Not so long ago, one employee of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences spoke publicly about the results of a survey of students at the university where she lectures. It turned out that most of these students are ashamed of the fact that they live in Russia, that they ...

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Not so long ago, an employee of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences spoke publicly about the results of a survey of university students, where she lectures. It turned out that most of these students are ashamed of the fact that they live in Russia, that they belong to Russian culture. This depresses them, they feel unhappy because of this and dream of leaving after their studies to live and work in the West. Many admitted that when they were abroad, they carefully concealed the fact that they came from Moscow, and presented themselves as students from Greece, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, even from Romania - if only they were not from Russia.

There are many reasons for this behavior. The main ones, of course, are economic and political. If a country turns from a superpower into a third world state, there is nothing to be proud of. If the economic crisis lasts ten years and $400 billion is flowing out of the country abroad, this also does not contribute to the growth of the “national pride of the Great Russians”. But there is another reason, perhaps not so noticeable, but no less important: current textbooks. Textbooks are one of the main sources of information for schoolchildren and students. TV news can not be watched, newspapers can not be read. But you can't read textbooks. Moreover, you have to learn what is written in them. And it is precisely with textbooks that a catastrophe has occurred in today's Russia.

During the Soviet period, textbooks were approved by the Ministry of Education (Education), and those who approved the textbooks were personally responsible for them. There were cases when people were fired from work for making textbooks with gross errors (usually, however, ideological ones). And in order for the textbook to be approved by the ministry, printed in millions of copies, and covered the whole country, it had to withstand tough competition and undergo a meticulous study in the expert council. The greatest scientists considered it an honor to write textbooks. There were competitions in which ordinary, unrespectable people simply had nothing to do (despite the anonymity of the projects). Among other things, the approved textbook brought a lot of money (by Soviet standards) and - which is also important - the opportunity to introduce their (their school) ideas, views, concepts, even terminology into the "broad masses of students", and this often ensured success in the "struggle of schools in the scientific world.

Therefore, textbooks usually turned out to be the object of the closest interest, the most scrupulous criticism. Every error found was immediately made public. And in most cases, this led to, albeit slowly, improving textbooks.

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Today's Russia is not like that. In secondary school alone, more than 1,500 (!) different textbooks compete with each other, written - we have pluralism! - from any, very often diametrically opposed positions. Officials of the Ministry of Education shrug their shoulders and complain (including in print) about their impotence: they say, what can we do? We don't have any restrictions.

True, even today the Ministry of Education has an expert council on textbooks. But this advice can only recommend or not recommend this or that already published educational literature. Textbooks are published by many publishers, which can safely ignore the opinion of the expert council. Schools and universities are completely free to choose. As a result, some children learn from textbooks that praise monarchism, prove that Orthodoxy is the only true religion, and inspire hatred for the republican form of government and other confessions besides Orthodoxy. Other children learn from textbooks written by followers of Rudolf Steiner, with all the ensuing consequences. Still others are still based on Soviet textbooks, only slightly modernized, or even just old ones (the Russian school, as it was honestly said at one of the collegiums of the Ministry of Education, has two troubles with textbooks: firstly, a catastrophic shortage, secondly second, catastrophic diversity). And then there are school textbooks written by ardent admirers of Yegor Gaidar, in which Russia is generally presented as a kind of “mental dislocation” of mankind, and the sooner the country loses any originality, the better. And then there are textbooks written from the standpoint of Malthusianism...

The most bleak picture is emerging in the national republics. In Tatarstan, for example, in Tatar schools, it is not difficult to find textbooks with an openly anti-Russian orientation. Now imagine what awaits the future of a republic where the population is mixed and where on the same street in the same house on the same floor in neighboring apartments live two boys of the same age, but one goes to a Tatar school and teaches there that the Russian nation and the Orthodox Church exist in general, only because the Golden Horde wanted it, that the Russians responded to the Horde with monstrous ingratitude, that the policy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the national question was exclusively colonial, Russifier and predatory; and the other boy goes to a Russian school and studies there, say, according to the textbook of A. N. Bokhanov, in which, on the contrary, Orthodoxy is praised - and only - Orthodoxy, and the internal policy of tsarist Russia in the national question is presented as exclusively cultural-trager, and generally contains the idea that one who lives in Russia should be - if not by blood, then by spirit - only Russian. The answer is obvious: the lessons of Chechnya do not teach anything, and today's textbooks lay the foundation for tomorrow's civil conflicts.

