What are They Teaching Our Kids?

Behind the headlines about elections and oligarchs and terrorism, profound changes are afoot that will alter how future generations of Russians see the world. In schools across Russia, new curricula are being introduced, history is being rewritten, and the role of the religion in education is being hotly debated.

“The holy hermits and sisters chaste

“That their hearts might levitate ... uh ... levitate ... ”

“Oh, Vadim, come on! ‘To distant realms,’” prompts Sofia Filippovna.

“To distant realms,” whispers the eight-year-old student, who is attempting to recite Pushkin’s archaically-phrased poem. Young Vadim might understand the meaning of the words he pronounces, thanks to Sofia Filipovna’s persistent pummeling of Pushkin’s verses into her young charges’ brains, but no second grader could begin to comprehend what the poet is really saying.

Vadim is still in front of the class and Sofia Filippovna challenges him further. “Which word should be stressed in the line, ‘But let me see, O Lord, my transgressions?’”

“The word ‘my,’” Vadim enthusiastically exclaims.

“We should be grateful to Pushkin for translating prayer into poetry,” Sofia Filippovna concludes, summoning her next victim to the blackboard. His task will be to recount a parable from the New Testament.

Rhetoric classes at Moscow’s “Peresvet” elementary school are not simply for teaching seven to ten year olds the art of speaking in public, but also to lay “the foundations of Christian mentality and behavior.” This intent is spelled out in the foreword to the students’ textbook, Introduction to the Cathedral of the Word. Its author is none other than Vadim’s teacher, Sofia Filipovna Ivanova, one of the school’s founders.

State-run Peresvet is an Orthodox oriented school, which also has a so-called “ethnic and cultural component.” It is therefore allowed to openly engage in “forming religious mentality.” It functions according to a special ethnic and cultural program, which includes over 40 schools and kindergartens in the capital. In addition to the Russian “ethnic component,” there are also schools that teach Tatar, Jewish, Armenian, Georgian, Lithuanian and Greek values and cultures.

But Peresvet and the 40-odd other schools are more the exception than the rule. Most of Moscow’s state-run schools have resisted introduction of religion into the classroom. That stance has been supported, until recently, by Moscow’s Department of Education. “When we have a law connecting the school and the Church, then we could start considering the question of teaching the basics of Orthodox culture,” said Department Head Lyubov Kezina.

But things may be about to change. In the last three years, the debate over religion in Russian schools has heated up to volcanic temperatures.

Careening Towards Orthodoxy

A decade ago, in 1993, the Ministry of Education issued regulations which allowed elective teaching of religious subjects, such as “Foundations of the Orthodox Culture,” or “History of World Religions.” Religious instruction was also allowed, but only at the request of children or their parents, and only outside normal school hours. But even before this legal loophole appeared,  missionaries of all imaginable denominations and sects – from Orthodox priests to Moonies – rushed in to fill the demand for meaning in this hitherto forbidden realm.

Yet the tide soon subsided. Schools denied Moonies and other questionable sects access, while Orthodox priests, busy with resuscitating their parishes, begged off the additional responsibilities of teaching. The work was unpaid and often unrewarding, said Moscow priest and former teacher Vladimir Lapshin: “I am explaining to the class that man is brother to man and that we all have one Father in Heaven, and then the child goes to his biology lesson and is told that man descended from the apes. So the Ten Commandments turn into empty words to this child. Why raise children in doublethink, which we have just rid ourselves of after so many years of Soviet rule?”

The idea of teaching children Orthodox Culture (meaning culture and ethics, rather than God’s Law) was an outgrowth of the collapse of Soviet communist ideology. Society was floundering in an ideological vacuum, so church leaders suggested introducing a system of moral education in schools, to be founded on Russia’s traditional cultural and religious values.

In some regions, the idea was quickly implemented. For instance, in 1997 in Kursk region, where the eparchy is headed by Metropolitan Yuvenaly Tarasov, a fierce advocate of a strong state and Russian Orthodoxy, the course, “Foundations of Orthodox Culture,” was introduced in some 300 schools – half of the region’s total number. The region’s governor at the time was Alexander Rutskoi, one of the convicted leaders in the failed 1993 coup against President Boris Yeltsin. The metropolitan had convinced secular authorities that Orthodoxy was not simply a religion, but an ideology cementing the state and nation together.

