Boris Pavlovich Nikitin is a popular domestic teacher. He is considered one of the founders of the methodology of early development in the country, a scientist who researched and implemented the pedagogy of cooperation. He has written dozens of books on pedagogy, several films have been made about his family and upbringing methods.
Teacher biography
Boris Pavlovich Nikitin was born in 1916. He was born in the Stavropol Territory in the small village of Suvorovskaya. His father was a Kuban Cossack.
In 1941 he received a diploma of graduation from the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, served in fighter aviation. He retired from the army in 1949, starting teaching and research activities at the Ministry of Labor Reserves. Over time, when his ideas and methods became seriously interested, he was attracted to work at the Institute of History and Theory of Pedagogy, the Research Institute of Psychology, as well as at the Institute of Career Guidance and Labor Training.
In 1958 BorisPavlovich Nikitin gathered a group of teachers to repeat Makarenko's experience with them. It is noteworthy that in the same year he met his future wife, whose name was Elena Alekseevna. At that time he was 42 years old. Boris Pavlovich Nikitin and his wife raised and raised seven children.
Nikitin's pedagogical principles
The experience of raising children, which was used by Nikitin and his wife, aroused genuine interest in many, he was taken into service. The hero of our article wrote several books about this, paid special attention to intellectual developmental games, some of which he himself developed. In his writings, teacher Boris Pavlovich Nikitin confirmed the hypotheses on the conditions for the formation of a child's creative abilities.
He actively popularized his experience, which aroused great interest among Soviet parents in the 60-80s. It was treated with interest in Japan and Germany. There were always many visitors in the Nikitins' house, who wanted to see with their own eyes how this was implemented in practice, they wanted to get practical advice. From 1963 to the present, the books of Boris Pavlovich Nikitin have been published with a total circulation of more than seven million copies. They have been translated into ten languages.
The basic principles of education "according to Nikitin" are maximum dedication and great consciousness of parents. The Nikitins themselves singled out three basic principles, which they formulated as follows:
- creating favorable conditions for the mental and physical development of the child. These include: easyclothes, sports environment in the house, a large number of educational games and benefits;
- free choice of activities for creativity by children themselves;
- parental indifference.
In many ways, their principles echoed the so-called pedagogy of cooperation, in a sense connected with the ideas of the great Soviet teacher Makarenko. The principles of the Nikitins were the result of understanding the practice of living in a family with their own children, which is why they are so valued by many generations of young parents.
Interesting is the opinion of the Nikitin children. They believe that this approach to education greatly facilitates the lives of children and parents, promotes their mutual understanding, makes childhood fuller and more interesting, giving the child an excellent start for future development and growth.
Basics of the methodology
Boris Pavlovich Nikitin, whose biography is given in this article, noted that special attention should be paid to early development. In his opinion, it begins for the baby from the moment his parents enter into marriage, conception and childbirth. Nikitin and his wife were convinced that the sooner this development began, the better it would be.
They have developed their own methods of education and developing mind games. Many of them are still popularized by different authors. Also, sports simulators were actively used in the family so that the child would develop fully, not only mentally, but also physically. The hero of our article in education used a very radical method of hardening, which made it possible to reduce tominimize any colds. And if the children did catch the disease, then they coped with it without medication.
Nikitin himself introduced the term NUVERS into pedagogical science. This is an abbreviation that means irreversible fading of opportunities for effective development of abilities. According to his hypothesis, with age, each person loses the ability to self-development, and the possibility of effective development is completely lost forever.
At the same time, there are certain conditions and times when development can be most effective. It is noteworthy that for each person they are strictly individual. Nikitin considered the gap in time between the so-called moment of "maturation" and the immediate beginning of the child's development as a measure of NUVERS. The main abilities, according to the teacher, are laid down at preschool age.
Interest in Nikitin's works
Nikitin's works aroused great public interest. Already after the release of his very first book "Are We Right?", which was published in 1963, the position of the teacher began to be actively discussed. It was criticized by many as it explicitly suggested deviating from existing and established medical and pedagogical norms.
Nikitin's right to his own vision and approach was recognized by the Soviet mathematician and founder of cybernetics Alexei Lyapunov. Scientists Ilya Arshavsky and Nikolai Amosov spoke positively about his methods. The fact is that medical studies that were carried out regularly did not reveal anydeviations in the Nikitin children, which once again proved their correctness.
Nikitin criticism in contemporary Russia
Already in 1988, the German journalist Marianna Butenschen published a book in which conversations with the grown-up Nikitin children were collected. In Russia, her translation appeared 12 years later, after the death of the teacher himself.
