The Transition from the Child's Unconscious Life to the Self and Personality

Rozin VM*

D. Philosopher Sc., Professor, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

*Corresponding Author: Rozin VM, D. Philosopher Sc., Professor, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.

Received: August 12, 2024; Published: September 27, 2024

Citation: Rozin VM. “The Transition from the Child's Unconscious Life to the Self and Personality”. Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 8.10 (2024): 124-132.

Abstract

Childhood is not only an independent culture of life but also the beginning of a difficult transition from one life to another (from unconscious behavior to “I” and personality). In childhood, there are two main ways of mastering the world: play and the formation of the first socially significant practices (the ability to eat, drink, talk, dress, communicate with adults, help them, etc.), which can be considered as his “social body”. The meaning of the crisis of childhood, which is much talked about today, is, first of all, the crisis of our adult life. Modern man has created a life that destroys both himself and his children. Parents do not live together with their children; they hand them over to others for upbringing. Today, almost the main educator is the environment, a hedonistically oriented culture. We, adults, do not know how to live ourselves. Hence, childhood is a “transition to transitions” to uncertainty.

Keywords: Childhood, “I”; Personality; Formation; Development; Crisis; Parents; Independence

Stages of formation

Let us raise the question of the beginning of the formation of a child’s personality. A common point of view is that this beginning can be attributed to the crisis of three years, when the child begins to insist that he can do everything on his own, discovering the formula “I am myself”. “First of all, you need to figure out what is happening to the child. The root cause of a sharp change in the behavior of a child lies in his desire for independence - this is one of the most difficult stages of personality formation. If earlier the child was not aware of himself as a person and almost did not draw a line between himself, the world around him and his mother, accepting all this as a whole, now it is time to “break away” from the mother’s heart. After all, this is no longer the baby who smiles when his mother smiles and sits quietly while he is dressed. The child begins to become aware of his own “I” and one of the manifestations of this process is the study of the boundaries of what is allowed. At first glance, it seems that the child purposefully his parents off, but this is not the case. He simply explores what is possible and what is not and learns to manipulate his loved ones” [1].

True, Alexander Asmolov believes that personality in a child is initially, from birth, only it seems to be asleep for the time being, is in a kind of suspended animation; the personality wakes up and begins to act (perhaps precisely by the age of three) when the child encounters contradictions in activity. “The first active and conscious actions,” writes Asmolov, referring to A.N. Leontiev, are the beginning of personality. Its formation takes place in intense inner work, when a person as if constantly solves the problem of “what is to be in me”... The search for the “engine” that gives rise to the activity of the personality must be sought in those contradictions arising in the process of the flow of activities, which are the driving force of the development of the personality. Acting as a source of personality development, the socio-historical way of life, as it were, sets a scenario for the newborn person, drawing him into a certain order of actions. The rigidity of this order of action depends primarily on the extent to which the freedom of choice of certain types of activity varies in a particular socio-historical way of life” [2].

 

I would question all the basic provisions in these concepts (that a three-year-old child can act independently, that “I” and personality are one and the same, that at this age a personality wakes up or becomes a personality). And here’s why. Well, yes, the child insists that he can do everything on his own, but in reality, as we know, there is still very little. He is still aware of himself not as an autonomous personality, but together with his parents within the framework of the “pra-we” (L.S. Vygotsky), and the “I” is just a new position in this whole. It allows you to formulate desires and distinguish yourself from others, but not act independently. The child will begin to act independently only in adolescence, when he really begins to form a personality. Here it is worth listening, among other things, to V. Zenkovsky.

