INTRODUCTION

There is no reason for complacency when we speak of contemporary church life and of achievements in the education of children and youth. In some respects, our era has something in common with the era of early Christianity. The Christian faith, that is, the belief that Jesus Christ is the God-Man, that God is Triune, and that the Church is the living Body of Christ, is confessed by a minority, and even this minority is divided and split. Christian symbols, holidays and traditions have largely lost their vitality. They either disappear from our lives, or become an object of trade, or are identified with culinary or national customs and too often come down to something pleasant, but not very understandable. In many countries, a person must have considerable courage to confess that he is a Christian. And even where there is no hostility to religion, culture is separated from religion. It is difficult to find any Christian content or Christian understanding of life values among the impressions that a modern child receives at home, at school, reading books, magazines, and getting acquainted with advertising. This also applies to those families who regularly attend the temple. The child is growing up today in an environment very reminiscent of the era of the Roman Empire

The great difference is that today the clear line that has always run between Christian and non-Christian worldviews is blurred. In the Roman Empire, school education was completely secular. The prevailing ideas about marriage, about the essence of family relations, about the human personality differed sharply from the Christian ones. A Christian child grew up at home, clearly aware that to be a Christian means to be different from the surrounding society, denying its values. Compromise with the environment or "adaptation" was unthinkable. Today, these boundaries are blurred. What does it mean to be a Christian? Who calls himself a Christian today? Theological differences have been erased. The words "conservative" and "doctrinaire" have become abusive expressions. The perception of Christianity as something that thirty or forty years ago gave a person respectability in the eyes of society has also been destroyed. It is difficult to reproach young people for rejecting the hypocrisy of such Christianity, although there was not only hypocrisy in such a perception.

Many people who call themselves Christians claim that they perceive Christianity primarily as the Sermon on the Mount, the meaning of which is love and respect for people, in peace and benevolence, as well as the recognition of a very vague sense of some Divine Power present in the world. This is quite enough for them. Of course, one should not dispute the sincerity or value of such statements. Yet we have no right to assert that ethical and moral values are the distinctive and exclusive privilege of Christianity. Ethical codes exist not only in religions; Even communism and Nazism have a very strict moral code based on discipline, self-sacrifice, comradeship, obedience to authority. A textbook of ethics for pedagogical institutes, published in the Soviet Union, tells about the rules of good manners, obedience, honesty, mutual assistance and similar things in the spirit of the XIX century. Therefore, if we assert that Christian morality is the essence of Christianity, we must understand what Christian morality is and how it differs from morality in its generally accepted understanding. There is a paradox here: Christianity is inconceivable without its morality, its ethical law; And yet the ethical law can exist completely independently of Christian concepts of life and can even be hostile to the Christian faith.

Thus, today, in raising our children, we are faced with a situation that the early Church also faced. And yet, there are many differences. We cannot simply adopt the piety of a medieval man. Spiritual values and requirements have become part of our thinking today. Faith in the freedom of man in God's world, in the creative purpose of man in the world, respect for the human person and tolerance have always been an integral part of Christian thought in the personal lives of saints and theologians, but in the life of society, in everyday life, they have not been dissolved. The Inquisition, religious persecution and wars, walking in line at home and at school, intolerance – all this was by no means explained only by "human imperfection". All this was part of the generally accepted and recognized system of "saving souls".

For centuries, the philosophy of education (secular and Christian alike) considered it axiomatic that the soul of any child is a "blank slate". Protect the child from bad influences, punish for misdeeds, reward for good – and, in the end, you will get a good person.

Meanwhile, one of the main theses of Christian spiritual education (as can be seen, for example, from the Philokalia) states that each soul is unique and that the task of the spiritual father is to determine concretely what is necessary for the spiritual growth of each unique personality. This approach was not reflected in the religious education of children. Some spirit-bearing teachers and saints had a remarkable gift of insight, penetrating the world of the individual with a spiritual eye, but in general, the educational program in the Church did not orient the teacher to understand the individuality of the child and help him to manifest his innate talents and characteristics, to encourage his creative abilities and desire for self-expression, to help him to understand more deeply the reasons for his behavior.