Traveling with adults
The concept of «transport» covers various moving means by which people and goods can move in space.
A variety of literary texts, fairy tales, television, and one’s own life experience quite early reveal to the child the idea of travel (close, distant, and even to other worlds) and how important it is to have an effective means of transportation to conquer space.
Fairy-tale characters fly on a flying carpet, jump over mountains and valleys on Sivka-Burka, a magical horse. Nilsky from the book S. Camp travels on a wild goose. Well, a city child quite early on his own experience gets acquainted with buses, trolleybuses, trams, subways, cars, trains and even airplanes.
The image of vehicles is one of the favorite topics of children’s drawings, especially boyish ones. Not by chance, of course. As we noted in the previous chapter, boys are more purposeful and active in exploring space, capturing much larger territories than girls. And therefore, a drawing child usually wants to reflect the appearance and device of a car, plane, train, to show its speed capabilities. Often in children’s drawings, all these motor vehicles are without drivers or pilots. Not because they are not needed, but because the little draftsman identifies the machine and the person who controls it, merging them into one. For a child, a car becomes something like a new bodily form of human existence, giving him speed, strength, strength, purposefulness.
But equally in children’s images of various means of transportation, there is often an idea of subordinating to the hero-rider of what or on whom he rides. Here a new turn of the theme appears: the establishment of a relationship between two accomplices in the movement, each of which has its own essence — «The rider rides the Horse», «The Fox learns to ride the Rooster», «The Bear rides the Car». These are the topics of drawings, where it is important for the authors to show how to hold on and how to control what you ride. The horse, the Rooster, the Car in the drawings are larger, more powerful than the riders, they have their own temper and must be curbed. Therefore, saddles, stirrups, reins, spurs for riders, steering wheels for cars are carefully drawn.
In everyday life, the child accumulates experience in mastering and controlling real vehicles in two forms — passive and active.
In a passive form, it is very important for many children to observe drivers of transport — from their own father or mother driving a car (if any) to numerous drivers of trams, buses, trolleybuses, behind whose backs children, especially boys, love to stand, enchantedly watching the road unfolding ahead and all the actions of the driver, looking at incomprehensible levers, buttons, lights flashing on the remote control in the cab.
In an active form, this is primarily an independent experience of mastering cycling, and not on a small children’s (tricycle or with a balancer), but on a real large two-wheeled bicycle with brakes. Usually children learn to ride it in the senior preschool — junior school age. Such a bicycle is for children the most versatile individual means of conquering space, provided at their disposal. But this usually happens outside the city: in the country, in the village. And in daily city life, the main means of transportation is public transport.
A few years after the start of independent trips, he will become for the child an instrument of knowledge of the urban environment, which he will be able to use at his own discretion and for his own purposes. But before that, the child will have a rather long and difficult period of mastering urban transport as such, understanding its capabilities, as well as limitations and dangers.
Its capabilities are determined by the fact that public transport in the city can potentially deliver a passenger to any place. You just need to know «what goes there.» The restrictions are known: public transport provides less freedom of movement than a taxi or a car, since its routes are unchanged, stops are rigidly fixed and it runs according to a schedule, which, moreover, is not always observed in our country. Well, the dangers of public transport are connected not only with the fact that you can get injured or have an accident, but even more so with the fact that this is public transport. Among respectable citizens there may be hooligans, terrorists, drunkards, madmen, strange and incompatible people who provoke acute situations.
Public transport, by its very nature, has a dual nature: on the one hand, it is a means of transportation in space, on the other hand, it is a public place. As a means of transportation, it is related to the child’s car and bicycle. And as a public place — a closed space where random people found themselves together, going about their business — transport falls into the same category as a store, a hairdresser, a bathhouse and other social places where people come with their own goals and must possess certain skills. social behavior.
Children’s experience of traveling in public transport is divided into two psychologically different phases: an earlier one, when children travel only with adults, and a later one, when the child uses transport on his own. Each of these phases sets different psychological tasks for children, which will be described a little later. Although the children themselves are usually not aware of these tasks, it is desirable that parents have an idea about them.
The first phase, which will be discussed in this chapter, falls mainly on the preschool age and is experienced especially acutely, deeply, and diversely by the youngest child (between two and five years). The psychological experience he gets at this time is mosaic. It is made up of many sensations, observations, experiences, which are combined each time in different ways, like in a kaleidoscope.
It can be the feeling of a hand touching the nickel-plated handrails, a warm finger on the frozen glass of a tram, on which in winter you can thaw round holes and look at the street, and in autumn draw with your finger on the fogged glass.
This may be the experience of high steps at the entrance, the swaying floor underfoot, the jolts of the car, where it is necessary to hold on to something in order not to fall, the gap between the step and the platform, where it is scary to fall, etc.
This is a lot of interesting things that can be seen from the window. This is an uncle-driver, behind whose back it is so easy to imagine yourself in his place and live with him all the vicissitudes of driving a tram, bus or trolleybus.
This is a composter, next to which you can sit down and be a significant person for everyone. He is constantly approached by other passengers with requests to punch through coupons, and he feels like an influential, somewhat conductor-like person on whom the situation depends — a rare feeling for a child and a sweet experience that elevates him in his own eyes.
As for the spatial impressions of a small passenger, they usually also represent separate pictures that do not add up to a holistic image, let alone a map of the area, which is still very, very far from being formed. The control of the route, the awareness of where and when to get off, at first is completely in the competence of an adult. Children’s spatial experiences, from the point of view of an adult, are extremely strange: what is far away sometimes seems to the youngest child not as large objects visible from afar and therefore seeming smaller, but really small, toy. (This fact, well described in the psychological literature, is connected with the lack of awareness in children of the so-called constancy of the perception of size — the constancy (within certain limits) of the perception of the size of an object, regardless of the distance to it).