“Of course,” he writes, “a child always has a direct feeling of his ‘animateness’; The child directly feels himself as a living, active being, directly feels the pulse of life in himself. But such an immediate feeling does not mean that the child is “thinking” about himself, nor does it have any motive to “think” about himself, no interest in himself. The first motives to dwell on oneself, to go beyond the immediate sense of one’s personality, are given by the social environment. A child very early gets used to the fact that it has its own special name, early learns to “respond” to it, to turn its head, raise its eyes, and smile. Even further it gets used to certain actions in relation to itself – from the mother, the nanny, the people around him... Projective self-characterization, which we can otherwise call social self-consciousness, never disappears in us, but forms a stable and irremovable pole in our self-consciousness. And we, adults, constantly address ourselves as other people should address us. Who does not know such forms of addressing oneself when a person says to himself (as if someone else were saying to him): “Well, Pyotr Petrovich, it’s time for you to get to work” <... > These cases of discrepancy between the data of internal experience and its external evaluation take place more and more often (when children grow up, adults become less attentive to them), they are more and more often recognized by children, and, as they accumulate, the child finally comes to a purely subjective self-consciousness, to the consciousness of his desires, plans, feelings, and thoughts. Here the child becomes aware of his inner world, which is directly inaccessible to other people - he is aware, of course, is only partially aware, but still in the true sense he discovers himself for himself. At first, subjective self-consciousness is composed of comparatively small material, which is still opposed to other experiences. We will see that real interest in oneself matures very slowly and becomes quite definite only in the third period of childhood (adolescence), but, of course, as a new pole in self-consciousness, the inner world appears very early [3].

The second consideration is based on a certain analogy (of course, not the identity) of the processes of phylogenesis and ontogenesis. In culture, the “I” and the personality are formed no earlier than antiquity. Even Plato spoke of himself in the third person – “such a man”, in the first person leads the story of Lucius, the hero of Apuleius’ story “The Golden Ass”. “I was (recalls the hero of “Metamorphoses” who turned into a donkey. – V.R.) is more dead than alive from the weight of such a load, from the steepness of the high mountain and the length of the journey. At this point, though it was too late, it seriously occurred to me to turn to the help of the civil authorities, and, using the revered name of the Emperor, to free myself from so many misfortunes. At last, when we were already passing through a crowded village in the bright light of the sun, where there was a large crowd of people on the occasion of a market day, I tried in the midst of the crowd in the native language of the Greeks to invoke the name of the divine Caesar; but he cried out loudly and distinctly only “O,” and could not pronounce the rest of Caesar’s letters. The robbers did not like my wild scream, and they cut off my unfortunate skin in such a way that it was no longer even suitable for a sieve” [4].

In the same period, in late antiquity, the term “persona” (Latin for “personality”) appeared, which, as is known, had two main etymological meanings – “theatrical mask” and “owner of the right”. If we talk about the formation of ancient culture, then, for example, in the works of Homer, there are neither statements in the first person, nor the concept of personality itself. but the “husband”, who is represented by the multitude of suffering organs of the body, and not by the integrity of the personality. In particular, my former graduate student Ivan Manin shows that the Homeric husband does not represent a whole (subject or personality), he does not have a conscious or volitional organization. In the husband’s case, the individual organs. The bodily multiplicity in the works of Homer is overcome when the husband turns to the higher (gods), submits to them, and the higher helps to gather the person into the “self” (comes from the ancient Greek αὐτός “himself, he”), which already presupposes a holistic consciousness and will[5].

I also remember my experiences in childhood: in one short period of development, I suffered from a growing disease (“autometamorphopsia”), when individual organs (hands, feet, tongue) were perceived not only separately, by themselves, but also hypertrophied, of enormous size.

 Another consideration is inspired by the analysis of the phenomenon of multiple personality [6]. I show that Billy Milligan, representing such a personality, perceived his alternating “mental regimes” (rather than personalities) as independent persons (members of his family) living in him. At the same time, both he and psychologists tried to assemble these regimes into an integral personality. For a short time, it seemed that this had succeeded, but when faced with serious problems, Billy (or rather his psyche) again disintegrated into independent quasi-persons [7]. As a result, I come to the conclusion that integral subjectivity, defined as the “constitutive authority” in man, is preceded by a state of multiple subjectivity, not organized into unity. Unity in the history of culture presupposed the formation of a special psychic instance that took on the function of the whole and comprehension (giving the states of a person the status of reality), and, importantly, the comprehension of the socially significant [8]. If in culture the main role in the formation of the constitutive authority was played by certain social institutions, for example, education, then in ontogenesis it is, of course, the family and parents.

In early childhood, the name and “I” probably do not yet mean and are not perceived by the child as his personality, and do not even gather into a whole his individual organs and states. But the further it goes, the more the need arises. The latter is strongly dictated by the tasks that parents set for the child: to learn to speak, eat, dress, wash, use the toilet, play with other children, etc. Schemes play an important role in this process.

