Asmolov scientist. "Agents of Barbarism"

Famous Russian psychologist and scientist.

Studied at the Moscow Regional Pedagogical Institute named after. N.K. Krupskaya (1966-1968). Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University in 1972. Senior laboratory assistant, assistant of the Department of General Psychology (1972-1981), Associate Professor of the Department of General Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University (1981-1988). Candidate of Psychological Sciences (1976), Doctor of Psychological Sciences (1996), Professor (since 1996). He has been working at Moscow State University since 1972, as a professor in the Department of General Psychology since 1992. Head of the Department of Personality Psychology. Chief psychologist State formation of the USSR (1988-1992); deputy Minister of Education of Russia (1992-1996); Vice-President of the Society of Psychologists of the USSR at the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1989); Member of the Presidium of the Russian Society of Psychologists (since 1996), corresponding member. Russian Academy education (since 1995); member of 5 editorial councils and 2 expert councils, member of the Public Council of the Russian Jewish Congress. Awarded honorary badges of the State Education of the USSR and the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.

Area of scientific interests: general psychology, personality psychology, historical psychology and ethnopsychology.

The doctoral dissertation was completed on the topic: “Historical-evolutionary approach to personality psychology” (1996). The work implements a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to personality psychology, combining biogenetic, sociogenetic and personogenetic orientation on the basis of intercultural interaction.

An original concept of personality is presented that implements system-wide principles of human analysis, emphasizing the role of culture, the historical and evolutionary meaning of personality activity, its pre-adaptive, non-adaptive and adaptive activity.

Universal patterns of personality development in biogenesis, sociogenesis and personogenesis are identified, which serve as the basis for understanding the evolutionary meaning of the emergence of various individual human properties and manifestations of individuality in the evolution of nature and society (the principle of increasing variability of system elements as a criterion for progressive evolution; the principle of interaction of tendencies to conservation and change as a condition for the development of evolving systems, ensuring their adaptation and variability, the principle of the emergence of redundant pre-adaptive elements of evolving systems that can provide a reserve of their variability in uncertain critical situations, etc.).

These principles made it possible to reveal the specifics of evolution in the social history of mankind and the heuristic nature of using ideas about a special “dispersive selection” in personality psychology.

A.G. Asmolov predicts the emergence of scientific disciplines that consider psychology as a constructive science that acts as a factor in the evolution of society.

A concept of the level nature of personality attitudes as mechanisms for stabilizing behavior has been developed, a classification of unconscious mental phenomena, and a semantic concept of individuality have been given.

The developmental paradigm is substantiated variative education, which contributed to changing the social status of psychology in the field of education in Russia, as well as the general humanization of education.

At the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, A. G. Asmolov teaches a section of the fundamental course of general psychology “Psychology of Personality and Individuality,” as well as a special course “Historical Psychology of Personality.”

Basic scientific works

Activity and Setting (1979)

Personality as a subject of psychological research (1984)

Principles of human memory organization: system-activity approach to studying cognitive processes (1985)

Psychology of individuality. Methodological foundations of personality development in the historical-evolutionary process (1986)

Cultural-historical psychology and the construction of worlds (1996).

Personality psychology: principles of general psychological analysis. - M.: “Sense”, IC “Academy”, 2002. - 416 p.

On the role of the symbol in the formation emotional sphere in younger schoolchildren with difficulties in mental development // Questions of psychology. 2005. No. 1.

Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University in 1972. Senior laboratory assistant, assistant of the Department of General Psychology (1972-1981), Associate Professor of the Department of General Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University (1981-1988). Candidate of Psychological Sciences (1976), Doctor of Psychological Sciences (1996), Professor (since 1996). He has been working at Moscow State University since 1972, as a professor in the Department of General Psychology since 1992. Head of the Department of Personality Psychology. Chief Psychologist of State Education of the USSR (1988-1992); deputy and first deputy minister of education of Russia (1992-1998); Vice-President of the Society of Psychologists of the USSR at the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1989); Vice-President of the Russian Society of Psychologists (since 2000), corresponding member. Russian Academy of Education (since 1995), academician of the Russian Academy of Education (since 2008), deputy chairman of the Expert Council on Psychology and Pedagogy of the Higher Attestation Commission; editor-in-chief of the magazine "Pedology" (1999-2004), editor-in-chief of the magazine " Century of Tolerance", editor-in-chief of the journal Educational Policy, member of 5 editorial boards and 2 expert councils, member of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research ISCAR. Honored Worker of Higher School of the Russian Federation (2005). He was awarded the Order of Friendship, honorary badges of the State Education of the USSR, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, the K. D. Ushinsky medal, the gold medal of the Russian Academy of Education, laureate of the National Psychological Competition “Golden Psyche”.

Scientific activity

Area of scientific interests: general psychology, personality psychology, psychology methodology, cultural anthropology, historical psychology, ethnopsychology, practical educational psychology.

An original concept of personality is presented, implementing system-wide principles of human analysis, emphasizing the role of culture, the historical and evolutionary meaning of personality activity, its pre-adaptive, non-adaptive and adaptive activity.

A.G. Asmolov predicts the emergence of scientific disciplines that consider psychology as a constructive science that acts as a factor in the evolution of society.

The paradigm of developmental variable education is substantiated, which contributed to changing the social status of psychology in the field of education in Russia, as well as the general humanization of education.

Main scientific works

Vygotsky today: on the verge of non-classical psychology. New York. 1998
Activity and Setting (1979)
Personality psychology: cultural and historical understanding of human development. M.: Meaning. 2007-528 p.
Psychology of individuality. Methodological foundations of personality development in the historical-evolutionary process (1986)
Cultural-historical psychology and the construction of worlds (1996).
Principles of human memory organization: a system-activity approach to the study of cognitive processes (1985)
Personality psychology: principles of general psychological analysis. - M.: “Sense”, IC “Academy”, 2002. - 416 p.
Social competence of the class teacher: directing joint actions. M.: Enlightenment. 2007
Personality as a subject of psychological research (1984)
Strategy for sociocultural modernization of education: on the way to overcoming the identity crisis and building a civil society // Education Issues No. 1, 2008 P.65-86
On the other side of consciousness. Methodological problems classical psychology. M.: Meaning. 2002-480 p.

Awards

Laureate of the Government of the Russian Federation Prize in the field of education (2010) for creating a series of works “Formation of attitudes of tolerant behavior and prevention of the risks of xenophobia in the general education system.”

Where does the variability come from?

In Russia they are accustomed to linking problems in the educational sector with the figure of the relevant minister. For a long time the target for criticism was Fursenko, and later Livanov. Claims were addressed to them, their dismissal was demanded. A stereotype has developed in society, behind which adherents of conspiracy theories could see sophisticated psychological manipulation. After all, the discussion about the root causes of the crisis was, in fact, replaced by the “personal affairs” of those who were only introducing a very specific concept. Who should be considered real? driving force, ideologist " educational reform"in post-Soviet Russia?

E If we talk about a certain symbolic figure characterizing the current decline in education, what appears before us is not at all the image of an effective manager, cold and calculating. Hindsight takes us back to the times of perestroika, when a truly romantic personality appeared on television screens and in newspapers. The country was renouncing its totalitarian past, and as part of this campaign, an eloquent psychologist, talking about humanism and gifted children, came in handy. The authorities frantically tried to please, to present the “human face” of socialism. Thus, the outstanding anti-Soviet Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov arose in the position of chief psychologist of the State Education Department of the USSR. (on the picture). Asmolov's political orientation was crucial for the future of domestic education. It was precisely the painful and emotional rejection of the Soviet system that became a kind of nuclear reactor, the energy of which was enough for decades of “reforms.”

Doctor of Psychological Sciences Asmolov talked about the horrors of totalitarianism without unnecessary academic conventions, as they say, in the language of a poster. His invective about millions of victims psychologically strangled in the ideological gas chambers of ordinary socialism, is a vivid illustration of the propaganda methods of the late 80s.

Asmolov managed to demonstrate a sophisticated mind in October 1993. During the bloody events, the scientist put his knowledge into practice - he developed for Yeltsin the “White House Program of Priority Social and Psychological Measures”:

1. The Patriarch’s appeal to the former deputies of the Supreme Council, gathered in the White House, with a request to prevent war in Russia and the further escalation of the conflict situation.

2. Using the means of mass communication, create a video series according to the scheme “ordinary fascism - communism - White House”.

First moves: demonstration of M. Romm’s film “Ordinary Fascism”; replay of May films with demonstrations and victims.

3. Personally about the speaker. Play L. Radzikhovsky’s program about Khasbulatov on TV several times.

4. Request to D.S. Likhachev with a proposal to speak to the Russian intelligentsia in this situation (today).

5. Conduct a conversation with Sergei Adamovich Kovalev: forecasts about the situation in the White House. Before the conversation, a few photos of the screensaver: Kovalev - Sakharov...

The techniques used to deceive the population came from a man who made a career out of exposing totalitarianism. By that time, Asmolov had already developed a reputation as a finely organized intellectual, close to the literary community and not alien to creativity:

Everything can be seen, measured and weighed,
Only the Soul cannot be calculated.
For centuries, the impotence of psychologists has infuriated
And at night it prevents them from sleeping...

It turned out that behind the sweet graphomania and worship of Okudzhava there was hidden a gloomy and active personality, clearly in need of psychological rehabilitation. It turned out that behind the image of a sincere, slightly awkward innovative teacher, there was an exemplary demagogue. “I propose a formula that it is not the child who should prepare for school, but the school should prepare for the child!”- Asmolov declared and paused in anticipation of applause.

From 1992 to 1998, Asmolov worked as Deputy Minister of Education of Russia, essentially being the ideologist of the new course, actively introducing the principles of “variability,” “tolerance,” and “de-ideologization.” Deideologization affected literature, history, and other humanities disciplines and resulted in a total ideologization of Russian education in accordance with anti-Soviet dogmas.

This is how Asmolov’s activities are characterized on his personal website (apparently, Asmolov himself talks about himself in the third person):

“For the first time, the idea of variability, as well as the very concept of “variable education,” was proposed by A.G. Asmolov in 1991. In the period from 1991 to 2011, the concept of “variable education” firmly entered the lexicon of Russian education, being tempered in discussions with supporters of faceless command-administrative unitary education and authoritarian pedagogy...”

Asmolov constantly uses this technique - he must present himself and his ideas as an alternative to totalitarian evil.

