Research Supervisor of the Center for Harmonic Development of Students of RSSU, Moscow, Russia

(Report at the international symposium “Education in Europe for Harmonic Development of Students’’, October, 13-15 2010, Moscow)

Modern schools are the places for mental health clinics (by Jan Eastgate, President of the International Civil Commission for Human Rights),

The dominant feature of the mental disorder is such a state of a person when evidence doesn’t have any influence and no sound arguments are effective (by Hippocrates).

Who of us has ever thought why the epoch of general education began this way, not any other? Why did J.H. Pestalozzi, great Swiss educator-enlightener claimed at the very beginning of the XIX century: bookish education suffocates kids’ development, undermines their health? Why did soon after everyone find out: wan complexion, exhausting migraine, nervous system and psychological disorder, myopia, pince-nez on the nose, crooked back and a stick in the hand became indispensable attributes of the image of young educated people? Why did American doctor Edward Clarke (1867) declare that school “puny bodies” of educated girls lead to mass abnormality of pregnancy and labor and threatens with human devolution in the future? Eventually, the world community had to get together at the World congresses on school hygiene; the first one took place in Nurnberg (1904), the second- in London (1908), the third in Paris (1912). There the most competent authorities acknowledged: pediatric and juvenile scoliosis, myopia, cardiac pathology, nervous system and psychological disorders, etc. – are purely school phenomena.

The most charitable social diagnosis to everything that happens to kids at schools in the conditions of skillfully enforced “book-sitting” model of education, in fact reproduction of the new generations of peoples, was given by the outstanding American psychologist of Pennsylvanian University M. Seligman: “Learned helplessness” in future life.

The more serious social diagnosis to all that happens to children at schools was made by the most competent Western specialists as early as in the 50-ies of the XX century – slow de-hominization (Professor Itten, Madeleine Welz Pagano, Lois Machar and others.)

What is meant here is discovering an epidemic of kids’ mass decrement of that distinctive specific human essence that once wrested us from grasp of the impulsive-situational reflectory-instinctive (animal) world perception and responsiveness and gifted with spiritual views on the world, or in other words, vivid imagination directed into the future.

Anxiety for the future of the modem civilization sounded in the words of President of INZEA society Doctor Edwin Siegfeld (USA) and a member of Board of the second General Assembly in the Hague Ozamo Nuri (Japan): “Whatever the future would bring to the mankind, imaginary education essentially is the only guarantee that the dazed mankind will be able to take shelter from all that disastrous tempests and catastrophes that threaten to devour the whole civilizations”.

But the most amazing here is the following thing: the international conference devoted to the centenary of the first Nurnberg World Congress on school hygiene that took place in Moscow in 2004 revealed the most important things: for the expired century no country in the world disclosed and removed from the academic process the genuine primary reasons for physical and mental health degradation of the new generation.

We devoted 33 years of life to studying the reasons and mechanisms of children’s health degradation in the academic process, including their elimination. And for me the most important matter has become not the one why school degrades down to the bottom physical and mental health (we have made this out), but why, having launched the increasing in generations degradation process of primary base of the family-genealogical trees of human life, we are still “afloat”.

I have come to the following conclusion after many years of research and thoughts on this matter: civilization, having laid “book-sitting” models of education alien to the human nature at the childhood stage, essentially reproduction of new generations, has started to develop as per the strategy of slow adaptive-mutant degradation.

And now about the most important: why we, who had not been given “eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day” (Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, 11:8). Or as it’s written in the Koran: “Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom” [Sura 2:6(7)].

The question is about abnormal for human nature dominant embryonic crooked academic-cognitive position that school forms.

Children all over the world study like this but as a result develop out of shape (excluding schools that introduced our alternative modes of studying). And the matter is not only about the total block of life supporting basic systems (blood circulation and ventilation) in the jaws of static muscle strains, (stresses – according to H. Selye), not only about the chronic cross-clamping of vessels, feeding the brain, and as a result, about development of children in the conditions of chronic brain hypoxia. We found it all out after special research. To the highest degree the matter is about blocking breath liberty and life vivification. I don’t have time to dwell upon it, but from this very position that hyper morbidity and hyper mortality that attacked Russia (and not only Russia) at the end of the millennium, sprang.