As I show in my works on the philosophy of childhood, a child learns the world and “thinks” in schemes [9]. The latter are semiotic formations that allow solving problems (problem situations), while the schemes set a new reality and allow you to understand what is happening, in addition, they open the way for new actions [10]. I will give one example from the book by K. Chukovsky “From Two to Five”.

“The train ran into a pig and cut it in half. The disaster was seen by a five-year-old summer resident Zorya Kotinskaya and shed many tears. A few days later, she came across a live pig.

“The pig is glued together!” Zorya shouted in delight”.

The expression “The pig is glued together” can be considered a scheme: it allows us to understand what Zorya saw: why the pig is intact, although it was cut. Zorya invented this scheme herself, but the knowledge that parts of a broken object can be glued together is empirical, experimental, obtained from observations.

 The formation of “I” was facilitated by other schemes: “Me (Masha, Petya, etc.), Mom and Dad”, “Me and Katya (Vanya, Natasha, etc.)”, “I have arms, legs, head, etc.”., “I walk, play, eat, sleep, wake up, etc”. On the one hand, these schemes explain for the child his vital activity, on the other hand, they have a common part – the “I”, which eventually turns into a “constitutive authority” that collects various states and organs of the child. The “I” as a schema also sets a new reality, which can be attributed to the early form of man’s self-consciousness. In fact, all this means the formation of the first type of man’s subjectivity in ontogenesis – his “I”. And since the child also likes the world of adults, and he strives there, invents and forms another scheme – “I myself”, which already operates within the framework of the constitutive authority.

The appearance of this schema is not at all evidence of the formation of the child’s personality, but evidence of the formation of his integrity as a subject of consciousness and action. When I. Kant introduces the idea of the “synthetic unity of apperception,” does he not mean something similar? “In fact,” writes Kant, “the manifold representations given in a certain intuition would not be all my representations together if they did not all belong together to one self-consciousness... in other words, it is only because I can comprehend the manifold [contents] of representations in one consciousness that I call them all my representations; otherwise I would have as variegated a diverse Self (Selbst) as I have the representations I am conscious of” [11].

There is one more condition for the formation of the “I” instance, namely, the delimitation of the realities of the child’s psyche, which initially exists syncretically, that is, the child perceives these realities simply as various unrelated states of his consciousness that belong to the world. Thus he confuses reality and dream, often taking dreams for phenomena that exist along with all others, or tries to take an apple drawn on an oilcloth, which I have observed several times in my children. And here is an equally eloquent example from my childhood.

“I was five or six years old. My mother worked day and night at an aircraft factory and only occasionally snatched a few hours to visit me and my brother in kindergarten. Almost always she brought something delicious: cocoa in a thermos, chocolate or something else. And so I stubbornly began to dream with my mother and delicious products in addition. It is understandable how upset I was when I woke up: there was no mother, no cocoa. Finally, in order not to be deceived and not to be upset in vain, I decided to check myself – to pinch my ear: if it hurts – I don’t sleep, if it doesn’t hurt – I sleep. And that same night I had a dream: my mother arrived, I pulled my ear, made sure that I was not sleeping, drank cocoa and then... Wake up. Then everything is clear. The power of grief firmly imprinted this dream in my memory” [12].

What did I understand when I remembered this dream? What I saw in my dream does not exist in reality, my mother in a dream, although she is my mother, but she is not there when I am asleep. Later, as a schoolboy, I realized that the logic of dream events is very different from the usual one: time is interrupted and jumps, themes and events replace each other without any meaning, dream people are often made up of several familiar faces. The events look unusual and strange [13].

Being already a young man and comprehending art, I came to similar patterns: in works of art there are events that are impossible to imagine in ordinary life, and their logic is sometimes no less strange than in dreams. If a dream comes to us by itself, without asking permission, then, for example, we are free to read a work of art or not. In addition, in order to understand it, you need to know the conventionality, the genre of this work, enter its reality, experience its events. Here, for example, is a fragment of a poem by K. Chukovsky:

The mice caught the cat,

They put it in a mousetrap.

Fish walking in the field

Toads fly across the sky,

And the chanterelles took matches,

We went to the blue sea,

The blue sea was set on fire...