Moreover, the book was treated very ugly, using the information in a distorted form and presenting it as a fresh interview from 2000, without references to the original source and indicating the real dates when the interviews were recorded. Nikitin himself died shortly before that - on January 30, 1999, he was 83.
Largely due to this publication, a large number of negative responses to the Nikitin methods based mainly on this book appeared on the Russian Internet. But no serious criticism of their experience followed. Since 2011, there has been a website of the Nikitin family, on which the children of the teacher convince that they positively evaluate the experience of their parents and are satisfied with the upbringing they received in childhood. And now they are actively developing these traditions with their own children.
Interestingly, by 2002, Nikitin had 27 grandchildren and already three great-grandchildren.
Learning ahead
One of the features of the education of the Nikitin children was that they were trying to send them to school right away in the senior classes. This became possible due to the fact that much attention was paid to intellectual development from the first years of life.
When children are already in school, they alsothey were allowed to sit in one place, transferred from class to class ahead of schedule, when it became obvious that they were ahead of their peers in terms of development. All the Nikitin children really never had practically any problems with their studies.
Disadvantages of the Nikitin Method
But there was also a negative point. Due to the difference in age with her classmates, she ranged from one to three years, a certain psychological tension developed between them, this affected communication, making friends and buddies outside the family was very problematic.
Additional pressure that interfered with a quiet life and study was created by the growing fame of a unique family. Close attention from scientists, journalists and ordinary curious did not allow to grow quietly.
Five Nikitin children after the 8th grade moved to secondary schools, two - after the tenth grade. At the same time, five graduated with honors.
Nikitins studied at universities together with their peers.
Intellectual games
Boris Pavlovich Nikitin paid special attention to the development of creative abilities. Many he himself designed for his children, made them by hand. They were first produced industrially in Japan and Germany, where "Nikitinsky" societies and kindergartens still exist. In Russia, these games are popular not only in families, but also in schools and kindergartens.
In 1981, the publishing house "Pedagogy" published a book by Boris Pavlovich Nikitin"Educational games". An example is the game "Fold the Pattern". It requires 16 identical cubes. Moreover, all the faces of each of them are painted differently in four colors. This allows you to make patterns from them in a huge number of options. This is the best game for 4 year olds to help them develop.
For the game "Bricks" you need a set of eight bars of the same size. This is a kind of gymnastics for the mind, which introduces kids to the basics of drawing, as well as spatial thinking. With the help of these bricks, you need to build models according to 30 drawings-tasks. The tasks are arranged in order of difficulty, this is a game for children 4 years old, as well as older children.
Unicube
Nikitin's game "Unicube" is very famous. These are versatile blocks that immerse kids in three-dimensional space. The teacher noted that the earliest possible development of spatial thinking significantly increases the child's capabilities, making him intellectually more developed.
For "Unicubus" you will need 27 wooden cubes marked in a special way. They must be folded for a while by color. It is believed that if an adult manages to do this on the first try in two minutes, then this is an excellent result, which means that spatial thinking is well developed.
The secret of "Unicubus" is that, at first glance, it seems that there are no identically colored cubes, as if all 27 are different. Although only three are usedcolors, and the cube has six sides. The fact is that, in addition to plain faces, there are eight more triads. So this game teaches not only spatial thinking, but also accuracy, precision and forethought.
1994 Edition
In 1994, the Nikitin's book "Intellectual Games" was published, in which you can find even more options for how to keep your child busy and contribute to his development.
For example, authors often offer to beat models of well-known objects. For the game "Clock" the so-called "children's watch" is used, in which there is no mechanism, while the child has to turn the hands and set the time on his own.
Also, a moving-scale thermometer is often used instead of the usual mercury column, and the Knots game consists of two frames connected to each other. Moreover, each has a rod. At the top there were sample knots, which are arranged according to the degree of difficulty of the tasks, and at the bottom there were pieces of a cord so that the child would practice copying the knots from the first part.
Games of other authors
Often Nikitin used popular games of other authors in his methods. For example, a three-dimensional analogue of the pentomino "Cubes for All", Montessori inserts and frames, the Pythagorean table.
The last game required three sheets of plywood. The main one was marked out into 100 squares, and in the center of each they drew a circle with a number taken from the Pythagorean table. On the second sheet, the circles were drilled out, and the third was brightly colored in order to move freely between the first two.sheets. The main task was to count as quickly as possible how many circles are currently colored.
