Vasiliy Bogin is the principal of one of the first non-state schools in Russia. The New Humanitarian School (NHS) that he founded has been working since the perestroika era.
Vasiliy Bogin has been cooperating with the Russian Academy of Education since 1987.
At the very start of his pedagogical activities Vasiliy Bogin clearly understood the inadequacy of the Soviet educational structure of that time, since it was not focused on a child’s development and did not prepare children for independent activity. Therefore, he decided to set up an educational system aimed at revealing the entire potential of every child and teach the children the basic ways of organization, self-organization, and different kinds of activities, such as intellectual, communicative, etc.
Vasiliy Bogin studied basic theories of the most prominent psychologists and pedagogues and chose as the basis for his work the ideas of the Moscow Methodological Club that was founded and headed by the outstanding philosopher and methodologist Georgiy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky. Then he created a system of education focusing on development of a child’s inner world, his/her creative abilities, thinking, understanding, integrative vision of concepts and phenomena, and systemic approach to analyzing and solving problems. The school pays special attention to individualization: it thoroughly analyzes specific features of every child and works out a plan of his/her further education on the basis of results of this analysis.
Vasiliy Bogin has organized a multi-step system of upgrading teachers’ qualification in his school, which enables him to conduct permanent work on improvement of methods of education. Currently, the school’s teaching staff is actively participating in elaboration of new educational standards within the experimental work conducted by the Russian Education Ministry.
The NHS has been accredited by some international organizations such as Accreditation International (Ai), AdvancED, and NCPSA. It is the only school in Russia so far having these accreditations.