In order to understand and correctly experience this poem, a child must, firstly, not try to identify artistic events with ordinary ones, secondly, nevertheless, imagine that, for example, can set fire to the sea, thirdly, immerse himself in a world where everything is opposite and unusual, fourthly, learn to get pleasure from traveling in such a world, and an important condition for all this is the development of artistic language and conventionality.

In general, it can be argued that a necessary condition for the formation of the “I” instance is the delimitation of such realities of the child’s psyche as dreams and wakefulness, ordinary life and art (possibly some others). Differentiation, as can be understood from the examples, simultaneously presupposes the establishment of relations between these realities, and in this sense acts as one of the conditions for their formation and assembly.

The further development of the child is greatly influenced by upbringing and education in the family or in kindergarten, and then at school.

The essence of preschool education and training

In this case, we will talk about the main trend associated with the creation of kindergartens and other children’s institutions, where parents send their children for upbringing and the first steps of education. As is known, the initiator here was the remarkable German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel, who formulated many ideas of scientific pedagogy [14]. If we proceed from our concept, then the first question here is this: after all, the educator is not a parent, how can he lead the child? Observations show that the way out of this situation was found, on the one hand, in the fact that the parents pass on to the educators (and teachers) a part of their attitude of “pra-we”, including the teacher in it and convincing the child that now you need to obey while you are in the kindergarten, not mom and dad, but Marya Ivanovna, and on the other hand, that a real teacher must earn the child’s trust (authority). Authority, as follows from the work of Hannah Arendt, presupposes not power and violence, and not rational arguments, but reliance on tradition and ideal content [15]. In this case, joining tradition can be understood as introducing the child to family values and history, as well as the values and history of his country, small homeland, people (of course, in a form accessible to children). religious stories, children’s books and cartoons with serious educational content, conversations and others. A better understanding of what it is is allowed by the memoirs of my teacher, G.P. Shchedrovitsky.

“If parents,” writes Shchedrovitsky, “do not ‘put’ the ideal content of their professional activity in communication, if they are simply thinking, then the child fixes the content of a completely different kind – communal, ordinary... In my life, it so happened – I don’t know, maybe my father and mother understood this, or maybe it happened by itself, it’s hard for me to say now – that this ideal content has always existed as real and has been more significant than the real. Perhaps the point is that there was still that culture of the old intelligentsia, where there were some, perhaps unfixed methods of presenting this content, laying it out – either at the expense of buying certain books, or at the expense of certain orders in the house” [16].

There was an ideal content in the author’s family, and this despite the fact that I practically did not see my parents: my mother worked from morning to evening, and my father was in the army; But they collected a wonderful library, and when they met, I saw the love and respect of my parents for each other. Today, when family traditions and the intelligentsia are being restored, but at the same time alienation is growing in the family, where children and adults live in different, non-intersecting worlds (parents work and serve their children, children go about their business, taking service for granted), Shchedrovitsky’s reflections on family education and laying out ideal content are more relevant than ever.

So, the educator and the educator can lead the child to the extent that their efforts are supported by the parents, and they themselves gradually gain trust and authority among the children. Now, the second question: what do the teacher and educator actually teach, what content do they pass on to the children? In terms of form and objectivity, as is known, such content can be very different depending on this or that concept and practice of preschool education and training (and there are quite a lot of them today). reading Hannah Arendt’s work “Crisis in Education” allows us to put forward a hypothesis that, in fact, in preschool institutions, the educator and the teacher help children to master the two main forms of life. One relates to non-play, labor, including educational, forms of life; it is the latter that children often observe in the adult world. The other, on the contrary, is a non-labor, so to speak, social or “political” form of life, where children learn to communicate with each other on an equal footing (less often, with adults) for the purpose of joint action in relation to one’s life. If in the working life the child must understand that there is someone who leads and one who is led, that work (study) requires attention and restrictions on one’s desires, involves the development of skills, and so on, then in the context of social life he acts as an independent person, where he is opposed by other children; Here you need to convince others, and at the same time you need their help, otherwise nothing new and interesting will happen. In the first area, the child becomes a subject of activity (labor and educational), in the second, the prerequisites for his formation (in the next culture) as a personality are formed.

