.

"But We Need New Focuses!"

Okay, we remove homework, cancel location binding, gamify the process. What will we compensate with? How will we ensure quality learning against the background of dopaminergic hyperstimulation from gadgets? This is unnatural.

This is education cargo cult. We imitate the external attributes of Silicon Valley (freedom, creativity), ignoring what it was built on — hard mathematical foundation and competition.

Gamification without foundation is emotional fast food. A child gets a quick high, but their brain "gets fat" and loses the ability to digest complex information (read long texts, maintain concentration for more than 15 seconds).

We take an entertainer instead of a teacher? Everyone has fun, no discipline. Parents start complaining about knowledge quality. The school is forced to react but can't retreat from "personalized approach" marketing. Hell begins: conveyor of teachers, sessions with psychologists — just to combine warm with soft.

Parents often "know better" how a teacher should work. Probably, they also tell a surgeon how to operate, and a cook how to cook. And if you try to return discipline, clear methodology and standards? Immediate complaints: "The child is bored, they're not unlocking their great potential."

They tell us: "You're too conservative. We need a fifth grader who knows chemistry at a research institute lab level, writes code for any production process, and is up to date with literary trends, but isn't bored." The school tries to please everyone and transforms under the agenda. This is a local industrial revolution with so-so consequences.

If Science Isn't Enough for You

If science isn't enough for you, let's turn to the greatest psychiatrist of the 20th century, Viktor Frankl. A man who went through the hell of concentration camps and survived, writing "Man's Search for Meaning."

Frankl introduced the concept of "Existential Vacuum." It arises when a person has no purpose worth overcoming difficulties for.

Modern schools, by removing stress and tension, artificially create this vacuum.

Frankl wrote: "What man needs is not a tensionless state (homeostasis and absence of tension) but the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."

We are doing exactly the opposite. We are trying to create a sterile world without tension for children.

But, as Frankl proved, it is precisely the ability to endure suffering for the sake of meaning that makes us human.

By depriving children of difficulties, we deprive them of the chance to find their Meaning. We are raising not happy people, but empty shells who will break at the first misfortune because they have no answer to the question "Why?"

Where is the Solution?

Show me an alternative school organized according to its own marketing principles — without leadership, accountability, and hierarchy. How to organize production (or a lesson) without structure? No way.

Moreover, there's no coherent validation of the quality of "psychological support" work in schools.

• Psychiatry — this is "Hardware" (brain biochemistry, pills). This works.
• Psychotherapy (evidence-based) — this is "Software debugging" (protocols, reprogramming reactions). This works.
• Questionable persons with personal growth course certificates — an ambiguous and often parasitic phenomenon.

Science Confirms the Failure of the "Soft Path"

"Desirable Difficulties" Effect (R. Bjork): It's proven that easy learning doesn't form stable neural connections. If a lesson is "fun and easy," knowledge is zero.

"Therapeutic Education" Trap (K. Ecclestone): School fixation on emotions makes children more anxious and dependent. We teach them to be professional patients, not creators.

Crisis of Will (J. Twenge): Catastrophic shift in "locus of control." Graduates are confident that their success depends on the "system," not their efforts.

And, by the way, they're somewhat right. Environmental pressure on modern people has no analogues in the past. But reality still doesn't care about your traumas. You need immunity, not isolation.

**Evolution is adaptation to stress. No stress — no evolution. Antifragility (according to Taleb) arises only through exposure to chaos and difficulties.**

The Answer is in Methodology

Specific knowledge becomes outdated (half-life of competencies in engineering is now about 5 years).

We need to teach the ability to learn, apply methods of cognition, develop analysis logic. A comfortable environment is needed, but it shouldn't be a psycho-emotional cocoon.

Moral questions are perfectly covered by God's commandments or universal ethics.

Rules of conduct are clearly regulated by legislation.

Personal relationships will be taught better by life itself than any pseudo-psychologist or coach in "quantum-telepathic communication."

Development of emotional intelligence is provided by mirror neurons of the CNS. They work on their own if a person is in a healthy society.

The task of an educational institution is to focus on knowledge accumulation and creating an environment for its transfer in a natural science format. That's all.

Don't turn a school into a circus, and a teacher into a hybrid of an entertainer, therapist, and startup founder under euphoretics. Maybe then everything will fall into place, and we'll stop turning education into a stress factory disguised by smiles.

POLARIS: Return to Essence

At POLARIS, we build an educational system on fundamental principles:

1. Clear hierarchy of responsibility — teacher as process architect 2. Academic rigor — knowledge requires effort, this is normal 3. Preparation for reality — not isolation, but developing immunity to difficulties 4. Focus on methodology — we teach learning, not content consumption

Want real education for your child, not its imitation? [Check out our courses](/courses).