And it’s all on the surface. But the deeper destructive processes turned out to be at the endocrine, cellular and genetic levels. The point is that immersion and stay of children in the state of static muscle strain (torpor in the ancient religious teachings) – is the syndrome of all-pervading “short circuit” in the hierarchy of energy-informational outlines of corporal, psychomotor, cellular life. This is the “burnout” syndrome of not only the nervous energy, but of all, thanks to what we once became a species of homo sapiens – energy-informational field genome.

It’s determined that systematic children’s staying in such a position leads to sharp growth of toxins in blood – under-oxidized products of cell dissolution, fall out of calcium ions into calcium salts, substitution of living tissue for bone tissue, etc. And this is nothing else but the age and senescence illnesses placed on fragile shoulders of our kids.

Youth truly differs from age with particular agility and body flexibility. And age is different from youth by stiffness and crookedness. And death differs from life with body immobility.

As a confirmation of all mentioned above let us take one of the developed and cultural Western countries, where special attention is given to children’s development and education – Norway. I quote the competent Norwegian specialist H. Seyffarth (1980):

“…Axis knot in the region of the neck is the most widespread reason for pains in nape and arms. Knots of the lowest lumbar vertebrae have a great influence on emergence of lumbago and ischias that we observe at adult stage… Knots are connected with the degree of stoop…

The research shows, that about 80% of all children, including school graduates have wrong poise…” Let us think: 80% of young people, entering upon life, possess defective epicenter of life and health – axis. And the same thing occurs all over the world.

And after all this we are surprised: why today from 2/3 to 4/5 untimely deaths of able-bodied people fall at cardiovascular system illnesses? Hereby we have established: with such education dysfunction of the cardiovascular system is detected with 26% of children only during the first year of studies. And after the primary period of studies – with 65% already. And finally, according to the data of the Children’s Health Research Center under the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (academician Baranov A.A., 1997) dysfunction of cardiovascular system among the senior pupils of elite Moscow schools is detected already in 90% of cases.

This is the pedagogical base for further human dying-out from cardiovascular system disorders. And it means that annually we handle bouquets of flowers to our kids tenderly for their… future cemeteries… But how we long for keeping our smart image, how we want to hide our heads into the sand from these merciless facts.

I’ll make a point of it. The tragic processes have touched upon schoolchildren’s spiritual and psychic sphere. Not me, but the Ministry of Education and the so-called Science of the Russian Federation in their official letter (no 220/11-12 dated 22.02.1999) brings the results of their everlasting reforms to the attention of the public: borderline mental disorders become apparent among 60-70% of kids after only one year of studying (?!). And there are 9-10 years of such mind-numbing years of studies ahead.

The research has established: under the conditions of static muscle strains there appears a syndrome of jamming-up, distortion, and decay of senses of images, utilized into memory, on the basis of which the inner spiritual figural imaginative world conceptualization is formed.

At such moments kids and teenagers feel unmotivated panic fear and aggression, and as a result, unmotivated dramatic acts. Many assassinators, the epidemic of which is growing in many of the so-called civilized countries, claim: at that moment something got jammed-up in my head. Here are a few examples of drawings from an international exhibition of children’s drawings.

It’s been determined that “stressogenic” visually small working distance turned out to be absolutely steady for each student during the whole academic year. It reflects evolutionary significant synthesis between the visual organ and a hand. The synthesis, due to which people acquire the ability to “fly” into the future “on the wings” of the creative imagination. That’s why one failed to get it through for 200 years of general education. As our researchers established its main reasons were that we pulled out gravitation support points out of corporal- axial balance, on the base of which a child was learning the ability to measure and dose the efforts constructing consciousness – actions. At the same time school actually walked off from the physiological ergonomic techniques of formation of the plastic handwriting, devoid of convulsive features — clams, steady sensible discourse, intentional reading, etc.