“The discussion about the role of the school is ongoing. Some believe that its role is the molding of personality, when people are turned into soldiers of Oorfene Deuce. I believe that the school should be an institution for supporting humanity in a person, which would help the individual to defend himself..."

With such simple argumentation, under Asmolov, the deputy minister, the school was destroyed. It was commercialized with false pathos and in the name of humanity. System destruction public education, the emergence of thousands of dubious “lyceums” and “universities” took place in parallel with the implementation of the key Asmolov concept - the introduction of an institute of psychologists. (Asmolov himself considers his most important achievement “creating a demand for practical psychology in the education system”).

As a result, the mission of education was essentially replaced by the function of psychological assistance. Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between this approach and the statistics of teen suicide? Today Russia ranks first in Europe in this indicator.

And another question: what quality of psychological specialists could commercial universities prepare in the 90s? And in general, how scientifically justified is the reliance on “practical psychology”? To what extent is the “cult of the psychologist” appropriate and historically consistent in the Russian school?

All these questions are more likely for specialists who still have to revive the “reformed” Russian education. The average person is left to discuss the case at school No. 57, where the school psychologist provided assistance to a girl who had been harassed by a teacher. “I tried to say,” explains the psychologist, “that behind such a sexual request one must see a purely human one. And it will be much easier to bring their relationship back to normal, and naturally, completely refusing him these advances, to try to answer his purely human request. A request for human attention, for friendship..."

Asmolov states: “In essence, practical psychology has set its sights on the role of social architect of the doctrine of liberal variable education, the transformation of education into an institution for the socialization of individuality.” It turns out that “the interests of the individual” are the main thing?

It is obvious that for Asmolov, “collectivism” and “conciliarity” are deeply alien categories. In the Soviet experience he sees “the frightening logic of the “culture of utility”, where a person is born for a reason, but for something, for the sake of performing certain social functions...” And what, public interest, defense of the Motherland, self-sacrifice are abolished by the doctrine of “practical psychology”?

Of course, care for gifted children is necessary; of course, a child has the right to count on individual approach, undoubtedly, inclusive education is humanistic. But maybe it’s still worth thinking about the majority – ordinary children from ordinary families?

"Since the nineties,- says Asmolov, - we supported the emergence of lyceums and gymnasiums and even suggested calling such institutions “school laboratories.” All this appeared. And there are many amazing, strong schools where a gifted child begins with a gifted teacher, where the child is given the opportunity for self-realization, where he is not subjected to a roller coaster of formality...”

And you immediately imagine the 57th Moscow. But for some reason it’s hard to imagine a rural, provincial school. A metropolitan scientist from a good family is focused on his circle, where the writers Strugatsky are read, the philosopher Mamardashvili is revered, and the genius of the psychologist Vygotsky is admired. Children of the majority in Asmolov's concept are lost somewhere in the unreached space between child prodigies and autists. Asmolov is alarmed: refusal of variability promises them the fate of the soldiers of Oorfene Deuce.

Remembering himself in the late 80s, Asmolov declares with trademark pathos: “I compare that period to the path to Calvary”. However, today it is difficult to call Alexander Grigorievich a victim. He works quietly, heads a department at Moscow State University, and heads the Federal Institute for Educational Development. That is, it prepares personnel, shapes the image of the future. Of course, based on the values of “liberal education” in Asmolov’s style. There is no variability here.

Estimate:

L. GULKO: 12:07 in Moscow, Lev Gulko at the microphone. Today we have important topic: “Unified State Exam and stress.” Today proms and today we can already sum up some results, we congratulate some, we sympathize with others, we sympathize with others, in a way. Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov – head. Department of Personality Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. Lomonosov, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Psychology, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Education, vice-president of the Russian Psychological Society - that’s all you. Hello, Alexander Grigorievich.

A. ASMOLOV: Even scary, yes.

L. GULKO: Yes. No, but okay, why? Just your topic. So, what kind of news component do we have, so to speak? “Psychologists, along with teachers, must prepare students to take the Unified State Test. exam, so that tragedies do not occur when a graduate, due to nervous tension, decides to commit suicide,” said the Presidential Commissioner for Human Rights and Children’s Rights Pavel Astakhov. You've probably heard all this, so to speak? A, “The boy jumped out of the window after an unsuccessful passing the Unified State Exam, these were all sorts of different messages, if a person takes his own life and ends it with suicide, then everyone who was next to him and did not notice the state in which he was in is to blame. First of all, teachers should not escalate the situation, it is already quite nervous and, so to speak, tense, the children are worried and many cannot cope with it.” - this is also Astakhov. According to the children's ombudsman: “Not only teachers, but also, above all, psychologists should prepare students to pass exams in schools.”

A. ASMOLOV: First of all, when we talk about exams, I remember one wonderful book, it came out in the thirties and was written by my teacher, classic psychology Alexey Nikolaevich Leontyev and Alexander Romanovich Luria. This book was called “Exam and Stress.” Let me remind you that it was written in the thirties.

L. GULKO: Yeah.

A. ASMOLOV: In fact, in education we have, as the main thing... Ah, quality assessment technologies, competitive technologies, the same Olympiads in physics, mathematics, and so on that you all know. The whole culture is geared towards the fact that we place the child in a state of competition, in a state of time shortage, and any exam, including the exam that today bears the name of the Unified State Exam, is a decision-making process in a situation of information deficiency, and any situation of information deficiency, time shortage , any competitive situation is always stressful. In this regard, everything depends on how we position this exam, including the Unified State Exam, in culture. Or, as an objective attempt to figure out what a person’s quality of knowledge is, and when a person takes a thermometer, measures the temperature. If his hands are shaking, is he sweating, when I take the thermometer, I calmly measure the temperature. If we treat different measures as an objective assessment of quality, this is one situation, but if we initially turn the Unified State Examination into a demon or any other exam, this is a different situation. Maybe many people remember the wonderful film “Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures”?

L. GULKO: Of course.

A. ASMOLOV: And there, as you remember, one of the characters comes to the professor to take an exam...

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: At the university, and there: “Reception. What about the reception?

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: And he says...

L. GULKO: He has a question.

A. ASMOLOV: And with him, with him, a question.

L. GULKO: Task, task.

A. ASMOLOV: He has a task, and he has a flower here...

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: And he, sobbing, all bandaged, says...

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: Every exam is for me...

A. ASMOLOV: Always a holiday.

A. ASMOLOV: Holiday, professor.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: Just a joke, a joke, in fact, this kind of film clearly shows a different attitude towards exams, a different attitude towards exams, and in fact both school and the unique capabilities of mass media. The thermometer should be treated as a thermometer, and not as an injection and not as a blow that a school or exam can inflict on a child’s psyche.

L. GULKO: Alexander Grigorievich, well, this injection, this blow, what does the attitude towards the thermometer depend on? From parents, from funds mass media, from Rosobrnadzor, from its submission, from what?

A. ASMOLOV: You know...

L. GULKO: From Fursenko, I don’t know from whom?

A. ASMOLOV: You know, there is a good old formula: “Seven nannies have a child without an eye,” but with us a child may turn out to be without a head if we look every time who is responsible. In fact, when a family perceives the Unified State Exam as one or the other, then it’s a leap into the unknown. The family says: “You should know this is the only way the child starts, forgive me, to scare and turn the Unified State Exam into a horror story - this is the family’s business. And, excuse me, as a parent, like even the word “grandfather,” I do everything so that the child calmly enters this situation.

L. GULKO: Alexander Grigorievich.

A. ASMOLOV: But it would be funny...

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: If only we could put everything on the shoulders of the family.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: If the following appears, what worries me and worries me most: where does this situation come from? For me, questions about the fact that the Unified State Exam is, excuse me, the cause of monstrous things such as suicide, such as suicide, are naive. If you look at the suicide statistics, you will see that ours is quite high, and excuse me, the Unified State Exam has nothing to do with it. There are completely different things to do with it. What does the following have to do with it - when the Unified State Exam turns into an assessment not of the quality of the student’s knowledge, but an assessment of the quality of knowledge, first of the teacher; after that they begin to flog him, evaluate the school director, and so on. The little fears begin and finally the assessment, if you are a governor, and you did poorly on the Unified State Exam, this is included in the governor’s ratings, then it means you are not an effective governor and the next thing begins - don’t care about the quality, don’t care what diploma, what begins in our culture is called double-entry bookkeeping. Instead of real assessment quality of knowledge, we are starting an all-Russian imitation of this quality - these things scare me, and any imitation, as a risk, has the consequences of escalating the atmosphere.

L. GULKO: Look, the question just came to us via SMS. If we are talking about stress, then why can’t we introduce the old form of taking the exam instead of the Unified State Exam?
On the other hand, someone named Alberta sent a question to our website, not a question, but a reasoning, he says: “The exam has always been stressful, the Unified State Exam is no more stressful, on the contrary, the Unified State Exam has only two mandatory exams, bottom line According to them, the Unified State Exam is funny, for the stupidest” - but this is his assessment. The Unified State Exam score is not taken into account in the certificate, so why worry?

A. ASMOLOV: You know, there is such a formula: “A question is only good because you don’t want to spoil it with an answer.” In this situation, I can say that I subscribe to what our colleague said, and forgive me, I started with the fact that there was a book “Exam and Stress”, the thirty-second year of the last century, I did not invent it.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: And in this sense, any exam is, for many reasons, a situation when a person can become stressed. Therefore, it is absolutely correct that you should not demonize the Unified State Examination and prepare for the exam as if it were an ordinary normal procedure for the quality of knowledge. But we are faced with another situation. What is the Unified State Examination? Why is there such a nervous reaction from society to the Unified State Examination? There is a nervous reaction from society to the Unified State Exam because it is generally a diagnostic procedure. When I, as a psychologist, come to someone and say: “You know, let me analyze you.” In response, there is no joy in the eyes.

L. GULKO: Well, does curiosity even arise?

A. ASMOLOV: Some people develop curiosity, and some begin to develop a unique psychological defense. The Unified State Exam is not an educational situation, it is a social experiment, a reaction to any attempt to measure and diagnose something in society, and sins associated with a specific educational procedure. Therefore, the reaction to the Unified State Examination is a reaction to social things associated with an attempt to analyze any person into a cultural system and diagnose him.