Actually, already today the anarchy in textbooks leads to an increase in the disunity of the Russian population. And without it, as has been repeatedly noted by experts, the population of Russia is monstrously atomized, and therefore, where in the West certain actions of the government that directly affect the pockets of ordinary citizens would cause mass response, the Russian population shows apathy, "the people are silent" and answers all the challenges of power exclusively by increasing the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Inconsistency in textbooks leads to inconsistency in the collective cultural experience, to a mismatch of cultural worlds even within the same city, one university, one social and age group.

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A few years ago, my colleagues and I had to deal with a phenomenon that had never been observed before in Russian higher education: in some universities, as a rule, humanitarian and prestigious ones, there was virtually no communication between students of different courses. It turned out that they simply cannot find a common language due to the mismatch of cultural baggage: they studied according to different curricula, are focused on different values, read completely different books (if they read), listen to different music, in different ways (sometimes in a diametrically opposite way). ) refer to topics such as religion, drugs, sex, careers, patriotism...

Today we can say that the situation (at least in some universities, for example, at MGIMO) has worsened: now students of the same year and even of the same group cannot find a common language. Each group breaks up into a community of singles, only formally united in a team.

In the best case, the group consists of mini-communities of 2-3 people. In the same MGIMO, for example, the following set is typical: a microgroup of Orthodox, closed in on itself and oriented towards Orthodox values ​​in the fundamentalist version (followers of the so-called young elders); a microgroup of “clever girls and smarties” (winners of the TV show of the same name - this victory guaranteed them admission to the institute out of competition), focused on an in-depth study of humanitarian subjects and a future scientific career; a microgroup of “golden youth”, leading a predominantly bohemian lifestyle and totally drugged; a microgroup of "proto-yuppies" aimed at a career of managers in foreign companies and choosing the image of Western yuppies as an ideal; microgroups of immigrants from the Caucasus, united on a national basis, etc. All these microgroups practically do not communicate with each other outside the formal educational process and often openly despise each other. Orthodox, for example, condemn the “golden youth” for “debauchery” and drug addiction, “clever and clever people” for “pride” and indifference to religion, “proto-Yappi” for “acquisitiveness”, and people from the Caucasus are generally perceived as something completely alien and hostile. In turn, the “wise men and wise men” consider the Orthodox “hopelessly outdated”, the “golden youth” as fools, the “proto-yuppies” as unscrupulous and immoral subjects, and people from the Caucasus as mafiosi.

At the same time, university professors unanimously note a noticeable drop in the general cultural level of both applicants and students. Literacy has dropped catastrophically, which is clearly due, among other things, to the fact that young people have begun to read much less. The cultural outlook has sharply narrowed (a simple example: last year, students of the philological faculty of Moscow State University did not know who Disraeli, M.L. King were, could not say the name of President Kennedy, and confidently enrolled the famous Lithuanian poetess Salome Neris in the characters of ancient Jewish history) .

The situation with knowledge of the history of one's own country is quite ugly. University graduates of the last two or three years - those of them who began working in the media - have already managed to become famous for their monstrous illiteracy. So, one young journalist from the ORT TV channel quite seriously told the audience that under the Soviet regime, it turned out, the word “Cossack” was forbidden to use - and those who violated the ban were repressed. Obviously, in the history textbooks the word "Cossack" was replaced by dots - just like in Sholokhov's "Virgin Soil Upturned", which, as you know, took place at school.

Another young journalist - from the TVC channel - said that in the USSR ... jazz was banned, and only in August 1991 jazz, it turns out, "came out of the underground." And on the NTV channel, one young journalist told the audience that “Cyril and Methodius taught the Eastern Slavs to speak Russian,” and another that St. Basil the Blessed was a “famous architect” ...