Today, as Russia’s leaders search for a new “national idea,” minus the communist husk, the famous formula introduced in 1833 by Minister of Education Count Sergey Uvarov – “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” may once again find its place.

Officially, “Foundations of Orthodox Culture” was introduced as an elective, which means students can refuse to attend. But in most of the region’s schools, it is taught as part of the regional curriculum during normal school hours and thus is obligatory for all students (the so-called “regional curriculum” dictates what students are to study during 20-30% of school time and, along with the federal (all-Russian) curriculum, is compulsory). Despite this fact, school authorities say that students do have a choice about attending the classes. Director of School No. 28 in Kursk, Valery Negukov, insisted that all the thirteen fifth-graders who attend the class at his school do so of their own free will. The headmaster’s words are supported by the fact that the fifth grade numbers twice as many students.

Nevertheless, not all school managers are so scrupulous. “What do you mean, ‘whether they want to attend or not?’” said the head of studies at a school in Zamostyansk, a small town about a hundred kilometers from Kursk. “If the subject is in the curriculum, of course, they must attend. There is no need to ask their opinion.”

Early on, the Foundations course faced fierce resistance from teachers. Aside from philosophical concerns about separation of Church and State, there was a practical issue – there were no teachers or textbooks for the class. Orthodox clergy could not help; they could not even get enough teachers for theological schools. This left volunteers, which meant opening the schools to lone enthusiasts or shameless hacks. “You know, given the salary teachers receive today, it is not surprising that they jump at any opportunity to make some extra money,” said Alexei Vodyansky, an official with the Ministry of General and Professional Education.

Today there are courses at institutes of continuing education in many cities, which prepare teachers to lead the Foundations course. Textbooks, authored mainly by self-made enthusiasts, range in approach from strictly cultural studies to preachy catechisms. Schools choose textbooks based on their idea of how the course should be taught; no one textbook has been recommended by the Education Ministry. Meanwhile, the Ministry has been planning to announce a tender for designing a course, “Religion in Russia.” But not everyone finds this task feasible. “People who could effectively design such a textbook,” Vladimir Filippov, then minister of education said at a recent press-conference, “disappeared in 1917.”

“Today,” said Dr. Vladimir Menshikov, program coordinator for Orthodox Culture Studies in Kursk region, “we have managed to overcome teachers’ resistance. People are starting to understand that we are doing a good thing and are introducing the Foundations course on their own initiative. Teachers feel acutely that children should be taught not only math and Russian, but also something ‘good and right.’” An alternative to the Orthodox idea of “right” is not available in today’s Russia: secular society, which, having lost faith in communist ideals, has not managed during the post-Soviet years to elaborate a system of morals based on liberal, democratic values.

Foundations and other religion courses are presently taught in some 30 Russian regions. Small towns and villages are more likely venues, relying on support of local authorities that is harder to come by in big cities. In Russia’s two capitals, religion is still not welcomed in most schools. Thus, out of St. Petersburg’s 703 schools, only 1% teach religion courses; in Moscow the number is even lower. This phenomenon is partly due to the stance of the local education authorities, who have repeatedly said they will not let religion into schools. One contributing factor is certainly that big cities have much greater ethnic diversity. “All Moscow schools are multiethnic,” said award-winning Moscow teacher Yelena Lubcheva. “In one class, there are children of ethnic Ukrainians, Armenians, Azeris, Tatars, Georgians, Jews and a dozen other nationalities. It is not a given that they will want to study Orthodox Culture. And there is the second question: Who is going to teach it? If it is to be priests, there is no guarantee that they will not use their position to convert students to their religion. If it is to be secular teachers, where do we find them? Those who used to teach the history of the Communist party are not likely to teach the children anything but undiluted atheism.”

Meanwhile, Russian society as a whole is split on the issue of teaching religion in schools. In a multi-year sociological survey, undertaken between 1991 and 1999 as part of the international project “Religion and Values After the Fall of Communism,” headed by Finnish researcher Kimmo Kaariainen, some 42% of those surveyed supported teaching religious studies, while 13% favored teaching Orthodoxy, 10% said schoolchildren should be taught the religion chosen by their parents, and 15% opposed teaching any religion in schools.

