8.4. Labor as a means of education

Labor acts as an educational tool in which an effective influence on the emerging personality is exerted by activities that purposefully modify and improve objects of the material and spiritual environment. In this activity, the child himself is being improved in physical, mental, moral, aesthetic, and other respects. The educational force of labor consists mainly in the fact that the achievement of its goal and the satisfaction of a need entails the emergence of new needs. They can be laid in the work itself, its results or in the fact that this result can be given to the child.

All created in the XX century. educational systems, famous for their results, were based on the use of physical labor as one of the most important means of education. The more varied and perfect in their organization were the varieties of work, the more stable and productive were the educational systems.

In order for physical labor to become an effective means of educational influence, its organization must comply with the following requirements: 1) attractiveness, social and personal significance of the goal, clarity of organization, moral satisfaction with the results; 2) positive motivation of labor activity, the possibility for children to choose the types of labor and the forms of its organization; 3) the connection of labor with the basic idea of ​​the school and its pedagogical concept, with other activities and in general with the life activity of the individual, the demands and expectations of the parents; 4) feasibility, diversity, high moral basis, connection with the doctrine, creative character, effectiveness, collectivity, encouragement of success in work.

Physical work in comparison with other types of work becomes clear and accessible to a child at an early age. Its varieties include the work of self-care, which a person is engaged throughout his life. Obtaining satisfaction from the results of their work (cleaning, cooking, preparing clothes and shoes for use, etc.), the child acquires the need to constantly have such an order of things. But at the same time, he discovers that in order to maintain order, effort and labor are necessary. The systematic application of effort requires the development and strengthening of the will. Here, participation and the example of an adult who skillfully creates emotional and psychological conditions for effective and educational work are particularly needed.

In addition, it is important that the work begun be completed and jointly evaluated. The child should enjoy the work done, supported by a positive emotional evaluation of the new, changed by his activity, state of the objects with which he worked.

Intellectual work is emotional and mental stress, mental activity performed by a researcher who knows the unknown. Such work takes place in the course of educational activity, when the teacher stimulates and organizes an independent search for students in order to discover the unknown.

In order to transform the process of learning into intellectual work, there are many possibilities, in particular:

• posing problematic issues with clearly expressed contradictions that require students to independently search;

• the introduction of problem assignments with the demonstration of several solutions and giving students the opportunity to think about which one is correct;

• Involvement of students in the independent search for ways to solve the problem, which will be considered in the next lesson, or vice versa - in the independent analysis of particular cases arising from the solution of this problem obtained during the lesson;

• selection of educational and educational tasks of a creative nature, which the student can perform only by taking a non-standard approach as a result of an independent search for a solution;

• encouraging students to analyze phenomena and factors (theoretical explanation), as a result of which contradictions arise between existing and new knowledge, an understanding of the importance of a problem and the inability to approach its solution;

• conducting training at a high, but feasible level of difficulty;

• availability of enough (but not excessively) diverse educational material and methods of study.

• teaching children mental methods: comparison, analysis, synthesis, classification, generalization, etc .;

• provision of conditions for obtaining a personal and socially significant result of labor;

• familiarization of students with the scientific and practical problems of the present, teaching them to see the problems in real life and the methods of their research;

• creation of material, technical and organizational conditions for creative activity in different directions, at least in all academic subjects studied at school;

• approval of student success, public recognition of each child’s achievements in intellectual work.

The work of the soul is moral efforts that elevate the child and bring him to a new level of relations with others and relationships with himself. The work of the soul is expressed in the fact that the child suppresses his desires for the sake of convenience, joy, pleasure of another person. The well-known Russian writer F. Abramov wrote about the work of the soul: “This is self-education, the construction of one’s own soul, everyday self-control, everyday self-examination by the highest court that is given to man by the court of one’s own conscience.”

The result of mental labor is that the child begins differently, with greater warmth and care, to treat all people. The work of the soul in any of its varieties can be continued and developed, for example, in charitable activities (practical work to assist the sick, disabled, old people, children, as well as collecting and making toys for orphanages and boarding schools, things for the poor, etc. .).

It should be remembered that none of the above varieties of labor can be recognized as better or less important, since only the unity of physical, intellectual and spiritual labor is capable of forming a real citizen and a unique personality.