Pedagogy of Light
1. A Child Is God
A child is God. We live for the child. And the child lives in order to live. Our task is to make sure the child lives, to help them get on their feet, to help them be themselves.
A child is an independent person with their own wishes, needs, inclinations, views, feelings, and inner world.
A child is inviolable. For the child, they themselves are at the center. That is why we must live and work for the child, not for what is convenient for an adult, what an adult would like, or what someone has said ought to be done.
We must love the child. Their opinion must matter. Their feelings matter.
A child's needs and wishes must be respected not as we adults understand them, but as the child sees and experiences them. We must constantly ask ourselves: “How can we make things good for the child, not for me, not for the adult?”
We must help develop the qualities a child already has, their abilities, interests, inclinations, and their own personality, rather than remaking them into the person an adult would like them to be.
When decisions concerning a child are made, the child's opinion must be taken into account. Conversations with the child are encouraged: to learn what they think about a particular issue, what they want, how they want to live their life, and who they want to be.
A child is not a slave, not an obedient creature, and not material from which an adult has the right to mold whatever they please. The authoritarian formula “shut up and do what you're told” is unacceptable. Forcing a small human being to obey another person's orders is nothing less than violence against God.
2. The Inner World Is More Important Than Knowledge
What matters most is the light within the child: that the child's eyes light up.
The most important thing for a child is to be loved, to be needed by someone, to be understood by someone, and to have people nearby whom they can come to, talk to, and share things with. Relationships with parents, friends, other children, and personal relationships are the foundation of personality.
Being unwanted is one of the great scourges of human life. Being unwanted by other children and adults can paralyze a child's inner life, cripple their soul, and bring them to a point where they no longer know how to live or no longer want to live. That is why the first task of schools and teachers is to help build children's inner worlds: to help them find friends, understand their feelings, express themselves, and understand themselves and other people. Only then can we talk about books, history, culture, the natural sciences, and everything else. Adults should ask: “What is in the child's heart? Are they hurting? Are they lonely? Do they have friends? Do they feel that someone needs them? Are they free? Can they stand up for their own opinion?”
School should be about children, not reports about children!
3. Learning Through Experience, Interest, and Living It
Knowledge should enter a person's world through lived experience: through interest, play, curiosity, competition, and interaction with others. A child should not only hear or read something. They should see, try, do, investigate, compare, discuss, build with their own hands, play, check — in a word, live it. We wholeheartedly encourage doing things together, riddles, unsolved problems, questions that do not yet have ready-made answers, games, research, experiments, and making things with one's own hands.
We need to give children interesting lessons. Knowledge should not be stuffed into a person's head. Through threats, humiliation, and shouting, knowledge does not become part of a person. It goes in only to come straight back out as soon as possible.
Interest is one of the main paths to learning. A child should have the opportunity to explore the real world, not merely repeat ready-made formulas after an adult. We should help a child see, observe, ask questions, look for answers, doubt, and draw conclusions — to develop independent thinking.
4. Grades Are Not the Goal of Education
There should be no grades in learning! Not just at school — in any kind of learning. A grade too often becomes a mechanism for controlling a child and a way to force them to do something that has not become interesting to them.
The way a child is treated must not depend on their academic success. A person does not become better because of an A or worse because of an F. Grades have nothing to do with a child's happiness. But they can become a source of stress, humiliation, fear, and psychological trauma.
The educational project I created is called “F”. I gave it this name to draw the attention of parents, educators, and all adults to the fact that grading — and treating a child on the basis of their success at school — leads to suicide among young people and has an oppressive, stressful, negative effect on the psyche.
We must not divide children into good and bad depending on how successfully they complete tasks given to them by adults. We need to create not a system for evaluating the child, but a system of support, motivation, and encouragement for development. A child comes to us not so that we can measure them and tell them their place among others, but for light, freedom, and love.
5. Violence Against and Humiliation of a Child Are Unacceptable
Physical punishment is categorically unacceptable.
Humiliating ways of treating a child are categorically unacceptable. You must not shout at a child. You must not take your frustrations out on them. You must not humiliate them, intimidate them, break their will, or treat them as though they were a slave or an obedient creature required to carry out an adult's orders without question. A child has a voice of their own. Adults have no right to take children's voices away from them.
Psychological and emotional violence against children and adolescents is violence too. It can take the form of shouting and intimidation: “Shut up and do what you're told”; insults and humiliation: “You're stupid”; threats of losing love and affection: “If you behave like that, I won't love you”; dismissing feelings: “Stop crying”, “What problems could you possibly have?”; making a child feel unwanted: “You're nothing but trouble”; imposing guilt: “We do everything for you, and this is how you repay us”; humiliating comparisons with others: “Look at your sister — she's a normal child. What about you?”; ignoring as punishment: “You don't exist for me right now”; suppressing a child's own opinion and will: “Nobody asked for your opinion”, “As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say”; intruding into private life: “You don't get to have secrets from me”; mocking fears, appearance, feelings, or personal relationships: “What love? At your age?”; public humiliation: “Everyone look — once again you're the only one who did nothing.”
Violence cannot be justified as part of upbringing. Humiliation cannot be justified as concern for a child's future. Shouting cannot be justified by saying that the adult is tired. Coercion cannot be justified by saying “it's for your own good.” If a conflict arises between a child and an adult, the adult's task is not to suppress the child, but to try to understand what is happening, talk to them, listen to them, and find a solution that respects the child as a human being.
A child is a human being. They want to be happy. They want to be understood. They want to be loved. They want to have friends, to have the right to their own opinion, the right to feel, the right to want, the right to make mistakes, and the right to be themselves. A child is not a slave. A child is our happiness and our light. And we must do everything we can to make sure things go well for the child!