L. GULKO: Look, now, perhaps as an illustration of what you said, I’ll read it, again sent to us before our broadcast on the Internet site on the topic of the program. And, a person is engaged in programming in Moscow. “My wife is a science teacher. At the insistent request of one of her graduates, she went with him to the appeal, the student literally begged not to leave him, and she barely managed to get through three checkpoints, posing as his mother, it was a whole detective story. The work turned out to be excellent and fully deserved at least one more point, but when she pointed out the obvious mistakes of the evaluators, they immediately asked: “Who are you?” I had to say that she and her son attended classes with a tutor. It ended with the fact that, recognizing that the work was written beautifully, the examiner defended this unassigned point, arguing that, taking into account the protected part C, the point would be too high.

A. ASMOLOV: Is this a situation that in culture is called the defense of honor and uniform?

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: This situation requires a very specific analysis because we know that according to appeal procedures, the grade can be raised by several points, and if this is proven normally, and the honor of the uniform is not taken care of, with this situation, and I think we are grateful, that this was sent to us, I would like to understand very clearly. I almost said an almost boorish statement: “Purely concrete!”, that’s it.

L. GULKO: Well, that’s what they say now.

A. ASMOLOV: Yes.

L. GULKO: The language is changing.

A. ASMOLOV: The language and style are changing. I would not like to speak in the language of the criminal subculture, but at the same time, the one who sent these things to us says, absolutely, fair points and that a detective story is arising, and we cannot, one way or another, support a person who defends his rights - this is a sad and dramatic situation.

L. GULKO: Another letter that was sent to you and me before the broadcast, a man deals with economics. Lucia, as she writes from Russia: “I also think that stress when passing the Unified State Exam is associated with to a greater extent with admission or non-admission to a university” - she supports our next radio listener: “It’s being decided further fate student, so we need to make passing the Unified State Exam as fair as possible without the possibility of falsification, and harsh measures should be applied to those who falsify it, including criminal liability.” Do you agree with criminal liability?

A. ASMOLOV: Excuse me, if I don’t say now that I have consciousness and repress it, I will have neurosis, so I, as a psychologist, will say what has arisen for me.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: When I hear such letters about how terrible the whole atmosphere associated with these things is, I remember the unforgettable words of Saltykov-Shchedrin: “And I have a dream,” he writes: “And I wake up in Russia a hundred years later and what do I see? They drink and steal." This phrase by Saltykov-Shchedrin completely applies, excuse me, to this issue. The Unified State Exam, indeed, like any exam, is connected in many cases with admission to a university, and that is why Unified State Examination communication with professional and life's path a person further, but whether this is the Unified State Exam or another exam, we will never move away from assessing the quality of knowledge. This assessment needs to be made independent, calm and balanced, so that each time this assessment is not an ascent to Calvary.

L. GULKO: “I study at school and I can say that the teachers themselves are escalating the situation, making the children nervous,” writes Anya. Anya, who graduated from school, is probably studying at school or has graduated.

A. ASMOLOV: We are walking in circles. When a teacher begins to perceive the Unified State Exam, and there is a social and psychological truth behind it, as an assessment of his achievements, then he begins to escalate the atmosphere and situation. But if you do an imaginary experiment and instead of the Unified State Exam, just put the word exam and remember what happened, excuse me, with me, what happened, perhaps, with you when we took the exams. It was a different time, the same thing was written off and so on.

L. GULKO: Of course.

A. ASMOLOV: Yesterday they gave me a wonderful example from the seventies. When one student brought a then unprecedented device to the presentation, it was called a dictaphone.

L. GULKO: Oops.

A. ASMOLOV: And teachers, they didn’t exist then.

L. GULKO: Yes, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, I remember exactly

A. ASMOLOV: Practically none.

L. GULKO: I remember.

A. ASMOLOV: The teachers were shocked that he calmly wrote down the presentation, then sat down and only by the earphone sticking in his ears did they see that something was happening. He calmly copied this account. Therefore, when we speak today, evil mobile phones are to blame and students have technology. Please search me! One mobile phone is taken out of him, the other remains in his pocket.

L. GULKO: Or in a sock, like a spy

A. ASMOLOV: Huh?

L. GULKO: Or in a sock, right here, you know.

A. ASMOLOV: No, we actually have a detective story. How about wearing a sock? I really want to ask them - Do you sell a Slavic wardrobe?

L. GULKO: There are no wardrobes, I can offer a nickel-plated bed, as far as I remember the answer. Look, then, today’s newspaper is called “Trud”. Yes? Also here is “The Test That Burst”, “Unified State Exam – Scandal, Harvest of 2011”, publication. Including a short excerpt. It is interesting what conclusions experts and official authorities have drawn from these various scandals. At Moscow State University. Lomonosov, where you have the honor of working, consider increasing the number of universities with the right to additional exams to be one of the possible ways to solve the problem. It is practically impossible to write down the answers there. Additional exams– this is additional stress.

A. ASMOLOV: Our leading universities are introducing a procedure that they affectionately call: “Entrance tests.” Please note that I am emphasizing the word “test”, not exam.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: Indeed, whatever you call it, this procedure for testing knowledge. Therefore, along with the Unified State Exam, when we receive Unified State Exam data, we conduct certain entrance tests in major subjects. This is not additional stress, it usually always happened at school, when you and I took exams at the university. An exam at a university in the form of tests, when a person wants to study at the best universities in Russia, is normal. But I want other letters of material that I remember. My colleagues are from a university that we couldn’t think of at the time for many reasons. It has a peculiar name - MGIMO. You know very well what kind of university this is.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: And before applying there, they just didn’t think about it, now colleagues from MGIMO tell me that talented guys have started to enter, completely from the “failed harvest”, to use Nekrasov’s kind language, who in fact, thanks to the Unified State Exam, have acquired a different social mobility. I really don’t want us to paint any action in culture in black and white. This is banal logic that drives us into a corner. Who are you for, the Bolsheviks or the communists?

L. GULKO: Well, yes.

A. ASMOLOV: Are you for the exam or for the Unified State Exam? This is the same naive logic into which mass consciousness has been driven today.

L. GULKO: You see, there is another topic that comes up, but it seems to me that it won’t come up very much in our case, so to speak, and in the topic of our conversation. This is a conscript army because fathers and mothers of boys are, of course, much more nervous than fathers and mothers of girls, well, it seems to me. I'm a boy's dad. The boy, however, had already finished everything he could, but nevertheless he was nervous at the time. This also somehow influences, this also leads to additional stress when the child initially understands that now I won’t pass, I won’t get in, so they’ll grab me, and so on and so forth.

A. ASMOLOV: Well, once again with this example you pointed out the systemic nature of the situation, because when entering a university is not because I want to go to a university...

L. GULKO: Of course.

A. ASMOLOV: And entering a university because I don’t want...

L. GULKO: Join the army.

A. ASMOLOV: Join the army.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: Excuse me, remember, to the old buttons...

L. GULKO: There are complaints, no? Sewn to death. You can't tear it off.

A. ASMOLOV: Sewn on necessarily. Therefore, let us think, if the army were an army, where my favorite formula would work: “From an enlightened Russia to a prosperous Russia,” if it were a professional army, where they would receive education, if it were an army over which there was no the threat of hazing and that kind of thing, we wouldn't have to deal with one more thing - the stress of joining the army, which is much more powerful, Unified State Exam stress. But at the same time, there is another insidious thing, when we talk about seriousness, I call it university-centrism, when everyone thinks that they go to school only in order to later prepare and go to university. A university is not the only path of development in culture, and when a child becomes a hostage to the ambitions of his parents, don’t get me wrong, I am a parent myself. My children are in universities, but at the same time the child has whole line wide and varied possibilities. If my child did not enter a university, I perceive this not as his failure, but as my social failure as a parent. There are many different paths, therefore, I would like the very value of the school to be very clearly fixed in our consciousness, but what you say about boys remains the complete truth and I will paraphrase a well-known phrase, distorting it: “What kind of commission, creator, is it to be a boy’s father.”

L. GULKO: This is true and another quote from today’s Trud. The head of the All-Russian Education Fund Sergei Komkov believes that the only way to combat violations during the Unified State Examination, there can only be a refusal to conduct this form of examination and a return to the classical one, further quote: “When a graduate is face to face with the commission, when he is able to show his capabilities, abilities, answer questions, show your level, not in absentia in test form, but directly, we need to look for other forms of passing the Unified State Exam, as automated forms of exams are doomed,” says Mr. Komkov. And Rosobrnadzor suggests jamming the mobile signal at exam venues, just in case.

A. ASMOLOV: There are such professions in culture called professional opponent. Whatever was said in this culture, our colleague Komkov, already in advance, no matter what appears, it will already be bad in advance. When Komkov says that instead of the Unified State Examination we need to return to the classical exam, he forgets that we are creating, as in the civilized countries of the world, an independent examination of knowledge assessment. Is there any difficulty in Unified State Exam procedures, does she have difficulties? I'd be a complete charlatan if I said everything was fine. In this situation, the Unified State Exam has many vulnerabilities. One of the developers Unified State Examination Alexander Shmelev, a talented specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, wrote an article. It’s called “How can we reorganize the Unified State Exam?” Painfully close, as you remember the name.

L. GULKO: Yes.

A. ASMOLOV: And he actually suggests ways to improve so that the Unified State Exam is more objective and less stressful. This logic must be supported in every possible way, but logic in the style of: “let's go back to the time of elephants, let's give up electricity and the wheel.” I will never support this logic. By the same logic, we must close the Internet and many other things tomorrow; any innovations in culture are harmful.

L. GULKO: Let's see what they send us as illustrations for the conversation. “Thank you to the Unified State Examination, my daughter is a student at a financial university in Moscow. Without a single ruble and stress during the university exam” - Sveta from Samara writes.

A. ASMOLOV: You know, I want to bow to Sveta from Samara. She really did send some bright information.

L. GULKO: And one more opinion from our listener Aeret: “There will be less stress if children, together with adults, work on the Unified State Examination question.” Listen, so to speak, to children.

A. ASMOLOV: Actually, this is a brilliant idea.

L. GULKO: We have twenty seconds left with you, but nevertheless...

A. ASMOLOV: Long live the children who participate in the world of education and themselves help to make this world more interesting for them. We live in times of information socialization and our children are intellectual accelerators, God grant them good luck!

L. GULKO: Thank you very much. Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov – head. The Department of Personality Psychology, Doctor of Psychology, Professor of the Academy, Russian Academy of Education and Vice-President of the Russian Psychological Society was on our air today, thank you very much, and the son of Alexander Grigorievich is on our air tonight, we will have such nepotism.