In my notes there is an interesting story of a girl about another spatial problem: when she was four years old, every time she traveled in a tram she stood by the driver’s cab, looked ahead and painfully tried to answer the question: why don’t trams running along rails meet each other? friend? The idea of parallelism of two tram tracks did not reach her.
When a young child rides with an adult in public transport, he is perceived by other people as a small passenger, i.e. appears on the stage of social life in a new role for himself, not similar in some respects to the well-mastered role of the child in the family. Learning to be a passenger means facing new psychological challenges that you need to solve on your own (despite the guardianship and protection of an accompanying adult). Therefore, situations that arise while traveling in public transport often become a litmus test that reveals a child’s personal problems. But equally, these situations give the child the most valuable experience, which goes to the construction of his personality.
A whole class of such situations is associated with a new discovery for the child that in a public place each person is an object of social perception of other people. Namely, it may turn out that those around a person are watching, explicitly or implicitly assessing him, expecting quite definite behavior from him, sometimes trying to influence him.
The child discovers that he must have a definite and self-conscious «social face» facing other people. (A certain analogue of the “social I” of W. James, already mentioned by us) For a child, it is expressed in simple and clear answers to the question: “Who am I?” That will satisfy others. Such a question does not arise in the family at all, and the first encounter with it in the presence of strangers sometimes causes shock in a small child.
It is in transport (compared to other public places), where people are close to each other, travel together for a long time and are inclined to communicate with the baby, the child often becomes the object of attention of strangers, trying to call him to talk.
If we analyze all the variety of questions that adult passengers address to a child passenger, then the three main ones come out on top in terms of frequency: “Are you a boy or a girl?”, “How old are you?”, “What is your name?” For adults, gender, age and name are the main parameters that should be included in the child’s self-determination. It is not for nothing that some mothers, taking their children into the human world, teach them in advance the correct answers to such questions, forcing them to memorize them. If a small child is taken by surprise by these questions and answers on the move, then it is often found that they fall, as psychologists say, into the «zone of personal problems», i.e. where the child himself does not have a clear answer, but there is confusion or doubt. Then there is tension, embarrassment, fear. For example, a child does not remember or doubts his own name, because in the family he is addressed only with home nicknames: Bunny, Rybka, Piggy.
«Are you a boy or a girl?» This question is understandable and important even for a very young child. He begins to distinguish quite early that all people are divided into «uncles» and «aunts», and children are either boys or girls. Usually, by the age of three, a child should know their gender. Attributing oneself to a certain gender is one of the primary and most important characteristics on which the child’s self-determination rests. This is both the basis of the feeling of inner identity with oneself — the basic constant of personal existence, and a kind of «visiting card» addressed to other people.
Therefore, it is extremely important for a child that his gender is correctly identified by strangers.
When adults mistake a boy for a girl and vice versa, this is already one of the most unpleasant and insulting experiences for a younger preschooler, causing a reaction of protest and indignation on his part. Toddlers consider individual details of appearance, hairstyle, clothes and other attributes to be signs of gender. Therefore, children who have the bitter experience of confusion with others recognizing their gender, when going out to people, often try to defiantly emphasize their gender with details of clothing or specially taken toys: girls with dolls, boys with weapons. Some kids even start the dating formula with «I’m a boy, my name is so-and-so, I have a gun!»
Many children, recalling their early experience of traveling in transport, quite often mention with a shudder about adult passengers who pestered them with conversations of this type: “Are you Kira? Well, is there a boy Kira? It’s only girls that are called that! Or: “If you are a girl, why do you have such short hair and are you not wearing a skirt?” For adults, this is a game. They find it amusing to tease the child by pointing out that his appearance or his name does not match the gender. For a child, this is a stressful situation — he is shocked by the logic of an adult that is irrefutable for him, he tries to argue, looking for evidence of his gender.
So, whether a person wants it or not, public transport is always not only a means of transportation, but also a field of human relationships. The young passenger learns this truth from his own experience very early. Using public transport — it does not matter, with an adult or alone — the child simultaneously embarks on a journey, both in the space of the surrounding world and in the social space of the human world, in the old-fashioned way, embarks on the waves of the sea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXblife.
Here it would be appropriate to briefly characterize the psychological characteristics of the relationship of people in public transport and describe some of the social skills that a child learns when he travels with adults accompanying him.
From the inside, any transport is a closed space, where there is a community of strangers, which is constantly changing. Chance brought them together and forced them to enter into certain relations with each other in the role of passengers. Their communication is anonymous and forced, but it can be quite intense and varied: passengers touch each other, look at their neighbors, hear other people’s conversations, turn to each other with requests or to chat.
Although the personality of each passenger is fraught with an inner world unknown to anyone, at the same time the passenger is in full view, on hearing, at a forced close distance and much more accessible to close touch than anywhere else in any other public place. It can even be said that in the community of passengers, each person is primarily represented as a bodily being, having certain dimensions and in need of a place. In such often overcrowded Russian transport, a passenger, squeezed from all sides by the bodies of other people, himself very clearly feels the presence of his “corporeal self”. He also enters into various types of forced bodily communication with various strangers: he finds himself tightly pressed against them when new passengers are pressed into a crowded bus at a bus stop; he squeezes himself between other people’s bodies, making his way to the exit; touches the neighbors on the shoulder, trying to draw their attention to the fact that he wants to ask them to validate the coupon, etc.
So, the body is actively involved in the contact of the passengers with each other. Therefore, in the social characteristics of an adult passenger (and not just a child), two main features of his bodily essence always remain significant — gender and age.
The gender and age of the partner, partly his physical condition, strongly influence the social assessments and actions of the passenger when he makes a decision: to give up or not to give up his seat to another, next to whom to stand or sit down, from whom it is necessary to move away a little, not to be pressed face to face. face even in a strong crush, etc.
