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Well, I say that we must teach what will be useful. That is a common platitude. Officials follow it, point to it, and concern themselves with it.
Vladimir Nikitin discusses why thinking cannot be taught in lessons and explores the true value of education beyond formal subjects.
Key Takeaways
- Thinking cannot be directly taught as a subject but must be developed through experience.
- Education should balance preserving valuable traditions and adapting to new realities.
- Holistic thinking is essential and cannot be reduced to isolated skills like critical thinking.
- Free time and inactivity are important for mental creativity and should be valued in education.
- Current educational systems often prioritize narrow specialization over broad intellectual development.
What the video covers
- Education should focus on what is truly useful, not just formal knowledge.
- Classical education, like studying Greek and Latin, develops formal thinking rather than practical language skills.
- Training often aims to develop patience, meticulousness, and holistic thinking rather than direct skill mastery.
- Thinking is a complex, holistic process that cannot be fragmented into discrete lessons like logic or critical thinking.
- Education must evolve by discarding outdated knowledge and preserving what remains relevant to new situations.
- False causal connections are common and misleading in interpreting history and culture.
- Belonging and identity can be manipulated, and true humanism transcends such affiliations.
- True thinking is rare and requires development beyond stereotypes and protocols.
- Periods of inactivity and free time are essential for creativity and reflection, contrary to societal norms of constant activity.
- Modern education and professional specialization have lost the original ideal of fostering free, broad thinking.
Chapters
- 00:00The Purpose of Useful Education
- 00:43Historical Example: Count Ignatyev and Military Education
- 02:11Challenges and Creativity in Education
- 03:36Training Patience and Meticulousness
- 05:08The Limits of Teaching Thinking
- 05:56Adapting Education to New Realities
- 08:53Misleading Cause-Effect Chains in Culture
- 10:25Identity, Responsibility, and Humanism
- 11:53The Rarity and Necessity of True Thinking
- 13:20The Illusion of Constant Activity
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Well, if you recall the classical gymnasium education, studying dead languages—primarily Greek and Latin—was important there. And by no means so that they could fluently read Greek or Latin, but because it is a powerful way to develop formal thinking. Or take
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the books "Fifty Years in the Ranks" by Count Ignatyev, the son of a former Kiev governor. The house where they lived is now the Honchar Museum. He graduated from the Page Corps, then became an adjutant to the Empress. The
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Chevalier Guard, the highest society, his father was a prime minister. And suddenly, he decides to enter the military academy. No one could understand why on earth he would do that. But he was bored. He was tired of the drinking, the carousing, the
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pointlessness of that existence, and he was a creative person. Well, uh, getting in was very difficult, but as he described, the education at the Cadet Corps and the Page Corps was very decent. He got in. Why am I telling
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this? In the first year, they gave us a bronze relief model, and we had to depict it. All the curves of the terrain and heights had to be shown through line thickness. And he says: "We, future General Staff officers,
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majors, colonels, sat for hours trying to do this, sharpening pencils, using hundreds of techniques; most couldn't handle it and quit." Well, a note on the side: in my first year of architecture school, we had similar assignments. It was ink-washing
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architectural details, facades, and volumes with Chinese ink. That was also no easy task. And they didn't understand why they needed it. They weren't going to be cartographers; they were staff officers. He says, only later, when I had already become the
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chief of an army staff, did I realize they hadn't been teaching us cartography and drawing. They were training us for patient and meticulous work, because back then, the job of a chief of staff was very exhausting, detailed, and responsible. You had to
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draft an order specifying everyone's place, because the regimental commanders themselves didn't want to or couldn't do it. So, we don't master things directly. And what is important cannot be taught as a school subject.
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There cannot be "thinking" lessons. There can be logic lessons, problem-solving lessons, critique lessons. Although I don't see what sensible outcome so-called critical thinking training leads to, because thinking is holistic and cannot be divided into fragments. Its results can
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be explained later logically or in some other way. Therefore, when I work with education, whether for children or adults, I strive for them to acquire their own experience rather than borrowing mine. What was common sense in my time and based on my experience
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is no longer relevant for new situations, and this is a catastrophe for education. It would be wise to understand what to discard and what to preserve. There is a uselessness to pure thought, free play, and high art if they are not turned into a show and
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thrown onto the market. There is also a belief in the sequence of causes and effects. Even though Roman law had the principle that "after this" does not mean "because of this." But we stubbornly build chains that convincingly seem to show movement and
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causes. Like, Wagner's music led to fascism, or reading Dostoevsky. I have read a lot of him, though I don't like him. leads to some kind of violence.
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And this is a very big trap. False connections are built on this simple principle of "after this," even though the causes, if they exist at all, might lie somewhere else entirely. There is also this mandatory bond. You must
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belong to something and bear responsibility for it. The cynics, like Diogenes, strongly protested against this line. "I am looking for a human being," he said, expressing the idea of cosmopolitanism. He clearly understood that what we call identity today is a
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tethering to some affiliation, and then a demand for obligations toward it. And this can be manipulated, for example, during a war. Everyone is the same, everyone is equal. Seems like a sound thought, too. We are all human. We all
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think—well, that's what Shchedrovitsky loved to quote, based on a statement by linguist Hans Jørgen Uldall. Thinking among humans is as rare a phenomenon as ballroom dancing among horses. And it is as necessary to humans as dancing is to horses.
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Thinking must be developed. These are very complex complex procedures, complex processes, especially if you move into open-ended thinking.
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Otherwise, we mostly just think that we are thinking, following common tropes. Stereotypes, protocols, and standards.
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In the novel The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder, there is a fragment in it. An indigenous man, a friend of the protagonist, tells him: "You white people are always having to do something with your mouths: eat, smoke, talk." That was a very accurate
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observation. We must always be active. Doing something, and idleness or inactivity is a sin in our society. I heard an excerpt from the trial transcript of poet and future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. And all his claims that he writes poems and earns
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extra money on expeditions were harshly rejected. There was no corresponding diploma. And he was declared a parasite and sent for forced labor re-education on a collective farm. And at that time, he had already written many wonderful poems, which are now quoted and even
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performed, like "The Pilgrims." For example, in China during the Cultural Revolution, similar processes took place. Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and teachers were sent to labor camps for re-education. As for me, I am quite lazy and have periods of
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inactivity. This was especially evident in childhood. My older sisters, quoting Chekhov, would say my laziness was born before I was. But if you look at it from another angle, it is a time when the mind and time are free. And if the
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mind and time are constantly occupied, then the miracle of another person, of this morning, of this tree, will go unnoticed. Humboldt, when creating the concept of the German university, assumed its essence was creating free time for free researchers, but the
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state quickly turned the university into a place for training unfree, useful bureaucrats and teachers. After all, the idea of professionalism was based on redundant knowledge, the ability to solve various tasks, and knowing how to set new ones, but
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current narrow specialization, standards, and protocols have killed this form of organization. For us, uh, this ability to see and do different things yourself, based on some general concepts, mental pictures, experience.
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I clearly see that technologies have destroyed professional organization. This is a sign of the new times. I, so to speak, do not weep on the ramparts like Yaroslavna over times gone by. I am simply noting what happened and what
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replaced it. M.
Topics:educationthinkingformal thinkingcritical thinkingclassical educationcreativitylearning processeducation reformidentityprofessionalism
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