A. ASMOLOV: Yes, a family dynasty!

L. GULKO: Therefore, we invite everyone to listen, thank you, all the best.

A. ASMOLOV: Thank you.

Guests: Alexander Asmolov, head of the department of personality psychology at Moscow State University, professor, director of the Federal Institute for Educational Development of Russia;

Evgeny Yamburg, director of education center No. 109 in Moscow, honored teacher of the Russian Federation.

Presenter: Alexey Kuznetsov.

03/6/2018 - interview with A.G. Asmolov to Novaya Gazeta: “Agents of Barbarism”

At the meeting working group on questions civilizational heritage Russian Federation Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Irina Yarovaya said that the Ministry of Education needs to reconsider its approach to the introduction of psychologists in Russian schools, since schools do not need psychologists, and their functions should be performed by class teachers and educators.

“The Ministry of Education proposes to allocate a lot of money for psychologists, but I will allow myself to say that we do not need psychologists, but educators.

Children don’t need psychiatrists and psychologists, children need educators, and money should be spent in the country on educators!” - REGNUM news agency quotes Yarovaya.

The head of the Department of Personality Psychology at Moscow State University, an academician of the Russian Academy of Education, agreed to comment on this proposal from the deputy.

I am very impressed by Irina Yarovaya’s idea to save on specialists in anxiety, childhood suicide prevention, personality development, masters in diversity and individuality support - practical educational psychologists.

Practical educational psychology has become part of Soviet life, I emphasize - to the Soviet, and not to the Russian - since 1988, and this was the decision of the chairman of the USSR State Committee on Education, the unique Gennady Alekseevich Yagodin.

But perhaps now, when it is so difficult for the country, when there is a need to save everywhere, Yarovaya’s logic is an important logic. If a country is in crisis and it’s hard, let’s remove duplicate structures. Psychologists at school are people who, in essence, conduct a kind of analysis, I would say, supervision of the child’s development. To minimize the risks of this development, create maximum security for mental health children.

There are far more local prosecutors than practical psychologists in schools. Let's continue Yarovaya's initiative: we remove school psychologists- We also remove prosecutors.

The analogy is direct: one of the tasks of practical educational psychology is insurance against errors of socialization and individualization in the development of a child’s personality. One of the tasks of the prosecutor's office is to insure against certain investigative errors.

- Educational psychology has already been destroyed once. These were the dark 30s.

In 1936, there was a resolution on pedological perversions in the Narkompros system. At the same time, the child development diagnostic service was destroyed.

HELP "NEW"

Pedology (from the Greek παιδός - child and λόγος - science) is a direction in science that aims to combine approaches various sciences(medicine, biology, psychology, pedagogy) to the development of the child.

All pedologists and psychologists were anathematized, Alexei Gastev, an outstanding scientist, creator, was shot scientific organization labor (NOT), the great Vavilov died in the dungeons. The diversity of life in the country was broken, killed everywhere: in politics, in culture, in education.

And today we have a whole series of agents of barbarism. They are again collapsing diversity and leading Russia backwards. They are much more dangerous than foreign agents.

When Irina Yarovaya says that children in schools do not need psychologists and psychiatrists, but rather educators, the feeling is that she simply does not see the difference between these three completely different professions.

Absolutely. From a psychologist, psychiatrist and educator different functions and different tasks. Lack of competence must be compensated for by consultation with specialists. It can be assumed that Irina Yarovaya’s consultants were my same “colleague” who

confuses pedologists with pedophiles. He wrote that pedophilia came to school from the pedologist Vygotsky.

- Are you joking?

No Unfortunately. There were similar moments, and they are beyond comment, because we are dealing with a clear manifestation of barbarism. Barbarians always want not one thing together with the other, but one instead of the other - to destroy something.

Children, of course, need a psychologist, a class teacher, a teacher, and in certain cases a defectologist. Together with my colleagues, we wrote about this in detail in several books, they have been published.

The Practical Educational Psychology Service is a unique childhood risk insurance service. This service primarily performs human science tasks. She prepares the child to face the situations of uncertainty of our difficult times, works with motivation and value systems. I revived this service, created it, for me this is a calling and mission. And I am happy that this service, despite all the difficulties, has led to the return of unique comprehensive programs for the development of a child’s personality. Programs that were developed by great, unique pedologists, such as Lev Vygotsky, thanks to whom the figure of a psychologist in Russia ceased to resemble the smile of a Cheshire cat. And the psychologization of teachers and class teachers began. This is my life's work, starting in '88. It continues today. And it is extremely important that the Minister of Education of the Russian Federation Olga Vasilyeva supports the psychology of education as a development prospect.

It is difficult to imagine how a teacher will work with a suicidal child. Or with a teenager who is drawn to the theme of Columbine. The psychologist has his own diagnostic tools. True, Irina Yarovaya subjected this fact to strange criticism, saying that “ideas psychological tests for children and parents they look like “mindlessness”.

Testing is a special case of diagnostics recognized throughout the world. There are a huge number of other diagnostic methods, also recognized throughout the world. What is diagnostics? This is an estimate various options typological and individual development. To oppose it means to oppose the child’s development, to bring his crisis closer.

10/24/2017 - interview with A.G. Asmolova Economy Times “Competition of prophets: betting on growth motivation and behavioral economics”

Habitual adaptation strategies stop working, contributing only to simplifying reality and placing the ideal of security on a pedestal. The winner is the one who chooses the strategy of pre-adaptation - readiness for change. Now there will be no other era other than the era of change. A famous Russian psychologist, head of the department of personality psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, academician of the Russian Academy of Education, director talks about what this new situation means for society and how educational practices should be built from now on. Federal Institute development of education (FIRO), joining the structure Presidential Academy, and now also advisor to the rector of RANEPA Alexander ASMOLOV told journalist Andrei Kolesnikov. The rector of the Academy took an active part in the conversation Vladimir MAU.

Andrey Kolesnikov: Nobel Prize in Economics this year was awarded to Richard Thaler, who works in the field of behavioral economics. And this area is extremely close to psychology. To what extent?

: Sometimes, as the masters of psychoanalysis advise us, it is useful to “dive” into the past - meetings of people who changed both the development of a whole complex of social and behavioral sciences and our own lives. Somewhere in the late 1970s. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, researchers appeared who brought new views to both psychology and economics. Their names are Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. It was then that these psychologists began to develop the “Theory of Bounded Rationality” and the “Theory of Decision Making in Unpredictable Situations.” After some time, when Tversky was already in Michigan and Kahneman was in Berkeley, they began to communicate with Richard Thaler. The last one was an economist, the other two were psychologists. The brainchild of their communication was a new understanding of the motivations and actions of people in conditions of uncertainty, complexity and diversity. It was formed at the intersections of interdisciplinary research, which ultimately undermined the seemingly unshakable established concepts in economics and psychology. This direction, born of the union of behavioral sciences and economics, still encounters serious resistance from the minds of both representatives of classical economics and classical psychology. Every now and then they come across a kind of “compromise” - resistance of thinking, stereotypes and attitudes of cognition. This strength of strength most clearly operates in three areas: in the field of economics, psychology and, finally, biology. Several researchers have overcome this resistance to rational thinking by calling their approaches differently. At first, some, playing with the behaviorists, called this approach “behavioral economics,” then, given the cognitive revolution of 1956 and the growing influence of cognitive scientists, they began to call it “cognitive economics.”

This resistance is as follows: in all approaches to explaining the driving forces of development complex systems, motives and mechanisms of behavior of people, large and small social groups, including economic behavior, the so-called homeostatic adaptive paradigm predominates, which is characterized by an understanding of development as a desire either for balance, or for pleasure, or for benefit.

Vladimir Mau: Where is the fear here?

: Fear is, first of all, a reaction in a situation of avoiding danger, which pushes one to choose a strategy for simply solving complex issues. Thus, behavior in a situation of fear fits into different schemes that interpret behavior as a desire for homeostasis and balance. The ideal of security, seen through the prism of adaptive methodological optics, is one of the options for the desire of a complex system (no matter biological, social or cognitive) to balance and stability. Such “postulates” go back to the well-known ideas of natural selection of Charles Darwin and the theory of population of Thomas Malthus, which are also based on the understanding of adaptation as a desire for equilibrium.

Let me remind you that in his theory of catastrophes, Vladimir Arnold shows that both Malthusian and Darwinian theories are theories “ simple solutions" Behind these theories emerges the thesis that conflict is the main driver of evolution, as well as the idea of the ideal of rationality as the key explanatory principle of the classical sciences, based on a deterministic worldview. This ideal of thinking was called the ideal of rationality by Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili, a wonderful thinker, thanks to whom I see the light in the window differently. By accepting his critique of the ideal of rationality, I began to see the world differently.

People are characterized by irrational decisions and irrational actions, which lead, contrary to formal logic, to achieving success

In fact, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky attacked precisely the ideal of rationality in the field of cognitive psychology and decision making by proposing so-called prospect theory (a poor translation for lottery theory) in the 1980s. They clearly showed that people are characterized by irrational decisions and irrational actions, which lead, contrary to formal logic, to achieving success. Richard Thaler also criticized the concept of rationality. I'll mention him famous work“From Homo economicus to Homo sapiens,” in which he practically begins to undermine the paradigms of rationality in the field of economics.

My main work is devoted to this breakthrough - going beyond the paradigm of homeostasis, first in personality psychology, and then in attempts to understand the mechanisms of the “evolution of evolution”. An ironic man named Karl Popper, polemicizing with Darwin, notes that the entire ideology of the struggle of species for existence comes down to the formula “the survivors survive,” bringing the idea of selection as a mechanism of evolution to the point of absurdity. Work by other evolutionists is emerging that criticizes Darwin's adaptation program. There are a lot of them. I will mention, first of all, the recently published book by Evgeny Kunin “The Logic of Chance” (2014). Criticism of adaptation programs of evolution shows that the ideology of stability, stability, equilibrium and the theories of stabilizing and directed selection that are based on it have a limited scope for explaining the mechanisms of evolution, including progress, as an increase in the diversity of complex systems.

Disruptive selection and pre-adaptation

Along with the ideas of guiding selection, which essentially reduces evolution to the victories of the “strongest” (C. Darwin) and stabilizing selection (I.I. Shmalhausen), other concepts of selection and analysis of changes in developing complex systems are becoming increasingly important. Among them, we mention, first of all, the concept of disruptive selection. If you pay attention to Klaus Schwab’s book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he widely uses the term “disruptive innovation” as a form of constructive destruction that allows one to break out of the captivity of past experience.