Perhaps in response to this uncertainty in society, advocates of religion classes have founded a movement, which gathers annually for “International Christmas Educational Readings,” organized by the Moscow Patriarchy, the Inter-Religious Council of Russia and the Ministry of Education. “Traditional values and ideas of Orthodoxy are an indispensable condition for the society’s well-being,” said Zinaida Vedyakova, a teacher from Lipetsk in a speech at last year’s event. “When children become familiar with the Foundations of Orthodox Culture, the psychological microclimate in the classroom changes for the better; children become more thoughtful about their actions.”

Opponents, meanwhile, fear that, under the guise of “foundations” and “culture,” children will be brainwashed with sermons, schools will be clericalized, and the courses will foster religious conflict. “I am an atheist, and in my family no one was ever religious,” said Pyotr Bizyukov, from Kemerovo. “I don’t consider the Orthodox Church the foundation of Russian culture. Just remember how the Church persecuted Lev Tolstoy. I don’t want my children to be indoctrinated with anything at school. And I have no doubt this will be the case when I hear the bureaucrats and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church talk.”

For their part, children seem most worried about the extra workload. “Frankly, I cannot say that Foundations of Orthodoxy is the kind of subject I would like to study at school,” said 10th grader Irina Zadonskaya, at whose school religion is not taught. “It’s enough that we already have to write homework essays on literature almost every week. And then there is also chemistry, physics, geography and biology.”

The debate has at times become so heated, it has led to rallies, public protests and even lawsuits. In 2002, human rights activists Lev Ponomaryov and Yevgeny Ikhlov filed a suit against the publisher of Alla Borodina’s textbook, Foundations of Orthodox Culture. The case is still pending. The plaintiffs argue that the textbook’s politically incorrect retelling of the Crucifixion encourages anti-Semitism. “Children perceive a textbook to be the ultimate truth,” said Ponomaryov, “and in this case the author is too ardent and biased, advocating the views of the Orthodox Church.”

But even with an “objective” textbook, it would be hard to keep religion courses “strictly informational.” For a teacher who is an Orthodox believer, chances are he will try to convert his students, especially in the countryside, where knowledge of the law is non-existent. In larger cities, people are more atuned to these issues. “Yes, I study church carols with children,” said  a Moscow music teacher who is also a choir member at a church in the Moscow suburbs. “I mean, what else can I teach them to sing? Not the songs about the young [communist] drummers!” Nonetheless, the teacher had to change her programs when parents of ethnic non-Russians complained.

And yet, some religion teachers are unabashed in their bias. A year ago, we attended Moscow’s Public School 225, to sit in on a course in World Religions. The lesson, devoted to “Western and Eastern Christianity,” was an openly anti-Catholic diatribe. The Orthodox Church was shown at every stage of its history as the avatar, while the Catholic Church was portrayed as the incarnation of vice. The teacher was not an Orthodox priest, biased against Catholicism, but an employee of the Russian State Library.

“In the absence of clear-cut methodology and approved textbooks, and given the very inconsistent position of the Education Ministry, which, it seems, just cannot decide for itself what the course should consist of, teaching the Foundations of Orthodoxy remains an unintelligible, amateur initiative,” said Nikolai Mitrokhin, Director of the Institute for Religious Studies in the CIS and Baltic States.

As if all this were not enough, President Vladimir Putin has joined in the debate, although his stance is about as clear as the Education Ministry. “We have a Constitution and Russian laws, according to which the Church is separated from the state, and, likewise, the state is from the Church,” Putin said in February. “And it is not planned to change anything in this respect.” The final decision whether to teach religion in schools, Putin continued, could be made only after a broad public discussion. But a month prior to this, on Christmas Eve, during a visit to a monastery, Putin said: “Orthodoxy is part of our culture. So it would not be right to draw a definite separating line between this culture and the Church. In our country by law the Church is, of course, separated from the state, but in the souls and the history of our people they were always together and will always stay that way.”

