Education either forms a Person
or prepares him for submission.
This is the essence
of the main school secret.
In the previous article, we clearly formulated for the first time: upbringing is not a service and not a function, rather a path leading to the formation of the Human Being as the central goal of civilization. Not a citizen, not a specialist, not an adapted cog in the system, rather precisely a Human — thinking, feeling, capable not only of surviving but of transforming the world. Yet the path to the Human lies through school — that very space which today seems both entirely familiar and profoundly mysterious. We have grown accustomed to perceiving school as something ordinary and inevitable, NOT NOTICING that it is precisely there that the basic firmware of thinking, behavior, language, will — and therefore the fate of an entire generation — is laid down. School teaches not what is in the textbook, rather how the world is arranged. And if school silently transmits meaninglessness, overload, fragmentation, and fear — it reproduces a meaningless, overloaded, fragmented, and frightened society. In this article, we LIFT THE VEIL over eight school secrets — the hidden knots in which the roots of the problem and the possibilities of its resolution intertwine. Behind every paradox of school reality lies a question about the Mind: how it develops, how it is suppressed, how it is protected, how it becomes an empty shell. For the true struggle for the future begins not with rallies and decrees, rather with WHO AND WHAT teaches children. Not for exams, not for ratings, rather for life — for the formation of a new Human Being. The secret of upbringing is that it is NOT SOLVED by reforms. It is solved by awakening. And therefore, the time has come to look deeper — to that place where school ceases to be a building and becomes a reflection of the very fate of humanity.
We are living in a turning point in time, when the familiar course of history no longer works. The old way of human existence — in which people lived as executors of someone else’s will, as cogs in predetermined mechanisms — has exhausted itself. This type of civilization has NO FUTURE anymore. It is not merely cracking at the seams — it has lost the very possibility of further meaningful development. What is happening in the world today — at the level of states, international conflicts, economic and social crises — is, in essence, not a movement forward. It is a convulsion, an attempt to hold onto the past. Attempts to preserve the old order, built on violence, suppression, and social parasitism, made by a narrow minority that until recently possessed real power. However, the previous system of governance NO LONGER EXISTS. The program by which this world lived for centuries has been stopped. And therefore, any effort to “save” the old order is doomed — it has no foundation to stand on.
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of people continue living inside these collapsed structures by inertia. They still participate in rules and processes that WERE CREATED for them, but no longer serve their development or their protection. And the clearer this bankruptcy becomes, the more inner tension grows. People feel ever more acutely the injustice of the imposed structure of society, and react ever more painfully to the increasing pressure from the state and institutions of power. This pressure increasingly takes forms that disguise themselves as “normal,” yet are in essence varieties of violence: financial, administrative, demographic, and ideological. When control replaces care, and governance turns into suppression, SOCIETY ENTERS a state of hidden conflict. This is precisely the conflict in which the world now lives — between the departing minority trying to preserve power at any cost, and the majority that is NO LONGER WILLING to remain an object. In these conditions, the question of education, of school, of the upbringing of the Human Being becomes not a private matter, rather a fateful one. Because the old world is collapsing not only externally — it must BE OVERCOME within the person himself. And if school continues to reproduce performers rather than form free, thoughtful, morally resilient human beings, then no reforms will save either society or the state. It is precisely here, in school, that the question is decided: whether the future will exist at all — and if it does, what kind it will be.
