Tatiana Bazzhina. Last peck

Last peck
Tatiana Bazzhina

Publication date: March 10, 2004

The lame duck is a president finishing his last term. Everyone knows this. But what is the name of a government official who is waiting every hour to resign? I don’t know, and so far I haven’t come across any reasonable or at least stable metaphors. And I know what to call an official who makes a fateful decision on his last working day, as well as the decision itself: the last peck of a gutted turkey.

When the whole country, having found a prime minister who was interested in everything, breathed a sigh of relief and set out, according to Russian tradition, to celebrate the international gender holiday in one separate part of the land, an extraordinary event happened - at that time the acting. The Minister of Education, Mr. Filippov, signed a decree on his last working day

"On approval of standards in the field of education." This happened on Friday, March 5th. A sort of bravura final chord of a ministerial career. Humanly speaking, the motives for such an ending are understandable. Well, a person leaves and wants to leave a memory behind him, so that people remember that there was such a name, he sowed the unreasonable, but eternal. And just to say: for two years the now ex-minister fought for these standards with the teachers' opposition behind the scenes - and fought unsuccessfully, and for the last two years - with the public, and again failed. the ministerial developments The public loudly rejected ; the State Duma did not adopt the standards. The minister threatened the deputies several times; if they resist, he will accept it himself, because the people’s happiness depends on it. He threatened seriously: “New standards of education, specialized training throughout the country will be introduced on September 1, 2006. The schedule for the gradual renewal of education in Russia is very strict. It is very difficult to implement, but nevertheless we have outlined this line. If the new standards are not adopted by the State Duma, they can be approved by order of the Ministry of Education , and they will be called “Mandatory requirements for the minimum content of education.” After the Duma elections, he ordered the deputies to get down to business - to accept what their sluggish colleagues had not accepted, and if they didn’t accept it, he himself would sign a decree on standards. And, I must say, he behaved like a man: he promised, he did, he signed. On his last ministerial day. One could consider this action a broad gesture, one could consider it a slam of the door, one could consider it a slap in the face to public taste, but for me it is a farewell peck.

All that remains is to make sure that the newly appointed Minister of Education will not forget about the claps and gestures of his predecessor and will cancel them in time. And not because the offended public demands it, but because it’s high time to stop reporting and get down to business. For example, to understand that children at school need to be taught to write and count correctly, and not just to respond to the challenges of the time.

Speaking seriously, over the last four years that the reform of school education has been taking place, we have heard enough reports - every day there is a new wonder in education: either we are “unloading, without throwing anything out of the program and introducing new subjects,” or we are computerizing schools in villages where there is no electricity, we learn a foreign language from the cradle and by the fifth grade we speak it like native speakers - however, the catch is that there are so many foreign language teachers - we either teach patriotism or introduce it at the same time" Civics" and "Social Studies" (we would still like to understand how these two subjects differ - apparently, for their authors, society exists separately from citizens, and citizens are isolated from society), then we do not allow schoolchildren to rise above the third floor, then we rewrite textbooks , then we teach according to the old ones, but with new programs and methodological recommendations. And there is no end in sight to these initiatives. One of the most recent ones is to introduce football as a separate school subject. On March 9, the vice-president of the Russian Football Union, Valery Droganov, said that a group of State Duma deputies had drawn up a plan for “introducing football in Russian secondary schools.” And according to Mr. Droganov, who also heads the Duma Committee on Economic Policy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, it is possible that the popular game will be included in the school curriculum. Excluded! - even despite the fact that football in Russia is more than a game. It is excluded not only because it is impossible to put into the school curriculum everything that can be useful to a person in life - from darning socks to the law of God and omphalomancy (navel divination), but also because education must be held accountable for any initiative in education too. It has long been known that war is too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals. Now in a civilized society they understand that the education system cannot be responsible for education. This is the responsibility of the entire society. And if we want to live in a civilized country, we must understand that we are all responsible for what happens in the schools where our children study, what they are taught and why. And most importantly - how and who. And it’s time to stop talking to society about education in the language of ultimatums - “it will be as I decided.”

They say there is no more favorable dream than the one where you are stuck up to your neck in a quagmire, since dreams, as all the sages of the Christian world say, must be interpreted in the opposite sense. Our school education - with all these football games, standards, reports and ultimatums - is already in a quagmire up to the top, and not in a dream, but in reality.