Meanwhile, Moscow’s Orthodox community is celebrating a minor victory. At the end of February, Moscow’s Deputy Mayor Mikhail Men announced that an elective course on the History of Religions could be introduced in Moscow schools and that a textbook on the subject was already being studied by the head of the Moscow Education Department, Lyubov Kezina.

And the lobbyists will not rest. At the 2003 Christmas Readings, it was proposed that the government review State Education Standards and introduce “knowledge of the values and traditions of Russian spiritual culture, including the history and culture of Orthodoxy,” which would give Orthodoxy a permanent, compulsory place in the classroom.

New Standards for Schools

The call to introduce changes to State Education Standards is, in fact, timely. For the last 12 years, Russian schools have been guided by Temporary Instructions. But at the end of 2003 the board of the Education Ministry and the Presidium of the Russian Education Academy approved the federal component of the State School Education Standard.

The new Standard was conceived in the early 1990s. Its major innovation was the introduction of two class levels for the final two years of high school – the general, compulsory level, and the specialized, elective level. If a student has a gift for humanities, he joins a humanities class, where literature and languages are taught in greater depth, while taking more basic math and science courses. A student more inclined towards exact sciences will join a specialized class with that orientation.

At present, in most Russian schools, all students in each grade study according to the same program, covering an average of 15 subjects a year in high school, 10 in middle school and 5 in primary school. Elective courses are few, so the value of the new system is that it will allow the students to specialize more in the area of their choice during 10th and 11th grade (compulsory education lasts nine years in Russia; students who want to enter university need to complete 11 grades).

After the new Standard was preliminarily announced in the fall of 2002, it had to go through a period of public evaluation. It was not smooth sailing.

One of the main goals of those who designed the Standard was to lessen Russian students’ workloads. Over the past few decades, Russia’s education standards have been getting increasingly tougher and it is taking a toll on students’ health. According to the Education Ministry, only 10% of students leave 11th grade healthy.

But some critics say that the preliminary Standard overcompensated for the problem, that, as one of the heads of the Higher School of Economics, Alexander Privalov, put it, the new draft Standard proposed in 2002 would confer “a certificate of national imbecility.” Alexander Abramov, corresponding member of the Russian Education Academy, noted that, should that draft be approved, “in the so-called school of the future, they want to shorten the hours allocated for math in high-school from today’s 350 to 210, leaving the level at 350 hours for specialized [math] classes. This means that they are lowering the level of a specialized class to the level of an ordinary school today.”

Other critics of the Standard insisted it was still overloaded with courses, hours and information. Literature got the heaviest beating. “Reading lists [in the Standard’s first draft] were excessive, equivalent to the volume of reading at a [university] philology department, said Irina Bukrinskaya, an expert at the Moscow Linguistics Institute, and a member of the Expert Committee for Russian language and literature. “There was everything in them – from Mythology to Contemporary Literature. Even the Japanese writer Akutagawa. With this approach, there will be no time to actually read, analyze and understand works of literature.”

As a result of the public discussion, the draft Standard was revised: biology and geography teachers got some of their hours back, and literature reading lists were reduced to what they were in the early 1990s. The computer science course was lengthened, as were courses in the social sciences, with more emphasis placed on economics and law.

It is hard to know how the new Standard will do until it is actually tested in schools. All the same, most teachers seem happy to at last have official guidelines. “We are tired of the constant confrontation between the local authorities,” said Larisa Polyakova, principal of Moscow School No. 962. “In our case, it is the Moscow Education Department and the Federal Education Ministry. All these years they have not been able to agree about what should and should not be taught to children. They’ve literally worn us out with all their contradictory instructions and orders. But, on the whole, there is nothing new in the Standard. It’s a pity they keep emasculating the content of courses. Courses lose their depth, but there isn’t much one can do about it – such are the times; you cannot fit everything in.”

The specialized programs for 10th and 11th grade were introduced in ten Russian regions in September 2003. This coming September, the Education Ministry plans to have a total of 1000 schools participating in the program; by 2006, all schools in Russia should be working under the new, bifurcated system and the new Standard.

Rewriting History

In the next few years, the Education Ministry wants to not only standardize curricula and improve teacher qualifications, but also to review and standardize textbooks. Some texts will need to be written from scratch, such as in law and economics, while others will simply be supplemented.

