“Educational systems that create themselves”: Petro Chornomorets speech
On October 6th, Petro Chornomorets, Zminotvortsi’s methodologist, participated in the “Osvita Dyvosvitu” forum. Here are the key takeaways from his speech.
Petro explained why classical education is ineffective: children don’t understand the purpose behind their knowledge. The core of Zminotvortsi’s methodology is based on asking the questions, “Why am I doing this?” and “Why would these teenagers want to do what we propose?”
For our neurons to work and learn something new, they need support — dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin signals.
Learning through force doesn’t work — if a person doesn’t want to learn, they won’t. However, creating an engaging lesson for everyone is impossible because all students are different.
We can’t expect students to learn everything they need during their school years, especially given the vast amount of information that can’t be covered in 11 years. Some subjects are uninteresting because they are irrelevant at this stage, and some knowledge becomes outdated.
Our goal is not to produce a person who will pass a standardized test but to nurture someone who is ready to learn throughout their life, form hypotheses, think critically, and question their knowledge.
At Zminotvortsi, we encourage course teachers to speak no more than 5 minutes at a time and no more than a third of the lesson. One of our goals is to give children the experience of interacting with other adults rather than just listening to lectures.
Another key objective is building a community of like-minded individuals, as in small villages or towns, there may be a lack of peers with shared interests. This is how our teenagers find friends from different corners of Ukraine.