And only from the position of opening our eyes and perceiving the facts mentioned above (I repeat, the facts, not opinions,) one will be able to realize the tasks and objectives of replacement of the “book-sitting”, bone-motionless model of the so-called education, and actually cognition of life with dead letters, numbers, schemes, “cognition” of the virtual-abstract world for alternative models of education. The thing is on construction of the academic process in the regime of triune activity of body, senses and creative searching mind, corresponding to the nature of the developing child. In fact, it’s about adding the evolutionary- significant regime of corporal sensual system learning activity to the educational process, and as a consequence, long-term perfection of the body, soul, brain and its functions directed into the future.

Technologies and technological tools of their realization are protected with 44 patents for invention and ware models. The program is approved and recommended by Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation and got a sanitary and epidemiological certificate of the Russian Supervision Agency for Health and Consumer Rights (No. 77.99.95.3.T.000674.07.01). And, in spite of the fact that the program is mainly introduced due to enthusiasm of individualists, nevertheless, so far, more than 3,000 schools in Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia use different fragments of this program.

Long-term results give hope. The thing is that one managed to suppress the formation of known and habitual to us school pathological forms (scoliosis, myopia, nervous and mental disorders, cardiovascular disorders, etc.) in the process of education for the first time for the epoch of book-sitting general education.

Of course, this work demands mass initiatives of teachers and parents. But it particularly demands the state policy in correcting goals and objectives of all the system of education.

It’s known: Holy Scriptures begin with warning to the peoples of Adam and Eve civilization of the forthcoming threat of our destruction from the “cognition”. Genius I.V. Goethe tried to bring light to us, self-reliant and very clever in our own eyes, that for profanes the formula of destruction from “cognition” had remained the secret locked behind seven seals for millennia:

Yes, “know”!

–

Men call it so, but then

Who dares to call the child by its right name?

The few who have some part of it descried,

Yet fools enough to guard not their full hearts, revealing To riffraff both their insight and their feeling, Men have of old burned at the stake and crucified.

And at the same time, the evil one sings from the left shoulder, putting a tongue to us, self-reliant, and rubbing his hands: «No, the outcast hunchback with a curse on his brow

I will never be happy on earth»

(Notre-Dame de Paris)

And so far profound words by the great Swiss thinker-educator Ferriere have sounded like an alarm bell over us for the whole century:

‘”And they created school the way devil told them. The child loves nature, that’s why he was locked in the four walls. The child likes to realize that this work has some sense, that’s why everything was organized t in such a way that his activity would not bring him any use. He can’t stay motionless — he was made to stay immobile. He loves working with hands, and was taught to theories and ideas. He loves talking, and he was ordered to keep silence. He aims to understand— he was told to learn by heart. He would like to search for knowledge himself— he is given it ready for use.

…And then children learnt something they would have learnt under other conditions. They learnt to lie and pretend.

And what happened next. As devil wanted it, some people withered, became flabby and passive, lost any interest for life. They lost happiness and health. Love and Kindness disappeared. Thought became cool and dull, souls got stale hard, and hearts soured.

And school that the devil so skillfully imagined, went to pieces ”.

In conclusion let express gratitude to PACE management for the honor to deliver a speech at the session of the Committee for Science, Culture and

***

Education. I want to express gratitude on behalf of thousands of children to Sergey Mikhailovich Mironov, Head of Federation Council, leader of the party “Just Russia” for the constant attention to this problem, for that he was the first of the Russian political leaders who handed personally health developing educational technical products to children. And the special thanks to his Adviser, Chairman of the Russian Union for Healthy Development of Children, to a great friend and defender of our kids Anatoly Antonovich Korobeynikov and his deputies Berchun V.V. and Zaitsev V.I. And my obeisance to all the practicing teachers and directors of educational institutions, who have taken upon themselves the care of healthy harmonic development of children in the immediate academic process. I thank everyone present here for your attention.