Criticizing the American experience of education in the 1950s and 1960s, which ignores the first area of life and exaggerates the importance of children’s freedom and originality, Arendt writes the following. “It is precisely what should prepare a child for the adult world, the gradual adaptation to work and non-play activities, that is excluded for the sake of the originality of the children’s world... In this way, it is as if they deny that a child is a becoming person, that childhood is a temporary stage, a preparation for adulthood... But this can also mean that consciously or unconsciously the requirements presented by the world and the need for order in it are rejected, any responsibility for it is denied, both the responsibility to order in it and the responsibility to obey in it” [17]. And here is its characteristic of the second area of life. “Looking at things from this perspective (when it is believed that ‘all public affairs are governed by power and interest’), we learn nothing about the real content of political life—about the joy and satisfaction of being in the company of equals, of acting together and appearing in public, of being involved in the affairs of the world through words and deeds, thereby acquiring and maintaining one’s personal identity and starting something entirely new” [18].

In relation to children, we are talking about the formation of a “children’s society”, when the child understands that the “other” is equal to him in his desires and actions. The child learns to act collectively, to yield and direct, to discuss initiatives that concern his life, to implement his plans. At the same time, the educator must imperceptibly help the child, and often he himself takes the position of the “other”, free, and not the educator or teacher. For example, the teacher discusses with the children where they will go today, how they will spend the holiday, what gifts they will make to their friends or parents. It is important that everyone can express their opinion, so that it is no less significant than other opinions, so that there is a general discussion, so that then everyone implements their plans.

In her article, Arendt draws attention to another important point, namely, that the position of the educator and the teacher necessarily presupposes a double attitude – on the one hand, protective in relation to the child’s consciousness, on the other hand, his introduction to the changed world. “Since the child does not know the world, he must be gradually introduced to this world; Since it is new here, it is necessary to see to it that this new finds a place for itself in accordance with the world as it is, and is not crushed by its age. But in any case, educators appear before the young as representatives of the world and must be responsible for it, even if they did not create it and even if they secretly or openly would like it to be different. This responsibility is not imposed on educators on someone’s whim; It stems from the fact that every young generation born of adults finds itself in an already changed world. He who does not want to take responsibility for the world should not give birth to children and should not take part in their upbringing.

With our approach to parenting, Arendt concludes, we decide whether we love the world enough to take responsibility for it and at the same time save it from destruction, which without renewal, without the arrival of new and young, would be unstoppable. And we also decide whether we love our children enough not to throw them out of our world, not to snatch from their hands the chance to undertake something new and unexpected for us, but instead to prepare them for their mission – the renewal of our common world” [19].

 It is hardly possible to say better and more precisely, and let the reader not think that we are talking about very lofty and abstract things that are not directly related to the upbringing of children. Yes, the demands put forward by Arendt relate primarily to educators, teachers and parents, but do they not create conditions for childhood, for childhood itself on the part of an adult?

The end of childhood

Why childhood is reproduced and exists for a relatively long time. There are two main factors here: external and internal. On the one hand, it was adults and teachers who organized childhood, recognizing children’s inner world, originality, and patterns of development. Plus the phenomenon of «pra-we», which also creates quite harsh conditions for children’s life and development. Adults support this organization and conditions until they believe that it is time for an independent life. As a rule, this time coincides with the beginning of school, where children begin to be required to behave independently. As a result, new conditions are formed for the formation of personality. It is the beginning of the formation of personality that marks the end of childhood.

On the other hand, the child’s life and development within the framework of the organization and conditions set by adults contributes to quite definite features of the child’s existence (reliance on the adult, the meaning of reality, thinking in schemes, mastering the world of adults with the help of play and other semiotics). These features are characteristic of the entire period of childhood. However, the child’s life activity throughout childhood is constantly becoming more complicated (first he masters the meanings of words, then relationships with people – adults and children – then learns to create schemes and play, expands the zone of freedom and at the same time grasps the basic “rules of the game” that govern life, etc.). Moving on to independent behavior, the child quickly becomes convinced that the skills and abilities developed during childhood no longer work, that it is necessary to rebuild. In other words, childhood is gone.