There is absolutely nothing to be surprised here. If you look at those textbooks (both for schools and universities) that have been published in the most mass circulations (and have been republished over and over again in recent years), you will find that their authors themselves often do not know the subjects they undertake to teach. Or they know, but lie. For contextual reasons.

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Now our students and schoolchildren are blessed with such publications as, for example, textbooks on the civilizational approach for schools and universities, written by L.I. Semennikova, professor at Moscow State University. Semennikova taught the history of the CPSU all her life. Anyone who studied at a Soviet university knows what kind of subject it is and who taught it. In 1991, Semennikova instantly "rebuilt" and turned from a propagandist of the CPSU into a propagandist of Western liberalism.

Semennikova, apparently believing that with her past one must be “a greater papist than dad,” did not stop at changing her views exactly 180 degrees. It is, of course, possible to write (in contrast to what she wrote before) that the October Revolution was a misfortune and tragedy, but it is clearly unoriginal. And Semennikova ran ahead of the locomotive: she wrote that there was no October Revolution at all! And at the same time (why bother with trifles?) She wrote that there was no Soviet power either.

I repeat, these are textbooks. And not just textbooks, but basic textbooks, reference textbooks, produced in mass editions from year to year. Pupils and students learn and remember it.

Semennikova's excursions into the history of antiquity, the Ancient East or modern China inevitably turn out to be a heap of anti-scientific absurdities. Then slave-owning Greece is described as such a realm of liberal freedom, which has not yet been found in any country in the world. Then China turns out to be a civilizational misunderstanding - a country with an unknown system. Then in the ancient Eastern despotisms Semennikova discovers "collegiate rule."

Do schoolchildren, for example, have an alternative to Semennikova's textbooks? Eat. A textbook on the "civilizational approach" by V.M. Khachaturian. But it turns out he's no better. If Semennikova's textbooks are a mess, a collection of misunderstandings (up to the invention of her own economic terminology) and a demonstration of ignorance, then Khachaturian's textbook can be safely called a hack. He simply duplicates the course of history, while confusing the students as much as possible.

It is simply impossible to list all the mistakes, misunderstandings, fabrications of this textbook, obviously written in extreme haste: Khachaturian, like Semennikova, can be quoted from any page. In ancient Greece, Khachaturian discovered “capitalism”, allows herself to contemptuously characterize Islam, justify colonial conquests, carefully obscure the economic reasons for the development of certain countries, and, finally, unrestrainedly praise the West.

Finally, despite all the endless statements about the “de-ideologization of the school”, both Semennikova’s textbooks and Khachaturian’s textbook are extremely ideologized - to the point that the authors themselves do not hide that they set themselves the task of justifying and praising liberalism and the Western way of life and discrediting everything that this does not match the two terms.

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History textbooks are no better. In them you can find enchanting stories about Ivan the Terrible, a paid agent of all foreign intelligence services, or about Indo-Europeans who rushed in droves in war chariots throughout Europe so that “in Europe (not yet named like that) there was ringing and dust in a column” (textbook A .P. Bogdanova); about the fact that Anna Ioannovna and Peter III were “great reformers” or that in Russia there was always no (!) ownership of land (textbook by V.V. Kirillov); or that M. Thatcher "finally crushed" the Labor Party in Great Britain (textbook by A. A. Kreder).

The situation is no better in the other humanities. Suffice it to recall the incredibly prolific author of textbooks on philosophy, cultural studies, and social studies P.S. Gurevich, who is confused in names and dates, in definitions and terms, and has a downright indecent predilection for mysticism, Satanism and thanatology.

From year to year, the expert council of the Ministry of Education gave negative opinions on Gurevich's textbooks. But Gurevich does not interfere. He wrote five textbooks in two years (!), and these books are mass-circulated and reprinted year after year.

What's the matter? And everything is very simple. A small group of people who are personally connected with each other dictates the “rules of the game”: they publish only their “correct” authors, cutting off, screening out, not publishing or financing those who turn out to be “too” independent, that is, as a rule, authors of honest, talented and unsaleable.