The School of Today and Tomorrow through the Eyes of High School Students

Abstract

The article dwells on the image of the modern and future school in the context of the system of values and outlook on the life of Russian high school students of 9-11 grades. The empirical basis of the study is the analysis of the answers of high school students from 46 schools of St. Petersburg to the questions posed during the school foresight sessions in September-December 2021 within the project “Your Budget at Schools 2021”. The study includes a detailed consideration of the image of the school through the eyes of high school students of St. Petersburg, as well as the interpretation of this image in terms of its relationship with the system of values of modern youth. The main conclusions of the study are that the importance of such elements as “adult life skills”, “computer competence”, “efficient communication skills”, “self-development and self-improvement”, “collaboration skills”, “readiness to extracurricular activities” has increased in the structure of the school image. On the contrary, the importance of such elements as “general literacy”, “working with information”, “school subject results”, “readiness to work and earn a living” goes down. Comfort, practical skills for adult life, self-development, efficient communication, health, and recreation become the keywords describing the desired image of the “future” school. In our opinion, the image of the “future school” in the minds of high school students reflects primarily their urgent need for having at schools modern comfortable spaces for active learning and extracurricular activities. At the same time, the rise of project-based learning importance, the involvement of young people into social design processes provide good opportunities to use these spaces for the development of socially useful activities (at least at school and local community level), which has high educational and civil impact.