The discussion was based on a report by S. N. Enikolopova”Psychological safety issues at school“
G. Daniels: Thank you very much for the brilliant presentation. Do you think that if we apply the systematic approach to security that you just talked about and to Russia's development over the past 10 years, when significant changes have taken place in the economy, have children's subjective well-being increased or decreased?
S. N. Enikolopov: No, this did not lead to improvements, unfortunately. When I was introduced, I was presented in my two guises: criminal and clinical. According to my clinical experience, the overall level of anxiety in school-age children is increasing. I can't say that the country's achievements have a good effect on people's sense of security; I have an even greater feeling of the opposite when it comes to communicating with people and at work. We are doing some research, and they show that most people generally believe that it's scary to go outside, that their environment is not people, but bandits. And this is happening: just watch one film, “School”, which caused a great resonance. I wasn't very excited about him, either artistically or truthfully. But since I had to participate in discussions about this film for a wide range of reasons, I realized how much this film frightened many people. Therefore, the sense of security is not increasing, but weakening.
J. Hardman: I would like to comment on a point that I found very clearer. You said IQ test scores should not be used to exclude children. I'll give you an example. In my country, I did research with children in rural areas. The distribution of scores there was very different from the normal distribution, and one girl scored a lot of points. But her teacher said that she was a weak student and would not go to high school, but would rather become a fruit picker. I didn't even show her the results, I thought “Wow!” ... I'm really glad you brought up this issue because a lot of people still think that an IQ test is a magic tool that will tell you everything.
S. N. Enikolopov: I would like to recall the report I already mentioned; this is Professor Sobkin's report yesterday. Teachers put a sign on the student and begin this quietest, indirect, hidden, latent exclusivity for many students not only in terms of IQ. This happens very often: if someone objectively measures an outside observer using psychological methods, it turns out that students are generally strong, which means that subjectively these students are considered not strong at that school. Indeed, they are being somewhat shifted towards C students, and sometimes hooligans.
X. Lauder: Are you saying that there are especially many female teachers in elementary and secondary schools?
S. N. Enikolopov: There are slightly fewer universities. And, of course, there are more women in pedagogical universities. I think that if we compare, I just don't want to look sexist, but yesterday's report by the head of the department, when he talked about these innovative universities and the best universities in the country, the asymmetry towards men was quite pronounced there. When I was studying, I started studying at the Institute of Physics and Technology, but there were no female students there, and there were no teachers, except for an English teacher. And it was the country's strongest institution at that time.
D. A. Makarovsky: When you said that a social group is divided into bullies, victims and bystanders, I remembered that you were conducting a social study on the political differentiation of young people and found that a sense of social stability was associated with approximately the same distribution. Everyone who has a positive, negative attitude and with a middle group, who, the larger, the greater social stability, the more it differentiates back and forth. Could this mean that this situation is some universal social characteristic? That society is always divided into three conditional groups: bullies, victims and middle groups. And if we choose and cut off the two extremes, then outside observers will still be divided into these three groups.
S. N. Enikolopov: Actually, a holy place is never empty. And there will always be victims. Of course, what you're saying right now is a bit like Durkheim's texts that even if you imagine a society of angels, after a while you'll find angels with longer wings and thicker feathers, and we'll mark them somehow. But I would like society to still move towards less stigmatization of each other, because as soon as stigma arises, as soon as some stereotypes and prejudices appear against someone, this problem begins to get stronger and more. I must say that, due to the nature of our research, we were bullying, but the usual task is to do some research at school thirty years late.
The funny thing was that when I gave an interview about bullying and mobbing in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 21,000 people visited the article on the newspaper's website in 4 days. And most of the comments were that this was not from school life at all, but from office life. Mostly adult office workers were represented there; students don't read Rossiyskaya Gazeta, as a rule, except for some politicized ones, whom I would not like to see as my students. But normal adults and young people who are quite successful from our point of view, they noted that this is natural office life, and we are almost all victims of either mobbing or bullying. Therefore, this is quite common in society. It's a triad, but it's actually so primitive. I've already stressed that I'm more interested in victims who might become bullies. Therefore, it is enough to change the situation a little bit, and we will get the same triad, but other people will face others.
A question from the audience: There are anthropological studies that show that any revolution from positive to negative is possible only if the problem is introduced into the human value field. In this sense, as far as I can imagine, it is not surprising that victims can become bullies. This is how capable the middle class is of internal differentiation, because we meet the middle class everywhere. I think this question is more interesting.
S. N. Enikolopov: I can only tell you one thing. Again, I will refer to studies that seem to be quite stable, because Bunimovich referred to one study yesterday, and I even specifically asked who conducted it. And I know Vladimir Samuilovich Sobkin's work very well, where it was shown that when children divide themselves into nine strata at school according to their parents' income, it turns out that all nine hate each other. There's no problem of envy, there's hate for higher and lower. This is very explosive, and the worst thing about it is that there is no “average” one. They're the same to everyone else. Give the opportunity — everyone will jump into each other's throats.
