Here's to you, student, and St. George's Day

Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko spoke in favor of a partial return of serfdom. She proposed to legislate the obligation of graduates of pedagogical universities to work for a certain time in schools after graduation.

On the one hand, it is nice to hear a government official admitting the problem of teacher shortages. After all, just a year ago, former Minister of Education and Science Fursenko announced a huge surplus of teachers in Russia - 200 thousand people. The speaker also correctly noted that there is a particularly shortage of teachers in villages and small towns. As of September 1, there were several hundred teaching vacancies in the Kirov region alone.

On the other hand, Matvienko’s proposal is cynicism. Such unforced, easy-going cynicism, which has become customary for the current government. After all, many students at pedagogical universities are children and grandchildren of teachers from those 20 thousand Russian schools that were closed over the past decade and a half. Those who, according to the principles of Soviet times, an allusion to which is the idea of ​​​​Valentina Ivanovna, were distributed across the endless distances and villages of the vast homeland. And then, at the dawn of capitalism, often in old age, he found himself abandoned to the mercy of fate in the process of liquidation of small educational institutions. Not once did the ruling elite remember these specialists, attributing their troubles to the legacy of the communist regime. She didn’t extend her hand to anyone. By clearly demonstrating that a person is nothing compared to economic feasibility. And now it’s enough shame to reproach graduates of pedagogical faculties that only 8-15% of them go to school?

Hinting that the problem of shortage of teachers, especially acute in villages and small towns, can be solved by force, by assigning young people to these areas?

However, several questions arise.

First. Doesn’t Matvienko hope that the promised increase in teacher salaries to the average for the regional economy will solve the problem? Apparently he doesn't have any hope. Well, I agree 100% here. Because numerous participants in the campaign to increase wages in the education system stubbornly “do not notice” the fact of its growth due to the intensification of labor, an increase in the volume of workload, while base salaries remain ridiculous at the “minimum wage” level.

Secondly. Where will the young people sent to patch up the states live? Neither schools nor municipalities have housing. Schools in Soviet times had powerful bases: their own housing stock, equipment, warehouses filled with various materials. The social weight of school directors at that time was not inferior to the importance of collective farm chairmen; people went to pay their respects to them for glass, bricks, paint, etc. Now all everyday issues fall on the shoulders of the employee himself. Will the graduate cope with them, paying most of the money he earns to pay for rented housing (if available)?

Thirdly. What to do with loud declarations at all levels that “a bad teacher has no place in school”? What kind of teacher will be who comes here not at the behest of the soul, but under pressure? What will he do? Torture children? Serve time? When will the next one with the deadline wait until the end of the “boarding”?

Fourthly. Matvienko expressed the opinion that with free education, the state has the right to demand compulsory service from students, and only if they pay for education can they retain freedom of choice. Only if such a rule is introduced for teachers, then what will prevent in the future from introducing “free pay” for all other people and returning to the labor mobilization of the era of war communism?

Just like that, from some luminary of Russian democracy, no need to scrape it, the insides of a Soviet partyocrat emerge.

...I myself encountered a personnel problem this fall (my math teacher left). I spent two months looking for an “extra teacher.” I called the district schools, visited the nearest educational institutions of the regional center (fortunately, it’s a suburb), posted a vacancy on the website of the information and educational portal of the Kirov region, an employment center with the possibility of cross-territorial viewing, parents of children who had been left without mathematics for a while got involved, advertised in the regional newspaper with five thousand copies. Silence. Only a pensioner from the Tambov region, who had a desire to move to her daughter in Kirov, responded to the ad. At the Kirov city education department, a human resources specialist complained that several schools “themselves” are looking for mathematics teachers and more. I offended my colleagues, whose employees I offered to join us, but I failed to seduce them. I am grateful to the wonderful student, excellent student Yulia, who is studying to become a psychologist, for wanting to quickly master the methods of teaching mathematics at night in order to help out the children she loved so much.

I would like to say thank you to Mrs. Matvienko, but I don’t feel like it at all.