The School of the Future the ideal school is built on the fact that first you help the child to decide where he or she needs to go, you build a route, and then you help them along this route.

I think we’re just moving from a school of equalization to a school of personalized routing, trying to proceed from the child’s interests. This brings us back to the original meaning of the word "pedagogue,” which, as you may recall, is translated as "a child guide”.

Have you encountered any schools that have built a truly personalized trajectory for children, a format where the child's interests actually count?

The only perfect example I have found so far is the school I describe in "The Other School” book. That’s Kunskapsskolan in Finland, where the general school curriculum for the whole country is shaped for each individual student. This model is highly scalable, and they have patented it and have been using it successfully in England and in India. It really impressed me a lot that you could do that.

I think we had such attempts in Russia at the A. N. Tubelsky school. At least I heard a lot about it from alumni and teachers who worked there. The teachers agreed they would use their disciplines to develop certain skills in children: the skill of logical thinking, critical perception of information. Each instructor was hitting a different aspect of that goal from his or her discipline.

One of the teachers at the New School was doing a personalized route in his history classes. He was building a system where students could read more, do more work to get the next level, like in a game. At the highest level, they could deliver a lesson, like teachers.

This personalization of education, from what age it is appropriate, do you think? From age seven, middle school or high school?

That’s a good question. Psychologists now say that the age of adolescent crisis in children is shifting. If it used to be at 13–14, 15–16 years old, now it starts with children as young as 10. I guess it makes sense to say that the earlier you try different things, the better. At the very least, I’m absolutely convinced that getting experience at an early age really shapes you in the future. I can see it in my loved ones and in the children I am in contact with. And I’ve done three or four thousand interviews with children in the last three years. Those who have had an experience are very different from their peers.

Tatyana Kovaleva, professor at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, believes that the time has come for self skills, the skills needed to take care of oneself. Psychologist and professor Alexander Asmolov speaks of soft skills as a set of competencies that a person must possess in a changing world. In what proportion do you think the School of the Future can and should teach soft, hard, and self skills?

First of all, big thanks to Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov, with whom we have a very warm and close relationship; it is his merit that it is said about these skills so much.

As is often the case with social change, there can be a strong bias at first. Now some private schools are positioning themselves exclusively as soft skills schools, the preparation for the business world. But gradually we will be able to find balance between self skills and soft skills, because, for example, teachers and parents lack the skill to take care of themselves, and a lot of them experience burnout. As an Italian acquaintance of mine used to say: "How are you going to work if you’re not rested?”