Imagine school not as an institution, but as a civilizational workshop in which children are formed into Human Beings — citizens, defenders, creators, mothers, thinkers, bearers of culture. This is not an abstract metaphor. School is the place where the most difficult and most responsible production on Earth takes place: the FORMATION OF A COUNTRY’S HUMAN CAPITAL. And if in the past a graduate received a certificate of maturity, it was not because he had mastered the curriculum, it was because he stood on the threshold of independent life, entrusted with the right to be an adult. However, today — we feel it — something is broken. Maturity has been replaced by “success,” preparation for life has been replaced by preparation for an exam, inner awareness — by a list of topics to be memorized. Society senses this substitution so sharply that the Minister of Education consistently occupies the position of the WORST MINISTER in public rankings. No one defends him — neither in words nor in deeds. Why? Because the essential thing has been lost: a clear and meaningful HUMAN PROJECT. Yet school is the foundation of the future, even more important than defense or the economy, because it shapes the one who will defend and build. And if in the army a soldier is taught to defeat the enemy, then in school a Human Being must be taught to overcome fear, ignorance, cruelty, and emptiness within himself. Today however, the entire school system has undergone a prolonged, painful, and scarcely meaningful reformation. These are not merely reforms — this is a CHANGE OF THE CODE by which the future is formed. Who is rewriting this code? Who decided what a school graduate should be ten years from now? Who are these invisible futurists confidently replacing some subjects with others, introducing new content, discarding the old without explaining to anyone: why? Parents remain silent in confusion, teachers — in exhaustion, children — in fear. School has become a site of an IDEOLOGICAL STORM, where the figures of former heroes, writers, and thinkers disappear as if they had never existed. We understand: this is a struggle for minds. However, a struggle for minds without explaining the goal is not upbringing — it is formatting. Something mysterious and strategic is happening in school. What, then, is truly going on?
First secret — What is the intended “project” of the school graduate, and for what purposes are the reforms being carried out? What do those who “design” the reform want the graduate to become? What kind of world do they foresee — and to what reality are they adjusting education? For if we follow the reformers’ logic, they must possess an extraordinary gift of foresight to assert WHICH KNOWLEDGE a child will need in adult life, and which he will not. Then let them explain to parents what and why their children are being taught. And since no one explains anything — everything resembles not education rather a special-operation. Thus emerges the first systemic anomaly: totalitarian control over the student under the guise of the Unified State Exam. Its form is not merely a test of knowledge — it is a ritual of fear through which every child, every parent, every teacher must pass: metal detectors, searches, passports, signal jammers, special guards. The atmosphere of the exam is LIKE AN OPERATION for identifying “enemies of the people.” What exactly are we testing? And whom are we cultivating? The structure of the program grows ever tighter and denser, as if the child is being prepared not for life on Earth rather for a flight to Mars; the mastery requirements — as if he were a starship pilot whose mistake could cost the crew their lives; the workload — monstrous; the pace — inhuman. And the central question never answered: FOR WHAT? Where is the future these reforms supposedly lead toward? Where is the model of a world that needs such a graduate? Why so much knowledge yet so little meaning? Why so much fear and so little freedom? Why, instead of a Human Being, do we get an examinable object incapable of living, feeling, deciding, loving, dreaming, caring? There is only one answer: SCHOOL HAS LOST its purpose. Yet it has not disappeared — and therefore we still have the chance to restore its essence: to make it a place where not an executor is born, rather a Human Being.
Second secret — what do textbooks actually give in forming a citizen? We are used to thinking that school textbooks are collections of verified knowledge, that biology, physics, history, and literature are unshakable foundations, like slabs in the foundation of human culture. 
However, once we look closer, we discover a STRANGE PATTERN: every decade, school “truth” quietly retreats, and a new one takes its place. We change content — without explaining why. Authors, names, emphases shift. It seems like mere updating. Yet what if it is not updating, rather a re- programming of the future? Today, physics is presented as a strict, solid science — like granite — yet at its core lies the STANDARD MODEL, which is still being feverishly patched and defended from internal contradictions. The Higgs boson, antimatter, dark energy — all this is less a foundation than a collection of guesses. Scientists themselves admit: “We do not understand 80% of the matter in the Universe, so we call it dark matter.” The same in biology — scientists cannot find the “missing links” of evolution, yet schoolchildren are still taught Darwinism as an UNQUESTIONABLE FOUNDATION. And yet, sitting at school desks are not museum exhibits, they are children of the future — those who will live in a world where biology merges with physics, and where humans may coexist with cyborgs. Philology does not explain why obscenity invades speech, and literature does not explain why some writers are canonized and others vanish. History is rewritten according to political temperature: Blücher, Stalin, Beria, Gorbachev and many others disappear, new figures occupy the pages until they, too, ARE DESTINED to disappear. We raise children in this system — as if we ourselves do not believe in its longevity. Education operates under a paradox: it presents the temporary as eternal. We still teach children from books that FALL BEHIND reality. Biology, history, physics — they have long changed, yet their new versions have not entered school programs. The student is asked to believe in the textbook as in a dogma, even though the world has long escaped its limits. If today we tried to apply school knowledge from the 1950s, we would realize — it is useless. And this is not a reproach to that era; it is a reminder: education that does not renew the spirit becomes a beautiful mummy.