Where there is a body, the problem immediately arises of the place that the body occupies. In the closed space of public transport, this is one of the urgent tasks of the passenger — to find a place where you can comfortably stand up or sit down. It must be said that finding a place for oneself is an important element of a person’s spatial behavior in a variety of situations and at any age. This problem arises in kindergarten, and at school, and at a party, and in a cafe — wherever we go.
Despite the apparent simplicity, the ability to correctly find a place for oneself is developed in a person gradually. To successfully solve this problem, you need a good spatial and psychological sense in relation to the «force field» of the situation, which is influenced by the size of the room, as well as the presence of people and objects. What is important here is the ability to immediately capture the intended space of events, the ability to note all the moments important for the future choice of location. In specific situations, the speed of decision-making is also important, and even an estimate of the future trajectory of movement towards the intended goal. Adults gradually, without noticing it, teach young children all this when choosing a place in transport. Such learning occurs primarily through the non-verbal (non-verbal) behavior of an adult — through the language of glances, facial expressions, and body movements. Usually, babies «read» such body language of their parents very clearly, carefully following the movements of an adult and repeating them. Thus, the adult directly, without words, conveys to the child the ways of his spatial thinking. However, for the development of a child’s conscious behavior, it is psychologically important that an adult not only do it, but also say it in words. For example: «Let’s stand here on the side so as not to be in the aisle and not prevent others from leaving.» Such a verbal comment transfers the solution of the problem for the child from the intuitive-motor level to the level of conscious control and understanding that the choice of a place is a conscious human action. An adult, in accordance with his pedagogical goals, can develop this topic and make it useful and interesting for a child of any age.
Older children can be taught to be aware of the social structure of space. For example: «Guess why on the bus the seats for the disabled are near the front door, and not at the back.» To answer, the child will have to remember that the front door of the bus (in other countries — in a different way) usually enters the elderly, the disabled, women with children — weaker and slower than healthy adults who enter the middle and back doors. The front door is closer to the driver, who must be attentive to the weak, If anything happens, he will hear their cry faster than from afar.
Thus, talking about people in transport will reveal to the child the secret of how their relationships are symbolically fixed in the organization of the social space of the bus.
And it will be interesting for younger teenagers to think about how to choose a place in transport for themselves, from where you can observe everyone, and be invisible yourself. Or how can you see with your eyes the situation around you, standing with your back to everyone? For a teenager, the idea of a person’s conscious choice of his position in a social situation and the presence of different points of view on it, the possibility of tricky games with them — for example, using a reflection in a mirror window, etc., is close and attractive.
In general, we can say that the question of where to stand or sit in a public place, a person learns to solve in a variety of situations. But it is also true that it is the experience of finding one’s place in transport that turns out to be the earliest, most frequent and clearest example of how this is done.
Children are often afraid of being crushed in crowded vehicles. Both parents and other passengers try to protect the little one: they hold him in his arms, they usually give him a seat, sometimes those who are sitting take him on their knees. An older child is forced to mostly take care of himself when standing with his parents, but next to others, or following his parents to the exit. He meets obstacles on his way in the form of large and dense human bodies, someone’s protruding backsides, many legs standing like columns, and tries to squeeze into a narrow gap between them, like a traveler among heaps of stone blocks. In this situation, the child is tempted to perceive others not as people with a mind and soul, but as living fleshy bodies that interfere with him on the road: “Why are there so many of them here, because of them I don’t have enough space! Why is this aunt, so fat and clumsy, standing here at all, because of her I can’t get through!”
An adult must understand that the child’s attitude to the world around him and people, his worldview positions gradually develop from his own experience of living in various situations. This experience for the child is not always successful and pleasant, but a good teacher can almost always make any experience useful if he works it out with the child.
Consider, as an example, the scene in which a child makes his way to the exit in a crowded vehicle. The essence of helping an adult child should be to transfer the child’s consciousness to a qualitatively different, higher level of perception of this situation. The spiritual problem of the little passenger, described by us above, is that he perceives the people in the car at the lowest and simplest, gu.e. material level — as physical objects blocking his path. The educator must show the child that all people, being physical bodies, simultaneously have a soul, which also implies the presence of reason and the ability to speak.
The problem that arose at the lowest level of human existence in the form of a living body — “I can’t squeeze between these bodies” — is much easier to solve if we turn to a higher mental level that is present in each of us as our main essence. That is, it is necessary to perceive those who are standing — as people, and not as bodies, and address them humanly, for example, with the words: “Aren’t you going out now? Please let me pass!” Moreover, in practical terms, the parent has the opportunity to repeatedly show the child by experience that people are much more effectively influenced by words accompanied by the right actions than by strong pressure.
What does the teacher do in this case? A lot, despite the outward simplicity of his proposal. He translates the situation for the child into a different coordinate system, no longer physical-spatial, but psychological and moral, by not allowing him to react to people as interfering objects and immediately offers the child a new program of behavior in which this new setting is realized.
It is interesting that among adult passengers there are sometimes people who, using the methods available to them, try to instill the same truth into the consciousness of those around them directly through actions. Here is the evidence:
“When someone gu.e. pushes through and doesn’t address me like a human being, as if I’m just a stump on the road, I don’t let me through on purpose until they politely ask!”
By the way, this problem is, in principle, well known to a preschool child from fairy tales: the characters met on the road (stove, apple tree, etc.) only then help the traveler in need (wants to hide from Baba Yaga) when he respects them by joining in full contact with them (despite the rush, he will try the pie that the stove treats, eat an apple from an apple tree — this treat, of course, is a test for him).
As we have already noted, the child’s impressions are often mosaic, emotionally colored, and not always adequate to the situation as a whole. The contribution of an adult is especially valuable in that it is able to help the child form coordinate systems within which it is possible to process, generalize and evaluate the child’s experience.