Vladimir Mau: In fact, in my understanding, one of the sources of the current slowdown in most developed countries (it began a quarter of a century ago in Japan, then continued in the Eurozone and Russia) is that the mechanisms of “creative destruction” that I wrote about when - Joseph Schumpeter. Anti-crisis policy has become so effective that a deep crisis is not allowed to develop. Social consequences crises are not as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Banks are not collapsing, unemployment is contained - everything is fine... But the result is that the field for growth is not cleared. We save dinosaurs by slowing down the appearance of mammals.

: You're right. It is precisely that it is not cleared due to the lack of mechanisms for liberation from rigidity, from the dictatorship of past experience. Paradoxical as it may seem, forgetting mechanisms are needed to get rid of routine, stereotypes, rigid attitudes and trauma. Anthropologist Valery Alekseev proposed, along with the theory of disruptive selection, the theory of variable selection, saying that since a person occupies different ecological niches, what was previously rejected begins to be preserved. Even the weakest survive. Let me refer to my work “Pre-adaptation to uncertainty as a navigation strategy for developing systems: routes of evolution” (2017). It shows that there is a whole layer of pre-adaptation phenomena that do not fit into rational schemes understanding behavior. These pre-adaptations as “anticipating changes” are paradoxical - in the present there are always already forms of the future that we stifle or do not notice, but which appear before something happens. Pre-adaptations are manifested, for example, in such phenomena as “woe from mind,” in delusions of reason, in illogical behavior, in the amazing logic of failures, which reveals the evolutionary meaning of mistakes as paths to success.

One of the consequences of adaptive evolution is the “rut effect” described in economics: we always end up in an evolutionary rut when we ignore redundant forms of behavior. This was clearly described by Umberto Eco, talking about the “university of comparative irrelevance”, the department of oxymorism, where “innovative traditions”, “folk oligarchs”, combinations of incongruous things are studied.

In other words, there has been a breakthrough in evolutionary concepts toward new programs for understanding behavior that explain the role of innovation and insight in the evolution of the diversity of life. The vulnerability of the homeostatic paradigm in the interpretation of behavior is especially visible if we turn to the words of Shakespeare: “How would man differ from an animal if he needed only what is necessary and nothing that is superfluous?” Understanding of the vulnerability of the homeostasis paradigm also occurs in psychology, thanks to the work of Kahneman and other researchers trying to go beyond rational behavior. The same thing happens in biology and cultural studies, when a huge number of facts that do not fit into the Procrustean bed of the ideal of rationality break into the homeostatic adaptive paradigm - useless DNA, the behavior of jesters, tricksters, laughter and carnival cultures - all these are unique forms of behavior that do not fit into homeostatic adaptive paradigm, wherever it appears - in psychology, economics, sociology or biology. In sociology, Bruno Latour draws attention to similar facts; in philosophy, this is, first of all, Merab Mamardashvili; in psychology, this breakthrough is associated with the activity approach of Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev and the underrated genius Nikolai Bernstein, the creator of the biology of activity and the concept of complex purposeful systems, who argued that “life is a struggle with balance.”

The result is the following: both Kahneman and Thaler (just like our N.A. Bernstein) began to show the limitations of adaptive development schemes. They convince us that on the ladder of evolution there are vectors of the desire for diversity and the collapse of diversity. An adaptive concept is a concept that works to support and reduce diversity. The most striking effect that has been encountered in economics, biology and psychology - I call it in my works simple living - the effect of “simplifying life”. Its consequence is archaization, barbarization of society, and the adaptive ideal of security rises to the pedestal. And then we have, in the wonderful words of Brodsky, an invasion of external and internal barbarians. In fact, the work of behavioral or cognitive economics is completely new round understanding the development of man, society, and nature in the spirit of Ilya Prigogine’s theory of instability. These studies shake the paradigm of rationality.

To illustrate the transition from the evolution of adaptability to the evolution of pre-adaptation, I will refer to the original observation of the master of analysis of organizational behavior D. Stark. He gives the following example: to get rid of adaptive models in a number of tribes the name is shaman. And the shaman throws a bone so that the tribe does not go hunting along the path that it has already walked. Thus, the shaman changes the path of the future hunt. This example proves the need for constructive ritual actions of a pre-adaptive nature, which allow us to find future solutions, other options for the development of systems, and break out of the rut effect.

Growth motivation instead of need motivation

Andrey Kolesnikov: So, in essence, we are talking about readiness for change?

: The key function of pre-adaptation is readiness for change. They used to say that no one knows which of the three great thinkers defined the 20th century - Marx, Freud or Einstein. So today I can say: the picture of thinking of the 20th - early 21st centuries was largely determined by a man named Ilya Prigogine and his concept of the philosophy of instability. His works set a new methodology, which differs sharply from the adaptive methodology of efficiency adopted by us. Prigogine's concept, returning to economics, makes it possible to see the limitations of the currently dominant concepts of human capital. They were good in the 1960s. And Gary Becker's concepts of behavior were also good then. It was on them that development strategies in education, culture, and the economy were based. In the study of unstable reality, a breakthrough occurred related to the understanding of pre-adaptation and its role in unpredictable situations. Therefore, the previous concepts that underlay development strategies not only do not work in our time, but also limit development. I can illustrate this with the following example: Maslow’s pyramid has become firmly entrenched in economics (at least in marketing), where the ideals of safety and the ideals of need lie at the very base of the pyramid of motivation. Maslow then exclaimed: “Take away this pyramid! I changed my mind about all this a long time ago, it’s all wrong.” And we conducted a simple experiment: I asked women who buy fashion magazines to be interviewed and looked at their appearance. “Girls” 50-70 years old take magazines where models are only for very thin people... this is completely pre-adaptive or maladaptive behavior, but they are selling them out. Through Maslow's pyramid there is no way to explain this.

Ideals of adaptability, ideals of security, sitting on the “throne” of the social system, economic system block their development

Let me emphasize once again that the ideals of adaptability, the ideals of security, sitting on the “throne” of the social system, the economic system, block their development. And then, instead of the motivation for growth, the motivation for need comes to the fore. Evolutionary models of pre-adaptation are based on the motivation of development, “motivation of growth,” and not the motivation of need.

Jean-François Lyotard suggested that humanity is beginning to divide into two lines: people ready for change, and people ready for archaism. People who are ready for change are a special class. They always, in one way or another, set variability, redundancy, plasticity, subtlety and resist rigidity and regression. Let me emphasize that adoption models difficult decisions in a situation of uncertainty, unpredictability, according to the Hamburg account, they belong to models of growth motivation, motivation of “love of diversity”.

And in this direction, for example, studies appear such as the pioneering work of J. Heckman, the creator of the Center for Development Economics at the University of Chicago. J. Heckman clearly shows that the more and earlier you invest in childhood, the greater the economic impact of return than when investing in human capital at school and university.

The ideal of security and the collapse of diversity

What is happening now and what worries me: today on the throne of economics, psychology and mass consciousness- the ideal of security. The ideal of security blocks any destructive processes, and thereby causes the phenomenon of “fear of entering open door" The ideal of security leads to the fact that various types of technologies come to the fore, which are aimed at creating depersonalization, or depersonalization. Including our existing television technology, today there is a massive stream of “TV hate”. Even what happens here when we explain all this with naive theories of conflict - a particular version of the conspiracy theory - is a complete simplification of the situation. The same epidemic of telephone virtual terrorism again pursues the goal of depersonalization and turning people into a crowd. And look for that some " foreign agent“created this epidemic means simplifying the situation.

By focusing on adaptive patterns, we lose in working with young people, because we always say that young people need this and that, offering the next adaptive patterns of behavior. At the same time, we do not ask the question: who are they, “a young, unfamiliar tribe” (the famous sociologist Lev Gudkov accurately defined this generation as the generation of negative identity)? In fact, the methodology of conflict and adaptability leads to the fact that negative mobilization becomes in demand. It can lead to the most serious breakdowns and the collapse of diversity. A small example: at Bolotnaya we were dealing with “carnival culture” in the Bakhtinian sense of the word, and not with the “culture of the opposition.” But as soon as we beat carnival culture, it loses the valence of carnivalism. It's the same with all innovation processes. For all the cries about innovation - if you don't take into account that the key characteristics of any system are not rationality, but redundancy (redundancy, flexibility, plasticity, fine-tuning and the key - readiness for change and readiness for complexity) - you constantly lose. You “pupate” in mobilization adaptation, thereby giving impetus to all simplifications - markets collapse, and in the literal sense of the word, diversity in education and in other areas collapses, although there are enough opportunities to support the evolutionary lines of pre-adaptation.

Vladimir Mau: I understood everything, but as in the joke about Vasily Ivanovich, to whom the structure of the airplane was explained, and he understood everything except where to hang the saddle. But what is pre-adaptation? Please explain in at least one sentence.

: Pre-adaptation is a readiness that exists today, here and now, to face unpredictable situations. Pre-adaptation often occurs due to the structure of organs - I have a huge number of cells that are not used, I have a huge number of extra movement options that are waiting in the wings. We have a huge number of geniuses in torn jackets who just need to be given the opportunity to develop. Newton would never have seen that the falling apple was related to the law of gravity if he had not been prepared, pre-adapted to change. Therefore, pre-adaptation is, in contrast to adaptive models of development, a lifesaver that can lead us out of many dead-end situations in an era of uncertainty.

Vladimir Mau: What is pre-adaptation opposed to?

: Pre-adaptation removes homeostatic models, to which it is not the opposite: they change levels. If in a stable era there are jesters, tricksters, dissidents, etc. actually had little chance of influencing the transformation of the system, today the carriers of pre-adaptive behavior with more likely can become leaders of change. Prigogine’s key pre-adaptive principle begins to work, that in a nonequilibrium system, even a small signal can change the entire trajectory of the system.

"Changing Changes"

Andrey Kolesnikov: But in politics we have a predominance of adaptive systems, and in economics too, because it depends on the political vector... But a common person– he is still inclined to adapt rather than take risks. Or vice versa?

: Now look, I’ll ask: how many times in your life have you heard the question: “What do you need more than anyone else?” Once you face this question, you are shown to be pre-adaptive. We take risks for the sake of risk, bet on excess and win.

Vladimir Mau: But there is a very close, but diametrically opposite situation: “Savva, why do you need this?” This is the same question, but in a completely different direction.