Third secret — how do the authors of school programs imagine the future of school graduates? School must NOT BE AN ARCHAIC storage of knowledge, rather an intuitive guide into what has not yet arrived. It must not prepare children for the past, rather train them to PERCEIVE NOVELTY. Yet who today would dare claim to know what the world will be like in 10-20 years? Nevertheless, this is exactly what the school system pretends to do, designing textbooks as if the future were already known. However, if the future is unknown — are we preparing children for reality, or are we programming them for mistakes?
My generation lived through the scientific and technological revolution. We were born into a world of loudspeakers and teletypes, and arrived in the digital universe. But even that is already yesterday. Today’s schoolchildren live in a parallel layer of reality where information is a habitat. The smartphone is their organ of perception, and instant connection is part of their being. They already live in a future that school has not yet touched. Their thinking is nonlinear, their memory — cloud-based, their perception — fragmented and multidimensional. They DO NOT WAIT for explanations — they find answers faster than the questions arise. And yet we confine them to subjects that describe the world of yesterday. We teach them what will soon become use(less). We do not give them the tools to adapt to the fundamental transformations ahead — and these transformations will be the law of the coming decades. Their lives will be lives of transitions, hybrids, the collapse of the familiar and the birth of the impossible. They WILL REMEMBER their childhood as a previous era — just as I remember mine. And if today we do not instill in them READINESS FOR CHANGE, then no program, no textbook will save them. They need not just “knowledge,” rather resilience to the unpredictable. They need not memorized content, instead, understanding. Not dead repetition, rather a living ability to discern, to feel, to create, to reinterpret. This is why they must not be trained like animals; they must be loved. Not forced, rather inspired. Not programmed, rather accompanied. Because they are THE BRIDGE between what does not yet exist and what we cannot yet imagine. And if we want this bridge not to collapse, we must change the very way we think about school.
Fourth secret — the vast transformation of life and of people. The threshold of change: people as both object and subject of the new world. We stand at a limit. The world is changing not gradually, rather in leaps — in the mode of a quantum jump — and with it the image of the People changes as well. The one who yesterday was the crown of creation today becomes raw material for technical modification. We are entering the era of transhumanism — not as a utopia, rather as a cold technological reality. Once the Human was made IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, and today he is offered “improvement” — like software or biomechanical hardware. Supporters speak of “liberation from biological chains,” of conquering aging, disease, fatigue. 
Opponents speak of the destruction of human essence, of replacing Spirit with mechanism. And while philosophers argue, children enter a life where the human being is NO LONGER A VALUE IN HIMSELF, rather a project for redesign. Where the conversation is not about educating a personality, it is about creating a carrier of functions. Where the avatar is no longer science fiction rather a technological plan: extend the work of the brain, replace the body, abolish pensions as an outdated relic. Yet the problem is not even these plans — they may be inevitable. The problem is the silence. That NO ONE HAS ASKED these children whether they want to become a link in a bioengineering race.