This may be a system of spatial coordinates that helps the child navigate the terrain — for example, not to get lost on a walk, to find the way home. And a system of social coordinates in the form of acquaintance with the norms, rules, prohibitions of human society, helping to understand everyday situations. And the system of spiritual and moral coordinates, which exists as a hierarchy of values, which becomes a compass for the child in the world of human relations.
Let’s return again to the situation with the child in the transport, making his way in the crush of people to the exit. In addition to the moral plan that we have considered, there is another important aspect in it that opens up a very specific layer of social skills. These are modes of action that a child can learn only by being a passenger in public transport, and not a taxi or a private car. We are talking about specific skills of bodily interaction with other people, without which a Russian passenger, with all his respect for others and the ability to verbally communicate with them, will often not even be able to enter or exit the transport at the desired stop.
If we watch any seasoned passenger on Russian buses and trams deftly making his way to the exit, we will notice that he not only addresses almost everyone he has to disturb in order to change places (“Sorry! Let me pass! Couldn’t would you move a little bit?”), not only thanks those who responded to his requests, not only makes fun of the situation and himself, but also very deftly “flows around” people with his body, trying not to cause them too much inconvenience. Such bodily interaction of this person with people who happened to be on his way is what we have already repeatedly called the term «bodily communication» in this chapter. Almost every Russian citizen encounters in transport situations and directly opposite examples of someone’s bodily stupidity and awkwardness, when a person does not understand that he has stood in the aisle of everyone, does not feel that he needs to turn sideways to pass between people, etc. P.
Success in bodily communication in social situations of the type described above is based on the development of psychological empathy and bodily sensitivity in relation to other people, the absence of fear of touch, as well as good command of one’s own body. The foundation of these abilities is laid in early childhood. It depends on the quality and richness of those bodily contacts that were between the mother and the baby. The tightness and duration of these contacts is associated both with the individual characteristics of the family and with the type of culture to which the family belongs. Then they develop, enriched with the specific skills of the child’s bodily interactions with different people in different situations. The scope and nature of such experience depends on many factors. One of them is a cultural tradition, which is often not recognized by the people who belong to it, although it manifests itself in various forms of raising children and everyday behavior.
Russian people have traditionally been distinguished by their ability to physically and mentally interact with another person at close range, starting from a heart-to-heart conversation and ending with the fact that they have always been habitually successful in freestyle wrestling, hand-to-hand combat, bayonet attacks, group dances, etc. In ancient tradition Russian fisticuffs that have come down to our days, some basic principles of the Russian style of communication are clearly visible, enshrined in the form of fighting techniques.
The attention of the psychologist is immediately attracted by the Russian specifics of using space in interaction with the enemy. The most important technique that all fist fighters carefully and for a long time work out is «sticking» — the ability to get as close as possible to a partner and «line up» in his personal space, catching the rhythm of his movements. The Russian fighter does not distance himself, but, on the contrary, strives for the closest contact with the enemy, getting used to him, becoming at some point his shadow, and through this he cognizes and understands him.
To achieve such a close interaction of two rapidly moving bodies, in which one literally envelops the other, is possible only on the basis of a highly developed ability of a person to enter into subtle mental contact with a partner. This ability develops on the basis of empathy — emotional and bodily attunement and empathy, at some point giving a feeling of internal merging with a partner into a single whole. The development of empathy is rooted in early childhood communication with the mother, and then determined by the variety and quality of bodily communication with peers and parents.
In Russian life, both in the patriarchal-peasant and in the modern one, one can find many social situations that literally provoke people into close contact with each other and, accordingly, develop their ability for such contact. (By the way, even the Russian village habit, which surprised observers with its irrationality, to put peasant huts very close to each other, despite frequent fires, apparently has the same psychological origins. And they, in turn, are connected with the spiritual and moral foundations of the people’s concept of human world) Therefore, despite all the reservations based on economic reasons (lack of rolling stock, etc.), Russian transport, crowded with people, is very traditional from a cultural and psychological point of view.
Foreigners from the West are easily recognized in our transport based on the fact that they need more space. On the contrary, they try not to let a stranger get too close, to prevent him from penetrating into their personal space and try to protect him as best they can: spread their arms and legs wider, keep a greater distance when entering and exiting, try to avoid accidental bodily contact with others.
One American visiting St. Petersburg regularly stayed on the bus and could not get off at his stop, because it was the last one. In order not to push along with the others, he always let everyone who got out ahead of him and kept such a large distance between himself and the last person walking in front of him that an impatient crowd of passengers on the ring rushed inside the bus without waiting for it to go down. It seemed to him that if he came into contact with these people, they would crush and crush him, and in order to save himself, he ran back to the bus. When we discussed his fears with him and formulated a new task for him — to make bodily contact with people and explore for ourselves what it is — the results were unexpected. After a whole day of traveling in transport, he said with delight: “Today I cuddled and hugged in a crush with so many strangers that I can’t come to my senses — it’s so interesting, so strange — to feel so close to a stranger, because I’m even with I never touch my family so closely.”
It turns out that the openness, bodily accessibility, publicity of the passenger of our public transport is both his misfortune and his advantage — a school of experience. The passenger himself often dreams of being alone and would like to be in a taxi or his own car. However, not everything that we do not like is not useful for us. And vice versa — not everything that is convenient for us is really good for us.
A personal car gives its owner a lot of advantages, primarily independence and external security. He sits in it, as in his own house on wheels. This house is experienced as the second «corporeal I» — large, strong, fast moving, closed from all sides. This is how the person sitting inside begins to feel.
