Translated material
"Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture" will be included in the curriculum of Ulyanovsk schools from September 1, 2007.
At the conference “Spiritual and moral education of children and youth in the family, school and out-of-school environment” held in Ulyanovsk, the head of the city education department Lyudmila Solomenko stated that from September 1, 2007, in all schools in the city, the curriculum - as a school component - will include The subject "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture" is included. As Portal-Credo.ru reports, “the course of studying the military-industrial complex is supposed to be made 'end-to-end', in other words, students from grades 1 to 11 will have to comprehend a new subject. Variability is provided only in the choice of versions of the 'big' military-industrial complex course by a particular school. So, in addition to the actual OPK, it could be 'Fundamentals of Morality' or 'Fundamentals of the Church Slavonic Language'.
The head of the city educational department motivates the need for schoolchildren to urgently study the military-industrial complex by the increase in the percentage of child and teenage crime (Ulyanovsk is a city where teenagers from different parts of the city wage constant wars with 'strangers'), manifestations of cruelty in families and general moral decline."
“All courses provide for joint education of children of all faiths, there are no contradictions here,” noted L. Solomenko. At the same time, according to her, there is a shortage of trained teachers of the subject and the necessary teaching aids. To solve the latter problem, the department plans to purchase literature that has already been “published and recommended by the Ministry of Education.”
In an interview with the portal, political scientist and religious scholar, expert at the International Institute for Humanitarian and Political Studies, Mikhail Zherebyatyev noted that “the delay in considering the legislative initiative of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation on the abolition in the federal educational law of the division of academic disciplines into 3 components - federal, regional and school - immediately led to the activation of supporters of the military-industrial complex." In his opinion, due to the fact that the inclusion of the military-industrial complex into the program as a regional component has recently been the most actively criticized, “OPeKizators quickly shifted to another niche, where it will be much more difficult to abolish the military-industrial complex, since school directors and local educational authorities are constantly will be able to refer to the opinion of a certain number of parents who, under all circumstances, will speak out for the defense industry.”
“...In the context of top-down initiatives,” believes M. Zherebyatyev, “even the all-Russian Ministry of Education will not be able to remove the defense industry from the school niche. Such undertakings - especially if they arise - will be hampered by the existence of the 'school vertical', when students and their parents find themselves dependent on teachers, head teachers and directors - especially now in connection with the widespread introduction of the Unified State Exam - as well as the quantitatively predominant parental 'swamp', which in modern Russian conditions is simply indifferent to the problems of civil rights."
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