Школьные учебники как отражение повседневности детства и как ее конструкторы

Abstract

The measurement of specific aspects of a child’s daily activities belongs to the subject field of modern sociology of childhood, with one of the important tasks being to find out how a material object organizes the interaction of children and adults. The article considers the school textbook to be a result of social construction and at the same time a constructor of concrete historical childhood at the micro and macro levels. The results of a longitudinal study of mathematical problems from primary school textbooks published from 1996 to 2021 are presented. It is concluded that the texts of the problems reflect everyday practices and changes in attitudes to childhood: narrowing of subjectivity of children’s agency; orientation of children’s lives to study and sports; limitation of children’s independence and greater involvement of parents in schoolchildren’s life; narrowing of children’s household chores, community work participation and self-care practices; and early development of consumer and financial behavior. At the same time, the following constants were revealed: the presentation of children’s lives through the gender division of activities and the androcentricity of the language of the texts. The study established that the textbooks mostly portray household chores as a strictly female activity. Along with the content of the texts, the socialization and emotional-expressive functions of the textbooks are considered—specifically, the presentation of values and norms to children, and the creation of emotionally positive conditions for the perception of texts and visual images which are based on real aspects of children’s everyday life. The article substantiates the importance of textbooks as a materialized social construct in shaping not only the present and future of children, but also the role behavior of parents and teachers. The article proposes to specifically include situations related to the new realities of the transformation of children’s life in the educational literature.