But as it usually happens when we transfer part of our functions to an assistant-thing, having lost it, we feel helpless, vulnerable, insufficient. A person who is accustomed to driving in his car begins to feel it like a turtle in his shell. Without a car — on foot or, even more so, in public transport — he feels deprived of those properties that seemed to him his own: mass, strength, speed, security, confidence. He seems to himself small, slow, too open to unpleasant outside influences, not knowing how to cope with large spaces and distances. If such a person had the previously developed skills of a pedestrian and a passenger, then quite quickly, within a few days, they are restored again. These skills are formed in childhood and adolescence and provide adaptability, the normal “fitness” of a person in a situation on the street and in transport. But they also have a deeper psychological underpinning.
When a person fully lived through some social situations, got used to them, this forever gives him a double profit: in the form of developing external behavioral skills and in the form of internal experience that goes to building his personality, building up its stability, the strength of self-awareness and other qualities.
A Russian emigrant who came on vacation from the United States with a three-year-old daughter, who was already born abroad, talks about her pastime in Russia: “Mashenka and I try to travel more in transport, She likes it so much that she can look at people up close there. After all, in America, we, like everyone else, drive only by car. Masha hardly sees other people up close and does not know how to communicate with them. She will be very helpful here.»
Therefore, paraphrasing the words of Voltaire, a psychologist can say: if there were no public transport filled with people, then it would be necessary to invent it and periodically carry children on it to develop many valuable socio-psychological skills.
The bus, tram and trolleybus turns out to be one of those classes in the school of life for the child, in which it is useful to learn. What an older child learns there, going on independent trips, we will consider in the next chapter.
Trips without adults: new opportunities
Usually, the beginning of independent trips of an urban child in public transport is associated with the need to get to school. It is far from always possible for his parents to accompany him, and often already in the first grade (that is, at the age of seven) he begins to travel by himself. From the second or third grade, independent trips to school or to a circle become the norm, although adults try to accompany the child and meet him on the way back. By this age, the child has already accumulated quite a lot of experience in riding public transport, but together with an adult accompanying person, who is felt as protection, a guarantee of safety, support in difficult times.
Traveling alone is a completely different matter. Anyone knows How long subjective difficulty increases when you first do something completely on your own, without a mentor nearby. In simple and seemingly habitual actions, unforeseen difficulties are immediately revealed.
Traveling alone is always risky. After all, on the way, a person is open in relation to any accidents and at the same time is deprived of the support of the familiar environment. The saying: “Houses and walls help” is a psychological point. As we discussed in Chapter 2, at home or in well-known, recurring situations, the human self materializes itself in a variety of forms, which gives the individual a sense of many external supports that give it stability. Here our «I» becomes like an octopus, which stretched out its tentacles in different directions, fixed on the rocks and ledges of the seabed, and successfully resists the current.
The traveler-passenger, on the contrary, breaks away from the familiar and stable and finds himself in a situation where everything around is changeable, fluid, impermanent: views flicker outside the windows of the transport, unfamiliar people around enter and leave. The very etymology of the word «passenger» suggests that this is a person moving through and past that which is unchanged and stands still.
By and large, the most reliable and stable element of the changing situations around the passenger is himself, his own «I». It is it that is constantly present and can be a support and an unshakable reference point in the changing coordinate system of the outside world. Since the passenger moves in the space of this world, his «I» is no longer psychologically dispersed among the elements of his usual habitat, but, on the contrary, is more concentrated within his own bodily boundaries. Thanks to this, the «I» becomes more concentrated, grouped in itself. Thus, the role of a passenger makes a person more clearly aware of his self against the backdrop of an alien changing environment.
If we look at the problem more broadly and take a larger scale, we will find additional confirmation of these arguments.
For example, from time immemorial, travel, in particular trips to study outside the native land, has been considered an important element in the upbringing of a person in adolescence. They were undertaken not only to enrich the cognitive experience, but also for personal growth. After all, youth is that period of personality formation, when a young person must learn to feel the inner constancy of himself, to seek more support in himself, and not outside, to discover the idea of his own identity. Once in a foreign, and even more so in a foreign, foreign cultural environment, being not like others, a person begins to notice differences and notice in himself many properties that he had not been aware of before. It turns out that, having set off on a journey to see the world around, the traveler is simultaneously looking for a way to himself.
Adult, already formed people often tend to leave home, go on a trip to break away from everything familiar, gather their thoughts, feel and understand themselves more fully, and return to themselves.
To some, it may seem too bold, incomparable in scale, to compare a long-distance journey of an adult and an independent trip of a first-grader child to school. But in the world of mental phenomena, it is not the external scale of events that is important, but their internal meaningful similarity. In this case, both situations make a person feel his separateness, his integrity, take responsibility for himself and solve important tasks related to the ability to navigate in the physical and social space of the world around him.
An analysis of the stories of children of primary school and adolescence about how they learned to ride in urban transport makes it possible to distinguish three phases in this process, each of which has its own psychological tasks.
The first phase of independent development of public transport by children can be called adaptive. This is the phase of getting used to, adapting, adjusting oneself to the requirements of the new situation.
At this stage, the task of the child is to do everything right and get to the destination without incident. This means: choose the right bus, trolleybus or tram number, don’t stumble, don’t fall, don’t lose your things along the way, don’t be crushed by a stream of adults and get off at the right stop. The child knows that he needs to remember a lot of rules: you need to validate a ticket, buy a ticket or show a travel card, when crossing the street you need to look to the left somewhere, and somewhere to the right (although he often does not remember firmly where is right and where is left) and etc.
The ability to correctly play the role of a passenger and feel confident and calm at the same time requires the development of many skills that must be brought to automatism. If we list at least the most important psychological tasks that a young passenger must cope with, then we will be surprised at their abundance and complexity.
The first group of tasks is related to the fact that the transport is continuously moving in space in its own speed regime, to which the passenger must adapt. Therefore, he has to keep the necessary information about the movement of transport in the field of attention all the time.