 The end of childhood is the period of personality formation, when a teenager first performs real independent actions. Actions are different, not always understandable, from the point of view of our further development. I’ll start with myself (first case).

I remember very well how my personality cut through, if it was a personality, of course. It was September 1, after the summer holidays. I came to the fourth grade and it was as if I woke up. It was from that time that I perceived myself, looked closely at myself, observed myself. The sense of personality was so unusual that I remembered my state and experiences well. It seemed to me that everything that had happened before was going into complete darkness. Only a few paintings were scattered in this dark past.

A completely different thing begins from the fourth grade. I am discovering myself, it seems to me that now I remember myself continuously, although this, of course, what I realized later, was an illusion. Thinking about why this happened, I found the reason, on the one hand, in reading books, it was by this time that I began to read quite confidently and a lot, on the other hand, in the fact that I went to school, and I was alone at home all the time (my father was in the army, and my mother disappeared at work). Books gave a form of self-awareness, and independent life at school and at home forced me to rebuild. I could no longer count on the help of my mother or teacher, as before, I had to rely on myself. Books have suggested how to do this – to look at yourself from the outside, to see yourself, to characterize your Self.

In general, by this time (fifth – sixth grade) I was completely immersed in books. Artistic events interested me much more than the surrounding poor post-war life. In those years, there were no TVs and players, almost no toys either. We lived in a huge house of the Sherst-Sukno factory with a corridor system. At one end of the corridor there was a public kitchen, where I once watched a fantastic dance of fat rats for two minutes, at the other end of the corridor there were two communal toilets.

There were only two Jewish families in the house. AntiSemitism flourished among both adults and their children. My brother and I had to defend our independence with the help of our fists more than once, I remember, for example, how we stood in the yard surrounded by our peers spitting at us. All this also did not stimulate the desire to live with ordinary events, as soon as the opportunity arose, I tried to dive into the world of books, where noble ladies, gentlemen and villains walked, passions boiled, heroes suffered and reflected on life. When the occasion did not come out, I tried to create it myself, reading even at night under the covers, including a flashlight, and carefully turning the pages so as not to wake my mother.

Naturally, with such a way of life, I did not have time to prepare my homework. Every day I was afraid to see if the teacher would call me. But sooner or later my name was pronounced. As a result, I neglected my studies so much that I was already afraid to go to school. For about two weeks or more, I went to the subway instead of school. The question is, was it an act or not? Behind the Elektrozavodskaya station, I found several badly torn tickets in the trash cans, and, holding the torn edge with my fingers, I walked past the control. In the subway, I found a free bench and sat on it, swallowing another book. At the appointed time, as if nothing had happened, I returned home. This would have gone on for who knows how long if someone from the class had not seen me in the subway and told the class teacher about it. I apologized for everything, promised to catch up with my studies and only asked not to tell my mother. She learned about this story just a few years ago from me.

About this time I read Oblomov and was shocked. For some reason, I decided that I was an exact copy of Ilya Ilyich, in particular, I was as weak-willed as the latter, since I could not sit down to my lessons or clean up my room for the sake of a book. I was really frightened, the prospect of overgrowth of the scab and the death of a living soul, brilliantly depicted by Goncharov, clearly appeared before me. I decided to save myself, to cultivate my will. He began with a simple task - he tried not to say a word for two days. The next task was more difficult, then even more difficult. So I went on the warpath with myself. Here, without a doubt, there was already an act. Along the way, I suffered more failures than victories, but still did not stop fighting for many years. Gradually, my efforts, surprisingly, began to bear fruit, and by the ninth grade I had already become a completely organized young man. By this time, the family had moved to the city of Anapa, which also contributed to the improvement of my personality.

Looking back from afar, I think that, strange as it may seem, not only the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, which my mother and father collected with love, played a big role in the formation of my personality, but also the general disorder of life at that time, which led to the fact that I lived as if without parents. I either had to disappear, as it happened to many of my peers, or become a person capable of independent behavior and comprehension of reality. For some reason, the latter happened. I began to work on myself and continue to do so to this day.