The first subject likely to undergo a wholesale revision is history. Three years ago, the government suddenly became very concerned about the way history was being taught in schools. On August 30, 2001, then Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told a cabinet meeting that “the government had not paid proper, timely attention to textbooks on contemporary history.” Kasyanov was especially upset about current textbooks’ descriptions of the post-Soviet era, which he found to be overly critical.

The Ministry of Education got the message and in January 2002 announced a contest for a new textbook on modern Russian history (20th-21st centuries), to be studied either in the 9th or 10th grade (ages 15-16). Many assumed that, as a result of the tender, Russian schools would end up with two or three new textbooks to choose from. But the Ministry had other ideas. In July 2002 it chose just one winning title: a textbook by a team of authors headed by Nikita Zagladin. The group had assembled the book in six months.

The next hint about the State’s concerns came on November 23, 2003. At a meeting with historians which took place in the Russian State Library, President Putin said that, “there was a time when historians emphasized the negative, as the task was to destroy the old system. Today we have a different, constructive task. This said, it is necessary to remove all the husk and scum which has accumulated over the years.” History textbooks, the president continued, “must cultivate in young people a feeling of pride for one’s history and one’s country.” The following month, Putin sent a letter to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Osipov, charging him to “with the help of historians, review the situation regarding the design of school history textbooks in the shortest timeframe possible.”

The general public has not yet been informed of the results of the Academy’s work, but, in the meantime, a scandal erupted about how history will be retold to schoolchildren. On December 2, 2003, then Education Minister Vladimir Filippov lifted the “approved by the Ministry of Education” stamp from Igor Dolutsky’s textbook, Russian History. XXth Century. As justification for the move, Filippov said that school textbooks should be free of “pseudoliberalism, aimed at distortions of history.”

While the term “pseudoliberalism” is unknown to science, a simple comparison of Dolutsky’s book with the Zagladin history gives a clear indication of where school history courses are headed (see opposite page).

The problem lies not so much in the evaluation of historical figures and events, but in the manner of their evaluation. Zagladin’s text does not attribute its opinions. Tsar Nicholas II, the textbook says, “was, undoubtedly, intelligent (in literary works he was often unjustly called ‘an intellectual nobody’), but his horizons were narrow.” But for students to understand such evaluations, it is important to know who is being quoted and why. Thus, Dolutsky is more “scientific” in using a quote of reformer Count Sergey Witte, in which he describes Nicholas as having “an average education of a guards colonel from a nice family.” Dolutsky also presents the tsar’s astoundingly Spartan diary entry from the day of when he was forced to abdicate: “drank tea and played dominos.”

The two textbooks also seem to understand the meaning of history and the task of a school course in very different terms. Zagladin and his co-authors say that, “knowledge of history means not only mastering a certain number of facts about the past, but also the skill to divide those into the major and the minor, to explain their meaning for the present and the future, to determine the main tendencies in the country’s development during various eras.” It is a conception that seems to derive from a Marxist view of history: there are facts and fiction, right and wrong theories, and inevitable forces of history.

But contemporary historians tend to espouse not mutual-exclusivity in their theories of history, but complementarity. As Dolutsky writes, “We have finally come to understand that neither scientists nor teachers possess the ultimate truth. The truth is reached by squeezing through the cobwebs of myths, born by the perennial falsification of Russian history. This is why the basis of this textbook is a dialogue with readers and a joint searching. Those who expect final answers will be disappointed. This textbook also does not have just one point of view. Facts presented will allow readers to arrive at different conclusions.” Many people are not comfortable with this relativistic approach, but history is more often about shades of grey than black or white.

Still, for some, Dolutsky’s textbook is excessively relativistic and puts too much responsibility for interpretation in the hands of students. Different interpretations of historical events collide on the pages of Dolutsky’s text, in the form of documents, quotes and descriptions. But no theory is presented as ultimately correct. This approach is surely what incited the Education Ministry’s discontent. Dolutsky suggested that children discuss and decide for themselves how to evaluate Vladimir Putin’s presidency, and, among the differing opinions on the subject provided for discussion were the words of writer and journalist Yuri Burtin, who wrote that, after Putin was elected president, an authoritarian regime was established in Russia. And there is a quote from Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal “Yabloko” party, in which he called modern Russia a “police state.”