In land transport, he must monitor what is visible from the window. Where are we going? When should I leave? If this is a child’s regular travel route (as it usually happens), then he must remember and be able to identify the characteristic signs outside the window — intersections, houses, signs, advertisements — by which he can navigate, prepare in advance for the exit. Sometimes children additionally count stops along the way.
In the subway, the passenger tries to listen carefully to the announcement of the name of the next station. In addition, he has a couple of seconds to recognize the individual station decor when the train is already stopping. The great difficulty for the child is the continuity of such tracking. Children are tired of having to be constantly included in a changing spatial situation — this is very difficult for them. But it’s scary to pass your stop. It seems to many younger children that they will be taken away to no one knows where and from there it will not be possible to find their way back.
If an adult loses his bearings along the way, then usually it is easiest for him to ask his neighbors: what was or will be the stop, where to get off, if you need to go somewhere?
For most children, this is nearly impossible. Here they are faced with the second group of tasks — socio-psychological — which the passenger must also solve. It is very scary to turn to a stranger in a transport. Sometimes it is easier to cry and so attract the attention of potential helpers. The people around the child seem to him omnipotent, powerful, incomprehensible, dangerously unpredictable in their actions. Compared to them, the child feels weak, small, powerless, subordinate — like a mouse in front of a mountain. His timid, indistinct voice is often not heard by anyone when he quietly asks a legitimate question: “Are you leaving now?”, “Can I go through?” But usually younger children are afraid to contact adults in transport. They are frightened by the very idea of initiating contact — it’s like letting a genie out of a bottle or tickling a giant with a spear: it is not known what will happen.
When a child travels alone, without peers who give courage, all his personal problems worsen in public: he is afraid of doing something wrong, incurring the wrath of adults or simply their close attention, because of which he is able to get confused even in what he knows and knows how to do. The feeling of weakness and fear of contact, as well as the undeveloped skills that are usually developed during trips with parents, sometimes lead to the fact that the child not only cannot make his way to the exit with a word (remarks like “Let me go”), but also is afraid even squeeze between the bodies of other people to get off at the right stop, if you didn’t have time to be at the exit in advance.
Usually the appropriate social skills are developed with experience: it will take some time — and the child will look completely different. But there are cases when such problems of the adaptation phase persist in adolescence, and even later. This happens in socially unadapted people who, for some reason, have kept the problems of their childish “I” unresolved, which does not know what to rely on in itself, and is afraid of the complex world around.
A normal adult can relive some of the problems of the adaptation phase and feel many of the difficulties of a child passenger if he finds himself in public transport somewhere for cash, in prim England or exotic Dhaka, in a foreign country whose language is not well known , and does not know household rules.
Now let’s try to answer the question: what specific skills are formed in a child in the first phase of independent development of transport?
Firstly, it is a set of skills that ensure psychological involvement in the situation and the ability to keep under control the attention of many environmental parameters that are constantly changing in their own mode: the landscape outside the windows, the people around them, the shocks and vibrations of the car, the driver’s messages, etc.
Secondly, an attitude towards contact with surrounding objects and people is developed and strengthened, the skills of such contact appear: you can touch, hold, sit down, place yourself where it is convenient for you and where you do not interfere with others, you can contact others with certain questions and requests, etc.
Thirdly, knowledge of the social rules that people obey in transport situations is formed: what the passenger has the right to do and what not, how people usually act in certain situations.
Fourthly, a certain level of self-awareness appears, the ability to answer oneself (and not just other people, as it was in early childhood) to the question “who am I?” in its various versions. The child begins to at least to some extent realize himself as an independent bodily, social, psychological entity and does not lose contact with himself in the current situation. And this happens not only with children. For example, a young man stands at the very door in a subway car and does not notice that he is holding this door with his foot, preventing it from closing. Three times a voice on the radio asks to release the doors, as the train cannot move. The young man does not take this to himself. Finally, the irritated passengers say to him: why are you holding the door with your foot? The young man is surprised, embarrassed and immediately removes his leg.
Without a sense of one’s own stability and integrity, the reality of one’s presence in a social situation, one’s status in it, one’s rights and opportunities, there will be no personality foundation that ensures the onset of the next two phases.
As we have already noted, children usually acquire all these skills gradually, by experience — life teaches them by itself. But a thoughtful educator, and in special cases, a psychologist, after observing the child, can provide him with significant help if he pays attention to those aspects of his experience that turned out to be insufficiently lived by the child. Moreover, there will be two fundamental points: self-awareness and a positive attitude towards contact with the outside world.
Children living in the adaptation phase, who are just starting to ride in transport on their own, are usually very focused on themselves and their actions and are more anxious. However, the calmer and more confident the child feels in the role of a passenger, the more, having disconnected from problems with his own “I”, he begins to observe what is happening around. Thus begins the second phase of the child’s acquisition of passenger experience, which can be called indicative. In familiar situations, the position of the observer is well and long familiar to the child. Now, as a passenger, he feels independent enough to direct closer attention to the world outside the window and to the people inside the transport. The novelty of the orienting phase lies in the fact that the observational interest of the child turns from narrowly practical into research. The child is now occupied not only with how not to abyss in this world, but with the world itself as such — its structure and the events taking place there. Even the child no longer just holds his ticket in his hand, afraid of losing it, but examines the numbers on it, adds up the first three and the last three to check: suddenly the amounts will match, and he will be happy.
In the world outside the window, he begins to notice a lot: what streets he is driving on, what other modes of transport are going in the same direction, and what interesting things are happening on the street. At home, he proudly tells his parents that he knows exactly the schedule of his bus, which he checked by the clock, that today he managed to quickly take another number and drive almost to school when his bus broke down. Now you can often hear stories from him about various street incidents and interesting cases.