No one has explained to them the difference between improvement and the abolition of the human. Between renewal and the rejection of nature there is a boundary — and it has not yet been named in words. We already live inside a new system. All our actions are recorded: streets, transport, shops, schools — all under the gaze of cameras, sensors, algorithms. Every step, every word, every purchase becomes a line in a data bank. We have entered the age of transparency, where a person, without realizing it, has already become open code. However, that is not the main thing. The main thing is that we DID NOT NOTICE how our inner life changed. We did not understand how we ourselves became different. And — what is more frightening — how different our children have become. They already belong to another world, a world that is not regulated by programs, decrees, or methodological manuals. THEY ARE PIONEERS in a world that does not yet exist, yet will inevitably arrive. And when it arrives — it is they who will decide whether this path becomes the elevation of the Human Being or his final loss. Yet will they be able to distinguish these two paths if we do not give them the instrument of discernment?
Fifth secret — the new psyche of a new generation, while school remains the same. The psyche of children changes at the same speed as the world transforms its landscapes. Every decade brings a NEW PICTURE of perception, a new type of thinking, a new emotional architecture. We no longer recognize ourselves in our children — and this is not a generation gap; it is a shift in the civilizational structure. Today’s child is not a slowed-down version of an adult, rather a being with a fundamentally different perception. His attention is fragmented yet hypersensitive. His thinking is nonlinear, instantly switchable. His memory is cloud-based, visual, distributed across devices. His handwriting is scribbles, yet in interfaces he moves like a fish in water. Psychomotor skills, speech, reactions — everything signals the birth of a NEW FORMAT of consciousness. They do not read Dostoevsky, instead they brilliantly deconstruct memes. They feel no tragedy in “Mumu,” yet they INSTANTLY RECOGNIZE hidden aggression on a stranger’s face. They do not blush at eroticism, they grow cold at violence — because violence is no longer fictional, it is a visual, lived experience. They do not believe adults — because adults do not protect. Their teachers are not examples; they are service personnel of a system. Their heroes are not the ones appointed; they are the ones who managed to survive the chaos. Their school is not a temple of knowledge; it is a quest for survival within a system they sense as artificial. But then — why does school continue teaching as if it were the 19th century? Why does it ignore the real anthropological mutation already being produced by technology, environment, and society? The key question — why do children learn life OUTSIDE SCHOOL, while school continues teaching them a life that will no longer exist?
Sixth secret — what is the true, positive influence of school on a child. One can speak endlessly and critically about school — especially about those who write programs and compile textbooks. Yet despite all this, at the heart of school THERE IS SOMETHING precious — an invisible yet unremovable order. School remains one of the rare spaces where a child’s higher mental functions unfold, functions that do not develop on their own in everyday life. It is a mistake to think that school is a warehouse of knowledge into which children must stuff as many “subjects” as possible. In reality, school disciplines are only TRAINING APPARATUSES. Mathematics, history, literature, chemistry — all of these are exercises, weights, resistances needed to strengthen thinking, memory, attention, speech, and will. School is not only a house of knowledge; it is an intellectual gym. Every dictation, every problem, every text — is like a dumbbell or a horizontal bar. And the goal is not to remember all of this forever, rather to DEVELOP ONESELF. Paradoxically, the main thing a graduate takes from school is not “subject knowledge,” it is internal tools: the ability to think, to concentrate, to understand the complex. This is the foundation on which he will build his professional destiny, master science, and acquire any specialty. Knowledge fades — while the capacity to know remains.
Seventh secret — what constitutes the negative impact of school on children. The workload, presented as a “norm,” has long CROSSED THE LINE of the reasonable. We see children who bend every morning under the weight of their backpacks. Textbooks have not become fewer, but more, despite endless conversations about “lightening” them. Even for a single subject, there are six different books. The child is NO LONGER A STUDENT — he is a porter of his own educational burden. It is not the volume of knowledge that matters. Do the program authors seriously believe that a fifth-grader needs to study “The Theory of Language” — a subject that philology students only begin to understand in their third year? We DID NOT NOTICE how simplicity and clarity were expelled from school. And with them, understanding disappeared as well. Textbooks have become unreadable, overloaded, artificially complicated. And the children are not becoming “dumber” — they simply CANNOT absorb what was not written for them. School-level Russian has become more difficult than English. Sadly, the fact stands: graduates today write twice as illiterately as those 15 years ago. Yet we continue to introduce “reforms,” forgetting that language and meaning are what form the soul and consciousness of a child, and NOT A REPORT for the ministry. 