S. A. Kuznetsova: I am Snezhana A. Kuznetsova, North-Eastern State University, Magadan. Sergey Nikolayevich, I think you touched upon a very important issue about some of the insecurity of teachers. In other words, you touched upon the role of teachers who are currently not very authoritative, respected and socially strong. So I think that emotional abuse and emotional bullying by teachers are currently underestimated in our society. So what you talked about about bullies, emotional bullies, is managing friends, announcing a boycott. These are forms of behavior that are quite typical for teachers. Please comment on something about this.
S. N. Enikolopov: In fact, the question here is only one thing: we pay very little attention to psychological studies of the role of teachers in the negative part. It's not that he's good or bad at teaching and teaching; there are works about that that that are on the periphery of my interest. As for the aspect that lies in my area of interest, I know that there are no such works, although there are facts. These include pedophiles, and what is more common is the emotional abuse that a teacher inflicts, largely due to his weak self, low self-esteem and other related things. There is another fact: although this was a very selective, small study, not very representative, it involved about 300 Moscow teachers who were retrained at MIOO. 40% of them noted that they were victims of violence. It doesn't matter which one. It is important that undeveloped victims of violence, many of them, according to our information, had PTSD clarifications, and there were many more of them than in the military environment. These are the kind of people who work at school. Accordingly, the transmission of violence is quite high and there is a high probability of deformed relations with students, so there are many problems here; this is a task for other creative teams.
G. Daniels: Do teachers receive systematic training in anti-bullying programs?
S. N. Enikolopov: The answer is even shorter: no!
G. Daniels: I want to ask you a question about what you mentioned about reduced well-being. Why do you think this is the case? I remember when I first came to Moscow in 1976. On the streets, the difference in wealth was not noticeable. Now, as you walk through the center of Moscow, it is obvious that there are a lot of very rich people here, as well as people who are not so wealthy at all. Do you think that a decrease in the sense of security is due to an increase in the gap between rich and poor in society?
S. N. Enikolopov: First, why do I think it's worse? When we were 250 million, there was the Soviet Union, and this is your first visit here. In 1985, there were more than 24,000 murders out of 250 million. With almost a very small number of people lost, most of whom suffered from multiple sclerosis. Since the seventies, and since the nineties, the peak has been ninety-eighth, ninety-ninth, and 2000th — 32.5 thousand murders per population of 140 million. And the fact itself can be translated into odds per hundred thousand, but it's still an indicator of trouble. The second indicator of trouble is suicides. In the Soviet Union, the figure was about 28 per 100,000, which means that in the 2000s and now it is 57-58 per 100,000. Again, only Russian territory. I will specifically mention another figure that is not Soviet, but Soviet in terms of time, but the RSFSR, that is, 85 years old, the territory of Russia alone is 30.6 per 100,000, and now this figure is 57-58. Now it falls slightly to about 56. Moreover, the most interesting thing here is that this figure consists mainly of male suicides. Paradoxically, female suicide in the nineties and 2000s was about the same, if you separate them.
If we talk about the fact that there are many rich and many poor, yes, according to the Gini Index, we are one of the most “stretched” countries. Our index is very high: the top 10% are the richest and 10% are the poorest. They are fantastically far away, and you can also find small countries where the Genie index is about the same, but here it is high. And that's why it's noticeable. And with our mass media, they're still making it even more overblown. I've been a little ill here. At that time I was watching TV: I saw nothing but movies about rich people. In no country, not in America, nowhere, are there so many films about the rich. There is no film about ordinary people at all: not about the hard life of a lonely policeman, not about teachers, not about anyone. There's only about the rich and Cinderella who were poor and got rich, but only because they got married on time. Despite the fact that a very important part of the fairy tale has been thrown out, Cinderella was supposed to work after all. She was rewarded. Our Cinderella is only rewarded for her leg length or the sparkle of her eyes. Therefore, of course, everyone feels insecure. Just one more thing to end with. In Moscow, in 67, there were 9%, only 9% of mercenary murders, all the rest, of course, were emotional, jealousy, drunkenness, etc. And then we didn't seem to pay attention to it, only then did I start comparing how much these self-serving murders grew; it was the nineties, when they accounted for almost 80% of all murders. This is the “tail” of social optimism that existed in the country at that time. Can we now, based on some sociological data, say that the country is socially optimistic?
Source: Psychological publications portal
PsyJournals.ru, a portal for psychological publications — https://psyjournals.ru/edu_economy_wellbeing/issue/36277_full.shtml [Violence in Russian schools: is there any reason for optimism? (transcript) - Materials of the project “Education, Wellbeing and the Developing Economy of Russia, Brazil and South Africa”]
.png)