If the parents are in good contact with the child and talk to him a lot, they may notice that the older he gets, the more closely he watches people on the bus. This is especially noticeable after nine years — the age when the child begins to be interested in the motives of human actions. Some children literally collect material for a kind of «Human Comedy», individual chapters of which they are happy to tell interested adults over lunch or dinner. Then it may turn out that the child closely studies different social types, is keenly attentive to all situations where the characters are significant people for him (for example, parents with children), notices the humiliated and oppressed and wants to discuss the problems of justice, fate, the struggle between good and evil. in the human world.
An adult discovers that travel in transport is becoming a real school of life, where a city child, especially in our turbulent times, unfolds a whole kaleidoscope of faces and situations, some of which he sees fleetingly, while others he systematically observes for a long time — for example, regular passengers. If an adult is able to become a benevolent and inspiring interlocutor, then in these conversations, using the example of discussing live situations that are significant for a child, an adult can psychologically work through many important topics together with him. Unfortunately, parents often perceive the child’s life experiences as empty chatter that is not worth listening to, or simply as funny situations that do not have a deep meaning.
As the child gets older, new behavioral tendencies appear during early adolescence. The third phase of the development of transport is coming, which can be called experimental and creative. In this phase, a passion for experimentation and an unwillingness to be a slave to circumstances are clearly visible. We can say that the child is already adapted enough not to adapt anymore.
This is a new stage in his relationship with the world, which manifests itself in different forms, but they all have something in common — the desire to be an active person, inquisitive and prudently managing the means of transportation available to her for her own purposes. Not where they will take me, but where I will go.
This active and creative attitude can manifest itself in a real passion of the child to combine different modes of transport and choose more and more new ways from point «A» to point «B». So, as if in order to save time, the child travels by two buses and a trolleybus where it is possible to easily reach by one mode of transport. But he jumps from stop to stop, enjoying the choice, his ability to combine routes and make decisions. The schoolboy here is like a kid who has eight felt-tip pens in a box, and he definitely wants to draw with each of them in order to feel that he is able to use all the tools at his disposal.
Or, having arrived late for a private English lesson, he joyfully informs the teacher that today he has found another new, already third transport opportunity to get to her house.
At this stage of the development of the child, transport becomes for him not just a means of transportation in the urban environment, but also a tool for its knowledge. When the child was younger, it was important for him not to lose the one and only true path. Now he thinks in a fundamentally different way: not by separate routes, which are laid like corridors from one place to another, — now he sees a whole spatial field in front of him, in which you can independently choose different trajectories of movement.
The appearance of such a vision indicates that intellectually the child has risen a step higher — he has mental «maps of the area» that give an understanding of the continuity of the space of the surrounding world. It is interesting that the child immediately brings these intellectual discoveries to life not only in the new nature of the use of transport, but also in an unexpectedly flashing love for drawing various maps and diagrams.
It can be a usual note of a twelve-year-old girl, left for her mother in the summer at the dacha, indicating which of her friends she went to visit, and attaching a plan of the area, on which arrows indicate the path to this friend’s house.
It can be a map of another fairy-tale country, where a child periodically moves in his fantasies, or a «Map of Pirates» with a careful designation of buried treasures, tied to the real area.
Or maybe a drawing of their own room, unexpected for parents, with the image of the objects in it in the “top view” projection.
Against the background of such intellectual achievements of the child of early adolescence, the imperfection of the previous stages of the child’s understanding of space becomes especially obvious. Recall that children begin to think spatially, based on the category of place. Various familiar «places» are perceived by the child at first as islands known to him in the sea of life. But in the mind of a small child, the very idea of a map as a description of the location of these places relative to each other is missing. That is, it does not have a topological scheme of space. (Here we can recall that the mythological space of the world of an ancient person, like the world of the subconscious of a modern person, is based on children’s logic and also consists of separate “places”, between which empty voids gape).
Then, between separate places for the child, long corridors are stretched — routes, characterized by the continuity of the course.
And only then, as we have seen, does the idea of the continuity of space appear, which is described through mental «maps of the area.»
This is the sequence of stages in the development of children’s ideas about space. However, by adolescence, not all children reach the level of mental spatial maps. Experience shows that there are many adults in the world who think spatially like younger schoolchildren, through the trajectories of routes known to them from one point to another, and partly like small children, understanding it as a collection of “places”.
The level of development of an adult’s (as well as a child’s) ideas about space can be assessed by many of his statements and actions. In particular, by the way a person is able to verbally describe to another how he can get from one place to another. An adult must take into account his level and capabilities in this regard when he tries, as an educator, to help a child in the difficult task of understanding the structure of the space of the world around him.
Fortunately, children themselves are not born in this respect. Very often they join forces. Their cognitive spatial interest is manifested in the exploratory activities that they undertake with friends. Equally, both girls and boys love to ride transport along the entire route — from ring to ring. Or they sit down on some number to see where they will bring it. Or they get out half way and go on foot to explore unfamiliar streets, look into courtyards. And sometimes they leave with friends for a walk in a distant park in another area in order to bring new impressions to everyday life and feel their independence and the ability to conquer space. That is, the children’s company uses public transport to solve a number of their own psychological problems.
It happens that parents with amazement and a shudder of the heart learn about these journeys of their children. They need a lot of patience, diplomatic tact and at the same time firmness in order to reach a mutual agreement and find such opportunities to satisfy their childish passion for geographical and psychological discoveries and entertainment in order to maintain a guarantee of their safety.
Of course, joint trips with one of the parents are also fruitful for the child, when a couple of explorers — big and small — consciously set off towards new adventures, climbing into unfamiliar places, reserved and strange corners, where you can make unexpected discoveries, dream up, play together. It is very useful at leisure to consider with a child of 10-12 years old a map of the area familiar to him, to find places and streets examined during walks.
