Supporting Children's Initiative ²³⁷⁴

Supporting pupil's initiative aimed at searching for new ways of acting is necessary for bringing up people capable of self-education. In order to implement this, schools must change their schemes of one-way active interaction (built upon plans of only one of the partners) to mutually active cooperation (built upon both partners' plans). And thus the question "Who is more equal among the equal - a teacher or a pupil?" is no more relevant because it is replaced with a new, pressing one: "Since the level of development, skills and knowledge is so clearly unequal in children and adults, then what is the equality of a child and an adult?" An equal right for searching activity, equal obligations to build mutual understanding, but initially (on the primary stage of education) clear inequality of obligations to stimulate and support the partner's initiative, turning it to the discovery and use of certain cultural-historical means - that's the first principle of a learning community capable of developing the ability and desire to learn him/herself in a child.

Keywords: one-way active cooperation, mutually active cooperation, object-oriented interaction of teacher and pupil, search for new ways of acting, supporting child's initiative, aristocratic and democratic communities of learning

Column: The Problem Of Development