School violates the physiological and psychological boundaries of childhood. A child studies six days a week, sits through seven lessons, and then does three hours of homework — every single day. Where is rest, where is real communication, where is play? Who protects children from this hyper-exploitation? Adults have unions — and children have who? Parents? Yet they are the very ones completing much of the homework themselves: cutting, gluing, drawing until midnight. And during all this — silence. Ministries and academies behave as if deaf. They DO NOT HEAR — neither about children falling into depression, nor about teenagers who leave this world from the height of twenty floors. Why? Because they no longer see meaning. They NO LONGER SEE a future. They do not have time to live. They are “trained” as if for war, as if preparing for a special operation rather than for life. And yet everything could be different. And in the past, it was different. In the 1970s, after school there was time for household chores, for books, for sports. The child was protected. His mind, body, and psyche developed in balance. Today — everything is different. Doctors have been replaced by voice robots. Books — by social media. Teachers lose to the “collective educator” of the internet, cinema, and mobile apps. Children are increasingly shaped by images in which success is associated not with a cosmonaut rather with a criminal. Not with a scientist rather with an influencer.1 And this too is “pedagogy,” but no longer state pedagogy. The question is not only about the education system. It is about the human being and the meaning of his becoming — about whom we raise, whom we protect, and whom we lose. And about what the School of the Future MUST BE. That is what the continuation will explore.
Eighth secret — concerns what a person who receives a diploma of maturity must actually be taught. The answer is simple, and therefore difficult: a school graduate must BE READY for life — not in the sense of “beginning to try,” rather in the sense of becoming an adult. Independent. Confident. Capable of supporting himself, helping loved ones, making decisions, taking responsibility — not in the future, rather from the very first day after school. To this end, strange as it may sound, school ALREADY GIVES MUCH. It develops the higher mental functions without which neither a profession nor a conscious destiny is possible. School forms speech, attention, memory, logic, the ability to understand — in a word, everything that turns a child into a thinking human being. Of course, everyone’s level differs; however, the foundation is laid for each. And in this lies the merit of the school, even if it DOES NOT ALWAYS realize what its real strength is. However, what school still does not give are the skills of surviving in reality. It cultivates thinking, yet does NOT TEACH HOW TO LIVE. It does not teach how to behave in an accident, in a conflict, at a bank, in a hospital, or in court. A graduate can solve equations yet does not know how to behave with the police. He knows the definition of law yet does not distinguish administrative from criminal. He can pass standardized exams yet does not understand how to read a contract, does not see credit traps, does not sense the boundaries of what is permitted. He IS NOT TRAINED to act. And therefore, when he acts, he sincerely doesn't realize he's crossed the line. He lives in the logic of TV series, where norms are distorted and consequences And he begins to understand only after — when it is too late. When life has already cracked. Reality requires not theories, but skills. A modern graduate must not only know how to read and write — he must BE ABLE to light a fire, survive the cold, give first aid, hammer a nail, behave in emergencies, handle equipment, and care for the sick. He must not be a “child under supervision,” rather a citizen, a man, a woman, a soldier, a father. He must understand how the country, the economy, the laws, and the family work. And all this — not as an addition, rather as part of school education. Every subject must be connected with life. This is not utopia; it is a necessity. And this has already been done. In 19th-century Germany, when German goods were considered the worst in Europe, teacher Wilhelm Lay proposed a simple idea: knowledge through action. Not just botany — but work on a plot of land. Not just physics — but a workshop. Not just trigonometry — but calculating real structures. Not just anatomy — but first Thus the “SCHOOL OF ACTION” was born, which produced whole generations capable of thinking with their hands. And they raised the country not with words, rather with deeds. It is impossible to repeat that experience literally. However, its spirit is essential. Practice is not the opposite of theory. It is ITS CONTINUATION. If a child cannot apply knowledge, it means he has not understood it. School must teach life: biology — about how not to fall ill, mathematics — how not to be deceived, language — how to be understood, law — how not to get into trouble. This is maturity. Not only knowledge, it is the ABILITY TO BE a human being among people. To be a citizen, a worker, a parent, a companion, a protector — not later, but now. This is where adult life begins. This is where the journey to being a Human Being begins.
