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SPIRITUALLY-MORAL BASES OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING OF PUPILS
EDUCATION IN THE SPACE OF RUSSIAN CIVILIZATION A. L. Kazin
The modern world should be referred to not only as polycultural, but also as polycivilized. Civilization represents a uniformity of spiritual and material sides of human activities, while culture is mainly a secular form of spiritual life embodied in images and signs. The way of each civilization in history is unique, and destruction of any of them (military, political, economic, informational) would represent an unrecoverable loss.
Our country belongs to Eastern Christian Civilization, representing its special form known as Russian Orthodoxy. Russia adopted Christianity in the form of Orthodoxy which is not burdened with the features of Roman rational juridical consciousness. The Christian religious, moral and aesthetical energy in Russia in the form of conciliarism and truth has created a stable civilized core (faith and language), which became a center of concentration of outer shells of civilization (culture, nationhood and economy). As opposed to Europe, Russia did not create a humanistic "buffer" zone where a person would feel himself independent from God and the state, which is understood as a reflection of the truth on earth. It can be stated that Russian Orthodox civilization perceives transcendent as immanent, immanent as transcendent, verity as truth, divine as human and human as divine (sophian).
Spiritual, cultural and historical being of Russia is realized through a free choice of values rather than necessity and law. In terms of religious philosophy, representing a spiritual reality, Russia is placed between the world of creatures and uncreated plentitude (a saint and a robber are the key characters of our history and modernity). The attitudes to God, tsar and Motherland have been, in essence, the bearing structures of Russian Orthodox civilization throughout its existence, including the Communist and contemporary periods. Russian "communism" and "capitalism" represent, through their multi-faceted correlation, the diverse guises of a national "symphonic personality" (Olga - Oblomov - Shtoltz). Destruction of the root basics of Russian civilization (faith, the cult of joy and suffering, and the Nonpossessors Movement) will lead to break of its religious, moral and aesthetic structure and disintegration of the entire public and cultural order,
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which is big with the unforeseen geopolitical consequences for the global community.
The strategy of education and upbringing in Russia is to develop God's image in a human being, which, in fact, differs him from animals. Education in general and religious education in particular represent a school of life, where theory is inseparable from practice, faith from knowledge and victory from death and nonexistence. From birth to death man in Russia passes through a severe school of "being by truth", whether he wants that or not. All specific programs in pedagogy and andragogy in the space of Russian civilization should take into account the fact that life of this country will inexorably break any one-sided rationalistic schemes of "man making", be it the bourgeois positive or occult hedonistic or formally collectivistic schemes. As early as in the 1930s, a remarkable Orthodox philosopher and teacher, Father Vasily Zenkovsky showed that neither pedagogical naturalism (the idea of "natural man"), nor pedagogical pragmatism (the Americanized ideal of the "owner of being"), nor other educational strategies oriented towards a private human type would be "operational" for the process of upbringing and education in Russia. (See: V.V. Zenkovsky. Problemy Vospitaniya V Svete Khristianskoi Antropologii. - Moscow, 1996). The only practicable way of education and upbringing (I do not make a distinction between these concepts) of a person in Russia is to ensure that his willingness "to live the way God tells him, not the way he wants to" is developed in an integral and permanent way. It aims to make him know that life in Russia has always thrown and will throw him a curve, that it is based on a lofty joy of suffering, a joy of being God's son and a responsibility for His image in the world. In the current conditions of crisis of the world's and Russian civilization, this image undergoes the severest tests. The task to educate both a child and an adult in these conditions is to explain a person the essence and causes of the occurring events and, if possible, charge him with energy so that he is able to overcome their destructive aspects. This is the philosophical and culturological basis for the development of a person in the space of Russian Orthodox civilization, while the specific methods of its implementation should be dealt with by the relevant social institutes.
An indefeasible - or divine in the ordinary sense of the word - right of man is the right to choose between good and evil from the metaphysical, moral, aesthetic and social perspectives. Among many myths that EuroAtlantic culture is based on (liberal and humanistic, erotic, rationalistic, feministic, etc.), a legend of a child's behavior being a standard of human
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life behavior holds a special place these days. In essence, it is child who represents a socio-cultural ideal for a European grown-up, the more so when it comes to the US. Child is regarded as an irresponsible creature who lacks the will to life, mainly aspires to consume entertainments ("panhuman values") and to thank his mother, father or democratic power for them. In fact, this is the ideal type of man in postmodern society (as one Russian writer put it, a "sanatorium" civilization). The basis for the myth about a child-man was laid at the early stage of the bourgeois (hedonistic and sensualistic) era, in the Renaissance, when a pagan "goddess of reason" suggested J.J. Rousseau a tale about "a child of nature" who was depraved by large cities. At the same time, from his very conception, a human infant as such ("...was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me" [Psalm 51:5]) is ontologically implicated in the original sin. That is why sick and ugly children are born. Moreover, children who are quite healthy physically often bear the clear impress of a metaphysical fall. It is enough to recollect the hideously plump infants on some paintings of Baroque painters or, for instance, a pathetically fleshy (to put it in crude terms, overfed) child in arms of a woman in A. Tarkovsky's Mirror: a lethal sting of unenlightened flesh is emphasized in this piece by rooster's blood, whose head the child's mother asks to cut off. Another eloquent example comes from V. Nabokov's Luzhin Defense. The main character of the novel, who was, like the author, fond of entomology, recalls of his childhood as follows: "Having cried his fill, he [young Luzhin] played for a while with a beetle nervously moving its feelers, and then had quite a time crushing it beneath a stone as he tried to repeat the initial, juicy scrunch".
When I say all this about a child my intention is not to disparage him, but to understand the problem better. A child is not a demon, nor he is a "natural human being" as people often want to see him. Speaking metaphorically, a child is both a child of love and child of iniquity: he antinomically combines the sonship of God and the created Evil. Children enjoy beating and torturing their like, mock at others' weaknesses or simply play dirty tricks (that is, create evil for the sake of evil). But at the same time a child has something from an angel. This was observed by Heraclites who said that eternity is a child playing checkers. In his turn, F. Dostoevsky regarded children as guests from heaven, who "significantly differ from adult people; they seem to be different creatures of different nature" (remember the final episode of The Karamazov Brothers where children attending the funeral of a boy represent an image of the Children's Assembly of God's sons).
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It was only due to Christianity that the spiritual secret of man (both a child and adult) was revealed to people. According to the Orthodox doctrine, a child is certainly subject to original sin, but after all, this sin is neither chosen nor confirmed nor enhanced by him personally. This is probably the way we should understand the Savior's words that the Kingdom of God belongs to children: "whoever doesn't receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never get into it at all" (Luke 18:17). A child innocently and irresponsibly does impersonal good and impersonal evil. The task of Christian education is to teach him to gradually understand the difference between good and evil. A child has to learn to distinguish the spirits. This is the key aim of moral and aesthetical upbringing in Russian culture. The great interpreter of the human heart F.M. Dostoevsky brought his little characters through all the circles of suffering and joy. Remember his Christmas story A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree. A little person should not be frightened with fears or sanctified ("pedocracy", etc.). He should be carefully familiarized with the invisible spiritual powers that exist inside and around him, that is, helped to become a personality. A personality is a creature who can discern the cosmic top from bottom, right from left and good from evil. These are, in my opinion, the sources of the Orthodoxy-based moral and aesthetical educational strategy. And anyone who actively endeavors to entice "these little ones" from the path of virtue, that is, to turn the traditional values vertical of Russian culture ("a heavenly pleasure - bounty"), it would be better for him "if a large millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned at the bottom of the sea" (Matthew 18:6).
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