Sergei Ross
Schools throughout the world attempt to infuse the minds of their children with a basic sense of patriotism. Usually this is built around love for the flag and the anthem, for native landscapes, and the image of the Motherland - traditional conservative nationalism. History and social studies lessons are embedded with state propaganda, although one at least learns a basic idea of the state structure, constitution or the electoral system. But the current Russian state does not believe that this propaganda is sufficient.
No longer are schools and parents the main source of information for children; the majority have access to the internet, and snippets of news and analytics from the media reach them as well. Of course, under conditions of internet censorship, the likelihood that an independent source will fall into the field of view of a schoolchild is greatly reduced, but still there are dissenting views to be found online. This irritates our officials, who want to control the entire flow of information for children, and interpret it in the politically correct manner using their favorite tool to do so - school teachers.
On the first Monday of September, the first “conversation about important matters” were held in Russian schools. This was a patriotic non-lesson - “discussion,” if you must, but such a term implies the presence of differing points of view, of which there were none. These became mandatory for all schoolchildren after Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 1 about patriotism, science, and history (specifically, his version of Ukrainian history).
The Alliance of Teachers and the organization “Soft Power” have already issued a statement of disagreement with the new educational policy. Do you know what this struggle against a new round of state propaganda in schools reminds me of? The introduction of “Fundamentals of Religious Culture and Secular Ethics” in schools in year 2010.
I see some parallels: the indignation of civil society and parents, the lack of understanding on the part of teachers as to how to approach the new subject, confusion about what were field of possibilities and the spectrum of freedom allowed within the subject. According to the comments of teachers I know, then there was some opportunity to choose a religious angle or to focus on instilling secular humanist values in children. Of course, there were negative elements, beginning with the segregation of students along religious lines, and ending with unscientific paternalistic textbooks that explored the subject from only one side. But the teachers had some freedom - the path, flanked as it was with red flags that one could not go beyond, was quite wide.
Now the lines of the flags are closing in, leaving a narrow path that can only be walked in formation, in one direction, in lockstep. “Conversations about important matters” in such a system cannot allow the student to have his own opinion. In this sense, the school is the ideal medium for propaganda, because there is a monopoly on the interpretation of information, a clear hierarchy, a power structure concreted in the walls which simply will not allow students to argue with the teacher’s pronouncements, even during the so-called “discussions.” Of course, it all depends on the teacher - many will be lucky, but not all.
Consequently, we are left with a schoolboy who is blocked from independent sources of information on the internet, who is given propaganda every Monday as the first lesson, who is taught a version of modern history in which Ukraine as a separate state simply did not exist. The only way out for parents is to take the situation into their own hands, to resist the pressure, boycott the lessons, write appeals to the principals and the Ministry of Education demanding to remove the lessons, or to make them optional, and to talk with their child honestly and on an equal footing.
Parents’ outrage at the introduction of online education in times of COVID helped freeze an unpopular law. Collective action now can save children from a further tightening of the screws. It is in our power to slow down this regime’s rush to totalitarianism.