Without practical training in literature and the Russian language, school loses the most important thing — the ability to teach a person to be a human being. Without the right words and images, without the ability to hear and to speak, to understand and to explain, it is impossible not only to find a common language with another, but even to find oneself. Friends, love, family, work, society — everything begins with language. And EVERYTHING COLLAPSES when words stop being carriers of meaning. Yet everything that matters in life has already been described in world literature: pain and hope, friendship and betrayal, choice and honor. One can feel this only if one has been taught to read — not with the eyes, rather with the soul. And physics and chemistry? They are not just school subjects — they are life itself. Electrical wiring, a broken outlet, the smell of gas, a stain of unknown liquid, poisoning, water purification, the air in one’s apartment — all of this is either familiar and manageable, or it becomes a threat. And everything depends on how and what one was taught.
Practice is not an option — it is the essence of science. Without it, knowledge is dead. Geography? Try asking a graduate to draw a sketch of St. Petersburg — without Google. Or at least the route from home to school — with street names and turns. Can’t do it? And yet this is geography. Not an atlas with laminated maps, rather the ABILITY TO NAVIGATE in space, to understand where you are, how you got there, and where you can go. Without knowing this, a person loses even the image of his Homeland. For many, the Leningrad Region is as much a blank spot as the jungles of the Congo. He lives on his own land, yet he does not know it. He does not feel it. And therefore — he does not defend it.
Why is this happening? Why does school give FEWER real-life skills and more and more useless theories piled into five volumes of “Russian language” or “social studies?” Why are reform programs never discussed with those who teach, who raise children, who actually see them — not as points on a chart? Why do parents have no say in what their own children will be taught? Why has no one asked even the higher school — the universities, those who clearly see what this new school “education” leads to after 5-10 years? Why is a reform that is supposed to be public discussed behind closed doors? Why is it PUSHED THROUGH as if something crucial is hidden behind it — something vital, yet not for us? Even issues of economics, defense, foreign policy — can be debated, challenged, understood. Yet school — as if it is under lock and key. As if it has become the last fortress of something that MUST NOT be seen by outsiders. Everything becomes clear if we return to the beginning of this article. Because school reform is the reform of the human being. And therefore — of the entire world. Whoever captures the school, captures the future.
School is not a building, not a schedule, not a curriculum. School is the MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION in which humanity reflects its own future. It is not only millions of children who pass through the classroom — it is the very idea of the Human Being, which society either raises to the heights of reason or consigns to oblivion. Everything we see in the world around us — technological achievements, social fragmentation, spiritual crisis — was once planted in school classrooms as the initial configuration of worldview.
The eight school secrets, like eight unbroken seals, point not only to the illnesses of the system but also to a GREAT POSSIBILITY of transformation — the possibility of beginning to raise not performers and consumers, rather thinking, strong, compassionate, and free human beings. As long as school remains an arena in the struggle for the Mind, it also remains society’s LAST CHANCE to survive — not biologically, rather ontologically: as Humanity, not as a The struggle for the Mind is not a slogan. It is a necessity, without which speaking of the future becomes meaningless. And if we wish to reclaim that future, we must begin with the simplest things — a lesson, a teacher, a child’s awakened attention. It is there, in the quiet of the classroom, that the first inner voice of the Human Being begins to sound. Whether that voice is heard — depends on us.
To be continued…
1 Influencer (from the English to effect — to influence) — is a media personality, blogger, expert, or celebrity who possesses authority and a loyal audience on social networks, and who influences the opinions and decisions of followers, often through recommendations of products, services, and lifestyle choices, which is widely used in influencer marketing.