The problem of moral education of children in the situation of transition and crisis of culture

Modern Russian parents are the products of an upbringing characteristic of the 20^th century, about which Zenkovsky was so worried, drawing attention to its ideological nature and lack of spirituality. At the same time, it was in the correct upbringing that Zenkovsky saw a way out of the situation that had developed in the 20s of the last century. “Look at what is being done even now in all corners of Russia: you will find everywhere a number of active figures, animated by social ideals, who are overburdened with work, who are overwhelmed by the mass of work entrusted to them. And behind them there is a whole mass of “philistines” who only know how to use the results of someone else’s work, perhaps not averse to criticizing it, but they will not lift a finger to help. The weak development of social initiative is all the more striking in our country because life has now become unbearably hard. Food, housing, and financial crises crush all of us, and despite all this, the same people still appear in the arena of public work... In Russia, under the former conditions of social life, when any sincere and honest service to the public good was severely persecuted, the type of socially indifferent and socially inert person was naturally put forward by life itself and historically fixed. To these purely Russian conditions, which favoured all our Oblomovs, must be added a factor which is exerting its effect everywhere, namely, the influence of the economic individualism of our epoch. <… >

It would be more correct to say that the modern school does not teach anti-social habits, but that it fosters bad sociality. Competition, envy, vanity, etc., are also social feelings, which have their root, their meaning only in the social environment, but these feelings do not bring people together, but move them apart. <… >

Oh, how few people are now lacking in elementary social virtues! How few people are able to subordinate their personal, party, and class interests to the common good! A rich country, full of young, unused forces, freed from all external fetters, having the full possibility of free self-determination, vaguely aware of all its infinite strength – Russia is approaching catastrophe from day to day, torn apart from within by socially contradictory currents. Let parents and schools save their children from terrible corruption from the terrible corruption that poisoned life brings with it, and let them prepare in children love for the common good, the capacity for social rapprochement, the basic social virtues, a living desire for solidarity, a genuine, and not merely verbal, love for brotherhood! In contrast to all the terrible facts of mutual anger, mutual distrust and hatred, let them awaken in children’s souls a living love for man as such, social responsiveness, a sense of civic duty, honest fulfillment of one’s duty, a loving attitude to one’s work and a sincere desire to contribute to the common good!” [20].

Unfortunately, almost all of the above can be attributed to modern Russia. And the catastrophe, indeed, covered our country in the twentieth century with a tsunami of repression and cultural savagery. But today, new problems have been added to the situation so accurately indicated by Zenkovsky. Nevertheless, life does not stop and it needs to be resumed in the right direction. What can be said in the conclusion about upbringing, bearing in mind childhood?

It is worth noting that at present there are a lot of forms and types of upbringing and education: upbringing focused on technical culture, on humanitarian, artistic, religious, esoteric, with a national bias, military, sports, etc. True, it is partly in contradiction with some of the tasks of childhood; For example, how often do we hear that a child began to play music or sports very early and did not have a childhood. But I think that the above stages and means characteristic of childhood will also be preserved. In any case, the child must master the language, learn to build relationships with adults and children, develop in the direction of adolescence (i.e. be ready to transform into a personality), and it is unlikely that more effective means will be invented than a game, a fairy tale or schemes (although who knows, but even if they are invented, then, as history shows, nothing in culture disappears forever).

Sometimes you hear: “I had a happy childhood”. What does that mean? Isn’t it that the parents understood the child, supported him, loved him, and at the same time guided him correctly, which allowed him to become a full-fledged personality and a moral person? Here, of course, someone may object and say: everything is true, except for the “moral man”, and what this means today is completely unclear. I agree that it is incomprehensible, but I will not accept the statement that it is possible to raise a child correctly, ignoring moral and spiritual values. True, how to understand the latter, and moral education itself, if we remember that the essence of childhood relationships is largely related to «pra-we»? Is it possible to raise your child morally if these values and categories are empty and mean nothing to the parents themselves? And today, unfortunately, not so many people live according to moral values and categories.

There is only one way out: to educate both your child and yourself morally, not to assume that we always know how to behave correctly in modern complex contradictory situations, to think them through, to look for solutions. At present, a parent or a teacher must reconcile himself to the idea that he does not know how to educate correctly and does not know what this “right” itself means. His task is to comprehend what the right upbringing is and whether he himself was raised correctly. And not just to state the current situation, but to work to resolve it so that the childhood of our children is really happy.

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