: This question is from carnival culture. In this wonderful work we see the logic of the Bakhtinian carnival, and the playing of different options, and the question “Savva, why do you need this?” – pre-adaptive in nature. Savva in “Pokrovsky Gate” is a master of adaptability, acting by someone else’s will, the will of the wife who sent him, only strengthens the motivation of “flight for freedom” of another hero of this film - Lev Khobotov. Preadaptation is infinite number opportunities is an opportunity industry. And today in society the winners are those who take risks for the sake of risk, play for the sake of play, and support disruptive innovations.

Vladimir Mau: Why today? It's always been like this.

: There are eras of stability and eras of uncertainty. In today's society of instability, as change accelerates, we begin to respond to "change change." This is where the work of cognitive psychologists appears on the design of things of the future (D. Norman); hence Eco’s work “Open Work”. This is where people and centers appear that work with this. A unique Center for the Analysis of Complexities of Edgar Morin has appeared in France. The Complexity Center was created by Morin based on the research of Ilya Prigogine. It is in this vector of thinking that the research of James Heckman, Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler is being conducted.

Confucius’s curse “may you live in an era of change” has become the norm of life

Change is the norm of modern reality. The curse “may you live in an era of change” by Confucius has become the norm of life, the norm of everyday life. In education (school and preschool) this is beginning to be understood, and we are preparing for this situation through new standards. And we are always in a decision-making situation and in a situation of uncertainty. This is already the existential vector of our time. And from here, to my joy, such directions as psychohistory appear - the science of historical motivations; psychology of flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi); positive psychology(Martin Seligman). I mean the concept of the psychology of optimism and happiness by M. Seligman. Research on the psychology of flow, psychology optimal experience have now been adopted by the Singapore education system. In Singapore, Seligman's non-adaptive optimism programs are implemented in many preschool organizations And primary schools. That is, completely new movements begin and centers appear, which essentially act as navigators of development.

Step aside. The phrase of Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin has always helped me understand the phenomenon of pre-adaptation - “This has never happened before, and here it is again.” This is a pre-adaptive form of behavior.

An adaptive form of behavior is ready to be based on any form of past experience. Pre-adaptive behavior is associated with the fact that you solve problems in unpredictable situations, and not in situations of causality and determinism.

Vladimir Mau: I recently spoke in St. Petersburg at the Big Data conference. My thesis was this. Our traditional model of understanding the future is based on extrapolation and causality. In conditions where extrapolation almost completely stops working, we are forced to abandon causality for the sake of correlation. Namely, correlation (not causation) is inferred from big data. That is, Big Data is, in a sense, an alternative to understanding the world based on extrapolation with the identification of cause-and-effect relationships. But then Big Data is not a completely scientific way of understanding the world: science presupposes causality. When you give up causality, it is a different way of knowing and forecasting.

: More precisely, it is a non-classical and post-non-classical science, and not “not a science”. This is exactly what I wrote about. Any models that rely on extrapolation in a situation of rapid change cease to work. To describe them, the following terms are proposed: “extrapolation model”, “anticipation model”, “probabilistic forecasting”, “advanced reflection”. What is their commonality? They build an image of the future based on past experience and the logic of previous events. They work within a deterministic model of the world.

Those who believe that the future of education lies solely in key competencies are hardly right. th

Therefore, those who believe that the future of education lies solely in the baggage of key competencies are hardly right. The principle of extrapolation when constructing the future based on past experience is always inertial and will always lead to a rut effect. I am closer to another principle proposed by entrepreneur and IBM director Thomas Watson - if you want to succeed, double the frequency of your failures.

Vladimir Mau: It's very tough. There is a softer formulation. I'm in her Lately I often use it, although I myself do not fit into this model - it would be uncomfortable for me. “If you've never missed a plane, you're spending too much time in airports.”

Andrey Kolesnikov: But this is rational behavior.

Vladimir Mau: It is not known what is more rational: paying for being late or sitting at the airport...

: The essence of the critical pathos of pre-adaptation: since any adaptive model extrapolates the future, nothing works out. You cannot build models of the future based solely on options from the past.

Vladimir Mau: But there are practically no other options. Still, more or less reliably we only know the past (and, as we know, it can be unpredictable in our country). The model of the future is so long logical process. This is important for understanding the role and capabilities of strategy. For example, the question is often asked what proportion of a particular strategy (as a document, program) was implemented. In my opinion, this question is quite meaningless; it does not speak about the quality of the strategy. After all, in fact, the role of strategy is not to describe the future, but to clarify the relationship between us today. A strategy that is rigidly executed will usually destabilize the system because there is too much additional factors appears. The Soviet Union still existed for quite a long time, because there was the possibility of non-fulfillment of the plan - no matter how paradoxical it may sound. The purpose of the plan is not to be rigidly executed, but also to provide room for maneuver, to ensure flexibility of the system, and to be adaptable...

: That's it: adjustment, tuning.

Vladimir Mau: And as soon as the point of view was accepted - since the plan is not fulfilled, it means that the system is bad, the system is broken. Moreover, the more dynamic the system, the more necessary a plan may be, but the less necessary it is to implement it.

: Then we move on to the cognitivist attitude, the relativist...

Vladimir Mau: At one time, Andrei Belykh and I came up with the name of the series “Economic History in the Past and Present,” and the epigraph there was: “Once Hegel inadvertently and probably at random called a historian a prophet who predicts backwards.” That is, in this sense, real predictive analysis is an analysis of the past, which each generation must relive and reinterpret.

Adaptation to history

Andrey Kolesnikov: In this sense, there are no lessons?

Vladimir Mau: Yes, but each generation masters them anew. It's like translating Salinger into Russian: youth jargon changes, and in order to understand this book, each generation must translate it in a new way, in a new jargon. My cousin, who graduated from school in 1955, once told me that she realized that there was no history because final exam in history was canceled and replaced by materials of the XX Congress of the CPSU. There was one story, and literally the next day it turned out to be another story. I thought about this a lot later, at first I accepted this thesis - yes, there is probably no history. However, then I realized that it was - extreme case the fact that history should be experienced by each generation, because each generation, based on its experience, sees certain events differently. When people worry about Yegor Gaidar’s reputation in history, I usually remind myself of this lady’s fickleness. Let's say, Pyotr Stolypin was in the category of villains for 70 years, and now he turned out to be a political genius and patriot, whose monument stands at the gates of the Government residence. This is a normal attitude towards heroic individuals. But that is why predicting the past is the only real prediction. If I understand the concept of “pre-adaptation” correctly, then it explodes a whole layer of problems, not only of the future, but also of the past. Because you have to be willing to adapt to your past. In fact, the fundamental problem of the current elite is that it cannot adapt to the past.

The past has a huge number of degrees of freedom

: There are a huge number of latent lines in the past that did not work. They only then turn out to be pre-adaptive. One small example of pre-adaptation. There was a writer Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky who wrote the story “Genius”. In this story he describes an old Jew who was considered insane in Odessa. And then, when he died, they began to sort out his manuscripts, and it turned out that this man had developed his own version differential theory Newton. Another thing is that he never knew Newton's theory, this is purely accidental discovery. There are a huge number of pre-adaptive phenomena in the past, so our past is unpredictable and reinterpretable. The past has a huge number of degrees of freedom. Bernstein’s brilliant formula: “The task gives birth to the organ.”

Vladimir Mau: This is some kind of Lamarckism...

: You hit the target again. I also speak lovingly about Lamarck. Today, many biologists come to the idea of complementarity, in the Bohrian sense, of the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin. To show different things - two lines of pre-adaptation and adaptability, I separated them very simply: “So century after century - how soon, Lord? “Under the scalpel of nature and art, Our spirit screams, our flesh languishes, Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.” Pre-adaptation is the sixth sense according to Gumilyov. But he is talking about the evolution of adaptation: “Memory, you lead life with the hand of a giantess, as if by the bridle of a horse. You will tell me about those who used to live in this body before me.” And continuing your formula - not only Lamarckism: Bernstein - “the task gives birth to the organ”, Sartre - “existence precedes essence”, the famous master of artificial intelligence David Marr - “purpose determines the structure”.

You asked main question. It is necessary to reflect that three pictures of the world coexist in our mentality. The first is a deterministic picture of the world; the second is relativistic; but there is also one that we are afraid of, but which has its own truth - it must be understood. This is an objective teleological picture of the world. The geniuses of the deterministic picture of the world were Aristotle, despite entelechy, and Laplace, etc. A probabilistic – Boltzmannian, Einsteinian picture of the world appears, but it is no coincidence that Prigogine says, “I am closer to the teleological picture of the world.” Let us recall Norbert Wiener’s work on objective teleology, Ackoff’s and Emery’s studies “On Purposeful Systems.” Ackoff and Emery's work was first published in 1977. These works clearly show that the teleological picture of the world must be combined with the stochastic and Einsteinian relativistic pictures. Prigogine essentially accepts a teleological picture of the world in his works, or rather, constructs it.

Vladimir Mau: Teleological – is it deterministic, or does deterministic mean genetic, to use the terminology of the 1920s? I am referring to the well-known economic debate about the genetic or teleological approach to the plan: is the five-year plan the result of an accurate analysis of trends or a mechanism for seeking the achievement of goals, that is, is the goal given to the plan from the outside, or does it sit in the plan itself? This was the key economic discussion 1920s. It ended, however, with the imprisonment of supporters of both views.

Andrey Kolesnikov: If we return to the practices of today, both the state and, relatively speaking, average person choose an adaptive model. An example of private economic behavior: first, an attempt to take a risk investing in some kind of “MMM”, and then, if it doesn’t work out, quickly jump out. Am I right that the adaptive model always wins as a result, precisely because there are a lot of changes?

: This is a choice in the formula - “to be or to have.” Either be many, or have many.

Vladimir Mau: It seems to me that this is always an artificial dichotomy. Why can't you be in order to have?

: You have to have it in order to be. In order to move towards the future and act productively in the present, a person does not come to the present directly from the past, but constructs his present as an image of the future. And to be winning, you must, based on adaptive models, be able to be redundant. And today, those who are redundant are successful. Many corporations have lost their meaning. Representatives of various corporations came to me with the words “there is money, everything is fine, but life is boring.” The phenomenon of burnout begins. Frankl’s existential formula “man in search of meaning” today applies to Russia, Russia in search of meaning...