The ability to compare the direct image of those urban areas where the child himself has been, and the symbolic representation of the same landscape on the map, gives a very valuable effect: in the spatial representations of the child, an intellectual volume and freedom of logical actions appear. It is achieved through the simultaneous coexistence of a living, movingly lived, visually representable image of a familiar spatial environment and its own conditional (symbolic) scheme in the form of a map. When the same spatial information is described for a child and perceived by him in two languages at once — in the language of mental images and in sign-symbolic form — he has a real understanding of the structure of space. If a child becomes able to freely translate spatial information from the language of living images into the sign language of maps, plans, diagrams (and vice versa), the path to all types of practical and intellectual-logical mastery of space opens up for him. This ability is associated with the phase of intellectual development that the child enters in early adolescence. In fact, children tell us about the appearance of this ability when they begin to get involved in drawing maps.
The adult’s job is to notice the child’s intuitive step towards intellectual maturity and purposefully support him by offering forms of activities that are exciting for the child.
It is good when the educator feels what the child is strong in, and where he lacks information, does not accumulate a living experience of contacts with the outside world, and does not decide on independent actions. In filling such gaps, the child can usually be helped in fairly simple and natural ways within the framework of situations familiar to him, which can be deployed in unexpected ways by setting new tasks. But five or ten years will pass, and a pedagogically neglected, although already an adult, person will painfully solve the same childhood problems of contact with the outside world. However, it is much more difficult for him to get help.
It is important to note that the phases of mastering transport have a well-defined sequence, but are not strictly tied to certain age periods of childhood. Among our adult informants were people who lamented that they had «everything too late compared to others.»
A girl who came from the provinces, both in adolescence and in adolescence, continues to solve the problems of the first, adaptive phase: she learns not to be shy, not to be afraid of people, to feel “like everyone else” in transport.
A young woman of 27 is surprised to report her recent desire to know: “Where does the bus go next after I get off?” — and his decision to ride this bus to the ring, as children do at the age of ten or twelve. “Why do I not know anything about what is around me? My parents didn’t let me go anywhere, and I was afraid of everything I didn’t know.”
And vice versa, there are adults who, like children, continue to develop a creative approach to the development of transport and the urban environment and set themselves new research tasks in accordance with their adult capabilities.
One likes to drive different cars. He is fascinated by the process of “catching” a driver who is ready to give a lift, it is interesting to know the character of the driver by the way he drives the car. He has tried almost all brands of cars and is proud of the fact that he went to work in a fuel tanker, in an ambulance, in a cash-in-transit car, in a traffic cop, in technical assistance, in food, and only out of superstition did not use the services of special funeral transport. Another person retains the boyish methods of exploring space, but brings a solid theoretical basis for them. Such was one Danish businessman who came to Russia to build infrastructure facilities: highways, bridges, airfields, etc. His favorite pastime in his free hours was traveling by public transport. He was proud that he visited absolutely all the stations of the St. Petersburg metro and in a couple of years traveled from ring to ring along the main routes of surface public transport. At the same time, he was driven not so much by professional interest as by curiosity, pleasure from the process itself and the conviction that only a person who has seen everything not on a map and has traveled everywhere not in his own car, but together with ordinary citizens-passengers, can consider that he knows city in which he settled.
The story about children’s ways of mastering and using transport will be incomplete if we do not mention one more feature of the child’s relationship with vehicles.
Traveling in our public transport is always a ride into the unknown: you can never be completely sure that you are in control of the situation, that you will reach your destination, and that you will not get stuck along the way, that nothing will happen along the way. In addition, in general, a passenger is a person who is in an intermediate state. He is no longer here (where he left) and not yet there (where the path leads). Therefore, he is inclined to think and even guess about what fate is preparing for him when he arrives. Especially if he goes to such a significant place as a school, or from school with a diary full of different marks, he goes home. It seems that this is why in the tradition of the children’s subculture there are various fortune-telling that children do in transport. We have already mentioned fortune telling on tickets for luck by adding and comparing the sums of the first three and last three numbers of the ticket number. You can also pay attention to the number of the car in which you are traveling. You can guess by the numbers of cars on the street or guess the number of cars of a certain color that you need to count on the road so that everything is fine. Children guess even by the buttons on their coats.
Like ancient people, children tend to resort to magical actions if it is necessary to influence an object or situation so that it is in favor of the child. One of the magical tasks that confronts a child almost daily is to implore transport to quickly reach their destination. The more unpleasant accidents that can occur along the way, the more actively the child makes efforts to “clear up” the situation in his favor. Adult readers may be surprised by the fact that one of the most capricious modes of transport, which absorbs a lot of the mental strength of a child, is an elevator. The child often finds himself alone with him and is sometimes forced to build a complex system of love contracts with an elevator so as not to get stuck between floors, which children are afraid of.
For example, a girl of eight years old lived in a house where there were two parallel elevators — a «passenger» one and a more spacious «cargo» one. The girl had to ride one or the other. They got stuck intermittently. Observing the behavior of the elevators, the girl came to the conclusion that you often get stuck in the elevator in which you had not traveled for a long time before, and this happens because the elevator is angry and offended by the passenger for neglecting it. Therefore, the girl made it a rule to approach first the elevator on which she was not going to go. The girl bowed to him, greeted him and, respecting the elevator in this way, rode another with a calm soul. The procedure turned out to be magically effective, but it took a long time and sometimes attracted the attention of bystanders. Therefore, the girl simplified it: she went up on one elevator, and prayed to herself in parallel to another, asked him for forgiveness for not using it, and solemnly promised to ride it on the next day of the week. She always kept her promise and was sure that was why she never got stuck in an elevator, unlike other people.
As we have already said, pagan relations with the natural and objective world around are generally characteristic of children. Most often, adults do not know even a small fraction of the complex system of interactions that the child establishes with the essences of things that are significant for him.