In Zagladin’s textbook, there is no controversy or dialog. Sidebars called “Points of View” provide three or four anonymous theses which are not related to the text in any way. “Minor” facts are ignored, and the list of facts speaks for itself. The Civil War, for instance, is presented, according to Soviet historical tradition, as a clash of the Reds and the Whites. The “Greens” (representing the peasants’ interests) are mentioned only briefly, as a group that did not have a “common ideology.” Yet historians have long since concluded that the Russian Civil War was a war between not two, but three forces. Thus, Dolutsky cites anarchist Nestor Makhno and rebel Red Cavalry leader Filipp Mironov to give 10th graders an idea of who the Greens were.

Zagladin does not mention Russia’s repressed ethnic groups, deported under Stalin and partially rehabilitated under Khrushchev. As a result, “the rise of nationalism in autonomous republics” in 1990-91 and Chechen separatism appear as if from nowhere, as if they had no roots in Russian history. Dolutsky, however, offers context, stating, for one, that “in 1956 a Committee of Inquiry for investigating the circumstances of the Chechen deportation found in Chechen villages the bones of women, children and elderly who had been burned alive.”

The Siege of Leningrad does not even appear in the pages of Zagladin’s book. It is as if it did not take place. Instead, Zagladin, et al provide the enthusiastic conclusion that “the war’s main agent and victor was the multinational people of the USSR.” Zagladin gives no space to people, their dreams and struggles, their sacrifice and suffering. Instead, the main actor is “historical appropriateness,” and the State, which should be admired for working on the right side of history.

Zagladin’s lovefest with the Powers That Be reaches its climax in the description of post-1999 events. Students are informed that the Powers That Be and Russian society have since created a new “relationship model” (that is the title of this section of the textbook). This new model is summarized as: “the fight against corruption and crime in business circles, combined with measures to foster business activity”; the “key role” of some 100 financial and industrial groups in the Russian economy; and overcoming salary payment delays.

Dolutsky’s textbook, while it has its drawbacks – such as excessive use of teenage argot – is successful in what it seeks to be: “a step towards creating a combined history textbook of a new type, which is a textbook that teaches independent thinking and is thus a synthesis of a textbook (texts), a reader (extracts from different historical sources) and a problem solving book (questions and tasks).” Zagladin’s Ministry-approved textbook is a catechism, to be learned by rote and believed in blindly.

A school system’s choice of its history textbook is a statement on the place of that system in society as a whole: is the educational system to teach a creed or to foster a critical, balanced understanding of the past? If a textbook is approved and pushed upon schools by the Powers That Be, who is in control of the interpretation of history – historians or politicians? And how does a society learn the lessons of a painful past if truths about that past are dictated by those in power?

Several years ago, one of Russia’s most prominent historians, Boris Mironov, elaborated this problem in The Social History of Russia: “At present, we Russians need cliotherapy [A made up word meaning “healing through history.”] – a sober knowledge of our strong and weak points, so as to have a chance to foster our strengths and treat and remove our weaknesses. The best means to rid ourselves of weaknesses is to know where they came from, because as prejudices are artifacts of past truths, so the characteristics of social institutions, which used to be strengths, are now weaknesses. Historians can become social doctors. As a psychoanalyst rids patients of various complexes which have become obstacles in their lives by analyzing their personal history, historians can rid their nation of complexes... by analyzing its past.”

If the history textbook scandal is any indication, Russia’s Powers That Be have no wish to encourage balanced analyses of the past. Rather (and this is evident in the blurring of Church and State in the classroom as well), they wish to remake Russian schools into places of indoctrination, rather than enlightened, democratic education. The new Standard, which was conceived as an important educational reform and a means to bring greater democracy to schools, has in fact succeeded in this goal and thus runs counter to current political and social trends toward authoritarianism and traditionalism. But no Standard – at best a loose framework draped this way or that, depending on political winds – can be a guarantee of freedom in education. That guarantee must instead be grounded in citizens themselves, in a desire to make schools serve the interests of society and its individuals, rather than the State.  RL