If you want to live, know how to study

Vladimir Mau: We will still take a step towards education. I think we will talk more about education. It is always very difficult for me to explain to students why I need this or that subject. I say - life is so unpredictable that, in principle, you can say about everything that I don’t need it. The meaning of education is only to gain experience in obtaining and processing knowledge. But for this you also need to know a lot. If anything, you need to pick up a variety of knowledge, and then it somehow works out. We still don’t know what of the acquired knowledge will be needed and when. The point of teaching in general is to train the brain, and it doesn’t even matter what material is used.

: The main formula is “teach to learn.” Remember the parable that it is better for humanity to learn how to fish than to feed humanity fish once. At the same time, only a madman can deny the most important role of subject knowledge itself, the value of classical disciplines, which literally discipline our thinking.

Andrey Kolesnikov: Life as continuous education.

: This is redundancy. Why today are large companies headed by “generalists” - people who have systems thinking thanks to the acquired excess knowledge in various fields. These may be economists, graduates of the VMC, for some reason rarely from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics - but they receive a systemic effect. Not because they learned what was adaptive and necessary, but because they were super-adaptive.

You're just ready for change. Continuing this logic, I have prepared and shown the risks of blindness to development horizons. It is not understood that education today must answer the question: why should we teach? And only then - what, and then - what resources. And there is a change in the picture of the world - from the lesson-centric picture of the world of Jan Komensky to the person-centric world and education as an industry of opportunities. The lesson is cracked by a world of uncertainty. The lesson as a quantum no longer works. Today there is a change in the mission of education - from education as the transmission of knowledge (key skills) to education that provides opportunities, motives for action and meaning. In the previous system, skills come before motivation, the result is training as training. As a result, we get Matroskin the cat, an effective manager with a set of competencies.

The key task of education is to motivate readiness for change

Vladimir Mau: But this is also correct.

: Is it correct that in relation to the next generations we are concerned about how to become leaders, effective managers, but are not at all concerned about “How to become a person.” Therefore, it is important that everything about this does not come down to competence training, to training the mind. The key task of education is to motivate readiness for change, competence to update competencies - this is what we should get at school, and not just key skills.

Vladimir Mau: There is one problem here. I am extremely confused by the competency-based approach as the basis of education. At least in its current interpretation. Nowadays you can often hear that the main thing you need to learn is soft skills. This is the ability to communicate, present, experience empathy, etc., something else. But knowledge itself, hard skills, turn out to be secondary. With this approach, it turns out that you don’t even need a multiplication table - you will achieve everything by being able to communicate. Probably, someone can do so. But still, the task of education is fundamental knowledge. The main thing here is to teach how to learn. People tend to get carried away and go to extremes. And so we come to standards in which there is less and less of what needs to be known (roughly speaking, learned).

: I never go the competency route. The activity approach of Lev Vygotsky and Alexei Leontiev says that we, first of all, should consider education as a zone of opportunity, and not a set of competencies. Variable education is defined as a mechanism for expanding the capabilities of the individual, providing adequate choice in situations of uncertainty.

Vladimir Mau: But this cannot happen without knowledge, without hard skills!

: This doesn’t happen without hard skills, but no one discards them!

Vladimir Mau: By the way, by hard I mean, among other things, knowledge of history. What we lack most in the elite now is knowledge of history. And this is not only a problem Russian elite. Many sincerely believe that history begins with the current generation. This doesn't mean that historical experience can be applied directly to the present, but it is strange not to know it. In general, it is very rare in history that tasks that are fundamentally new and have never had precedent in the past appear.

: Without knowledge of history, this is when a three-year-old person comes to you and already speaks English, but cannot tie his shoelaces, which is a sad consequence of a competence-based approach.

Vladimir Mau: Yes. Although in general we know that someday he will tie them.

: Until you teach, it won’t stop. My formula about independence in tying shoelaces is to independence according to Pushkin, to human independence. Thank God, we moved away from the competency-based approach in preschool.

Vladimir Mau: But now they impose it everywhere...

: In the university standard - yes, in the preschool standard - it is not.

My colleagues and I developed new preschool and school standards as standards for supporting diversity. The other day there was a meeting on professional standards, where I was asked to come. I said - you are doing monstrous things: you have reduced everything to competencies, you have returned the Taylor system.

We made the program “Universal actions of the 21st century, the result of learning as a discovery.” And who will be the man of the 21st century? I called him whyer - why, and the leader of the future is the director of constructing opportunities. And three characteristics of the school of the future: motivation, opportunity and individualization. Hence, from mastery of universal actions - to semantic meta-subject knowledge, to understanding, not knowledge. What is needed is semantic education, not memory education. The most dangerous thing for me is that I always give an example of the dissertation “Career Guidance for Mining Professions in Senior Kindergarten Groups.”

Now there are children who are looking for their future, almost without us.

Vladimir Mau: In what sense?

: Let me explain. I call them the generation of Google and Yandex - they are looking for everything without us, without us - “why”, they don’t want what we want.

Vladimir Mau: Well, it has always been like this, even without Google.

: Not to that extent. But before, why things disappeared according to Korney Chukovsky - “from two to five.” Previously, for a child, an adult was still the zone of proximal development (according to Lev Vygotsky). Nowadays, for a child, the zone of proximal development is determined by the children's subculture and the world of the Internet.

Vladimir Mau: Depends on the parents.

Andrey Kolesnikov: And from social conditions life.

Vladimir Mau: Recently Anton Molev, scientific adviser The RANEPA Lyceum organized a large intellectual forum for our lyceum students. And we had a panel discussion - Viktor Vakhshtain, Sergey Zuev and me. Literally according to Toffler, his article “The Future as a Way of Life.” Zuev began his speech with the words: “Guys, you have to be able to want.” Very good formula.

: And I love the formula “if you want to live, know how to learn.”

It seems to me that a unique race has now begun - a race to create an image of the future, a kind of competition for prophets. By the way, your structure is called the Academy. And I remembered my favorite phrase from Isaac Asimov’s prophetic work “The Academy” - “We cannot stop the fall of the empire. But we will do everything to reduce the period of advancing barbarism.” For me this is the motto of life. This is a brilliant motto for the Academy. Barbarism is precisely the collapse of diversity. And the “Academy” in a broad evolutionary sense is the creation of an industry of opportunities and, God willing, a reduction in the period of barbarism, the period of graying of society and the collapse of diversity.

09/12/2017 - report by A.G. Asmolov “The labor market of the future: who will be in demand and who will remain out of work”

The autumn session of the “Image of the Future” cycle was organized by the Committee of Civil Initiatives and the All-Russian Civil Forum together with Yandex.

Dedicated to the prospects for the development of the labor market, human and social capital in the era of artificial intelligence.

Recording the broadcast

08/24/2017 - report by A.G. Asmolov at the pedagogical forum " Modern education- leadership of the Moscow region"

August 24, 2017 Director of FGAU "FIRO" A.G. Asmolov made a presentation at the pedagogical forum “Modern education - leadership of the Moscow region.”

08.08.2017 - article by A.G. Asmolov “The Race of Millionaires and Governors” in EDexpert magazine

A quarter of a century of development of the private sector in education through the eyes of one of the founding fathers.

The coexistence in our country of state, or formal, education and the non-state sector began in 1992-1993, when, after the entry into force of the first Russian law “On Education” and the decision of the board of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, we adopted a number of regulatory documents regulating the activities of various public and commercial educational organizations, as well as the role of sponsors and investors. Then we saw the great task of the non-state sector, including increasing competition in education, so that the state would “catch mice.”

06.06.2017 - article by A.G. Asmolov “Race for the future: and then came later” in the Teacher’s newspaper

Between the effect of self-fulfilling predictions and the effect of the psychology of perception

In Russia, as in many other countries of the world, a special process has intensified - the process of racing for the future. And the more I look at various forecasts for the future, including forecasts for education in the 21st century, the more often I remember the paradoxical title of the recently published book by the famous cartoonist Harry Bardeen, “And Then Came.”

Any forecasts, like prophecies, are not only attractive, but also risky. It is no coincidence that seers and eyewitnesses, as Vladimir Vysotsky’s song says, have been burned at the stake in all centuries. Predicting the future is also very risky because, with all the unpredictability of the future, it is precisely because of this unpredictability that the effect of self-fulfilling prophecies is triggered: utopias and manifestos more often degenerate into empires and totalitarian regimes, and not into bright cities of the sun.

The effect of self-fulfilling prophecies is just one of the effects of forecasting as constructing the future, without taking into account which any “objective” forecasts can crumble like a house of cards.
Another effect that also, in my opinion, needs to be kept in focus during the race for the future is the effect of the psychology of perception, known as the battle of visual fields.

When you look at Russia in 2017 and make forecasts for the future, you need to realize that the historical perception of the country is subject to the effect of the struggle of visual fields: one eye sees, for example, a brown spot, the other eye sees a spot of blue color. And now one image of perception arises, then another, competing with each other, overlapping each other.

In the perception of Russia in 2017, at least two images of the future compete with each other, carrying different historical settings. The first of these images is succinctly conveyed by the well-known ideological triad of the Minister of Education of the Russian Empire, Count Uvarov, “Orthodoxy - autocracy - nationality.”

Another image of the triad - “freedom - equality - fraternity” - is associated with the times of the Great French Revolution XVIII century.

Before our eyes, one after another, a variety of programs and strategies are gaining strength, trying to provide their answers to the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and diversity of the “fluid” era of change.
Among the current fair of future forecasts, the race of projects of various images of the 21st century - the image of a person, the image of the mind, the image of education - the metaphor of “inevitability strange world“most succinctly conveys the meaning of the cascade of changes taking place in the world.

In all these images of the future, “stories of tomorrow,” apocalyptic intonations concerning the prospects of man and humanity prevail. The future of education, which promises successful adaptation to a changing world, is associated with equipping the “man of the future” with a set of key skills and competencies of the 21st century, including creativity skills. The future of intelligence in the era of singularity (R. Kurzweil) - with the adaptive evolution of artificial intelligence models. At the same time, it is possible that, just as in medieval Great Britain, “the sheep ate the people,” flexible algorithms and platforms will displace humans, turning them into a representative of the “useless class,” a fading nature of evolution.

With all the diversity of pictures of the future, “agendas of action” with time horizons from 5 to 100 years, they are united by a number common features. Firstly, behind the diverse models of the future, there emerges the dissonance syndrome of a contemporary who is constantly unable to keep up with the passing day and is out of tune with time and himself.

Secondly, the challenges of a “strange” world - challenges of uncertainty, complexity, diversity - are most often interpreted as destructive challenges of “disorder”, “chaos”, “future shock” (E. Toffler), preventing the adaptation of man and humanity to environmental changes, as well as the adaptation of other biological species in the fluid worlds of environmental, technogenic, social and psychological transformations. As a result, the increase in the pace of evolution provoked by the flow of activities (and consciousness) of humanity and the loss of the gradual nature of evolution turn into an increase in tendencies of regression, archaism, “flight from freedom” (E. Fromm), as well as attacks of fears of the uncertainty and unpredictability of the present and future.

Thirdly, forecasting the future is carried out against the backdrop of ongoing technological, industrial and cognitive revolutions that are changing the lifestyles and images of the world of mankind (see, for example, R. Kurzweil, 2016; K. Schwab, 2017; Y. Harari, 2016, 2017) . As a result of these revolutions, the “shock of the future,” which the futurist E. Toffler warned about at the turn of the 21st century, becomes the “shock of the present,” and the time of change becomes the norm of modern life.

In conditions of growing instability, humanity is faced with the task of developing an effective “agenda of action” in a changed global situation and, through, I especially emphasize, the optics of rationality and economic conformity, it is looking for ways to respond to the economic subject of social systems to various changes, coded as a transition from the SPOD world (S - Steady - stable; P - Predictable - predictable; O - ordinary - simple; D - definite - certain) to the VUCA world (V - volatility - variability, instability, instability; U - uncertainty - uncertainty; C - complexity - complexity; A - ambiguity - ambiguity, ambiguity, ambivalence). The contradictory world of VUCA leads to the emergence of adaptive futurological concepts, in which the hope for increasing the adaptive potential of the 21st century personality by expanding the repertoire of so-called competencies and skills of the 21st century, including the skill of creativity, is combined with an awareness of the need to select people with tolerance for uncertainty. The present, and not just the future, world of VUCA is also becoming a drive to revise the practice of various adaptive models of educational practice in different countries of the world, an incentive to overcome the systemic crisis of education through the transition from the paradigm of teaching knowledge, skills, skills to the “school of uncertainty” and the paradigm of variable motivating developmental education.

Against the backdrop of these events, over the past decades, several large-scale attempts to reform education “from above” have been carried out in Russia, without critical reflection of which any new management project for predicting the future of the education system as a potential resource for positive changes in economic life the country has little chance of success. In the context of the trend in educational policy in recent years, manifested in attitudes towards the archaization of education, the risks of perceiving new projects for reforming education and projects for the future are increasing sharply.
In this regard, I consider it necessary, with a positive perception of the plans of various educational futurists, to begin the next round of education modernization “from above” and to identify some obvious risks of social perception and subsequent results of these implementation projects according to the Hamburg account.

1. Any previous attempts to modernize education encountered the following barriers:
- ignoring the expectations and motivation of the population when carrying out social reforms;
- the dominance of technocratic (technological, organizational and economic) models of modernization, which bracket the socio-economic and psychological effects of education (education as a factor of social stratification, social mobility, social consolidation (or segregation) of the population, images of the future of new generations of adolescents and youth, the formation of cultural identity, etc.);

Reducing education reform policies to departmental programs separate industry, which ignores the specifics of education in an open network society, the loss of the monopoly of education as an institution of socialization in comparison with other institutions of socialization, especially in the conditions of information socialization and the consequences of the digital gap between generations;
- the risk of education becoming a “scapegoat” for any manifestations social tension against the backdrop of increasing social stratification of society, exacerbation of xenophobia, ethnophobia, liberalophobia, witch hunts, growing ranks of supporters of the country’s “special path” and opponents of any “innovations”.

2. The risk of reducing education development scenarios to adaptive compensatory scenarios of technological upgrade of the current education system, turning various promising education models - 2018-2024, 2018-2030, etc. into retrospective models even before their discussion and adoption. Technological upgrades in education remind me of attempts to transform a Zaporozhets into a Mercedes with the help of an upgrade.

I’ll say something special about this risk. I clearly understand that in the “agenda of action” scenarios themselves, which correspond to strict management logic, discussions about the choice of methodology and, dare I say it, the philosophy of designing the future are hardly appropriate. Nevertheless, I consider it necessary to note that it is the methodology for constructing the future that largely determines the choice of goals, priorities, and language for describing any project.

By default, essentially two points of support are accepted as a methodology:
- methodology for considering education through the prism of human capital concepts, in which people are mainly “resources”, “means”, “personnel”, “instruments” for the state to solve economic problems;
- “philosophy of efficiency” (a philosophy proposed by the business community for teaching individuals the key skills (competencies) of the 21st century, including the “skill of creativity”).

All other general future design methodologies, including classical modeling methodologies sustainable development in the context of the concept of world (system) dynamics of Jay Forrester, the methodology of the “third wave” of Elvin Toffler, the futurology of the singularity of Raymond Kurzweil and, most importantly, the philosophy of instability of Ilya Prigogine, often remain outside the focus of attention when constructing the most different programs constructing both images of education and images of a person in the 21st century.

This is especially sad, since without a philosophy of instability that has highlighted the main trends of our time - the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and diversity, without taking into account the ongoing cognitive revolution, without analyzing the forecasts and consequences of the 4th industrial revolution It is hardly possible to build promising models of education for the 21st century.

But I don’t want to end the discussion of racing for the future on a sad note.
Science, no matter how traumatized it is by the archaic ideology of “escape from freedom,” is looking for a variety of ways to develop. If in the exact sciences of the 20th century the main symbol of knowledge was the atom, then in the 21st century it is replaced by such symbols as the brain and mind. And next in line are symbols such as consciousness and a person ready for change. The picture of funding research in the field of neurocognitive sciences and neurotechnologies in the first decade of the 21st century looks impressive:

"Connectom" (2005-2015, USA, financing 100 million US dollars);
“Blue Brain” (2006, Switzerland, 100 million euros);
“Human Brain Project” (HBP) (2012-2022, European Commission of the European Union, funding 1 billion 190 million euros);
“BRAIN Initiation” (2013, US government, 2014-2024, funding $3 billion at $300 million per year);
“Big Brain” (USA, Microsoft Corporation, $60 million);
“Brain netome” (2013, China, 200 million yuan).

Without analyzing these studies and understanding the reasons for the change in the chain of symbols of cognition “atom - brain - mind - consciousness...” futurological forecasts will remain in an airless space... “And then came later.”

But I consider myself an evolutionary optimist. And therefore, I will conclude my essay with a phrase from Voltaire’s journalistic philosophical pamphlet “Candide, or Optimism”: “All events are inextricably linked in the best of possible worlds. If you had not been expelled from the beautiful castle... if you had not been taken by the Inquisition... you would not be eating sugared lemon peels or pistachios now.

“You said it well,” answered Candide, “but we need to cultivate our garden.”

So, no matter what happens at the fair of forecasts and new archaics of the future, we need to cultivate our garden - the garden of the culture of dignity, the garden of modernity for the fearless generation of complex free people, ready for changes in reality, the garden of variable education of the 21st century.

02.16-18.2017 - A.G. Asmolov made a presentation at the conference “Trends in the development of education. Who uses and evaluates educational standards and how?”

Conference organizers: Moscow Higher School of Social and economic sciences jointly with the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow City Pedagogical Institute.

Topic of the report by A.G. Asmolova: “The child as a value: Seeing. Anticipate. Act".

The event took place on the basis of the Moscow Higher School of Economics and Social Sciences.

02/5/2017 - lecture by Alexander Asmolov in Novaya Gazeta

How to remain human in an inhuman era? Is it possible to maintain your dignity in a world where conformity and flight from freedom become norms of behavior that promise social success? Like in very different historical times Do psychotechnologies of suppressing diversity and defending one’s self compete with each other? What awaits us: civil society or a new round of barbarism and neo-archaism?

About all these eternal scenarios of a person’s dialogue with his time, psychological mechanisms Alexander Asmolov, head of the Department of Personality Psychology at Moscow State University, academician of the Russian Academy of Education, spoke about support and suppression of diversity in different cultures.

01/24/2017 - Alexander Asmolov spoke at Sberbank

On January 24, at a meeting of leaders, a dialogue took place between German Gref and Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Education, head. Department of Personality Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, director of the Federal Institute for Educational Development.

01/17/2017 - A.G. Asmolov was invited to the Scientific Expert advice National Award "Golden Bear"

The national award in the field of goods and services for children “Golden Bear” was established as an industry award awarded for achievements and professional contribution to the development of the infrastructure of modern childhood in the Russian Federation.

01/13/2017 - appeal from A.G. Asmolov to the Minister of Education and Science O.Yu. Vasilyeva

12/20/2016 - article by A.G. Asmolov and M.S. Guseltseva “Education as a potential resource for modernizing society” in the journal “Education Policy”

Annotation. The purpose of this article is to reveal the methodological prerequisites for the sociocultural modernization of the education system and society. IN Russian system In education, several trends are currently represented to varying degrees: technocratic, or organizational and economic, modernization plays a priority role; professional scientific community The sociocultural modernization of education is systematically advocated and supported; Since 2013, the remake modernization of education has been gaining momentum. Within the framework of this article, modernization is conceptualized as an ontologically and epistemologically complex process, covering different layers of reality.

The methodological basis of the presented analysis is the historical-evolutionary and cultural-analytical approaches developed by the authors. From the indicated methodological positions, the education system is considered as a potential source of social change and possible transformation of society. At the same time, the construct of “sociocultural modernization” is introduced into the context of interdisciplinary approaches to social change. Psychological strategies for constructive mastery of modernity, as well as “escape” from modernity are shown; resources and obstacles to identity development in an era of change are identified. Positive socialization of younger generations is interpreted as a sociocultural means of overcoming the crises accompanying the transformation of society upon entering modernity.

Positive socialization of modern children and adolescents means: psychological qualities and attitudes that allow productive living and acting in transitive and diverse world: reflective complexity, tolerance for uncertainty, civic position, development of critical thinking, personal responsibility, abilities to design a professional and life path. Positive socialization presupposes a supportive sociocultural and friendly family environment, as well as reliance on the traditions of a culture of dignity and humanistic practices. However, the ideology of humanism is still an insufficiently reflected resource in our society for the success of sociocultural modernization.

The practical significance of this article is associated primarily with the development of a strategy for the sociocultural modernization of education and society, in the context of which the role of positive images future in the socialization of younger generations.

Keywords: methodology, education system, modernization models, sociocultural modernization of education, regions, socialization, images of the future, changes, pedagogy of dignity, pedagogy of chauvinism.