Pregnant? To the university!

For all the battles around the Unified State Exam, we missed another innovation in the field of education, which Mrs. Golodets shared with the public the day before yesterday:

“Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Olga Golodets drew attention to the importance of creating conditions for young mothers so that they can combine raising a child and their professional activities. Today in Russia there is a need to support and stimulate the birth of the first child, she explained. As a possible measure, Vice-President The Prime Minister proposed to consider benefits for young parents to obtain higher education. She said that the Russian government is developing a corresponding bill" (takenfrom here ).

In short, trouble came suddenly.

The idea of ​​quotas, in my opinion, is bad in itself.

Firstly, because it contradicts the law, according to which we obtain higher education on a competitive basis, and not just based on skin color, eye shape, or the fact of pregnancy and having many children.

Of course, they will reassure us that the number will be insignificant, that additional places will be created, which will help keep at least some of the 30% of university teachers who are being trained for layoffs in their jobs.

However, all these will be just words, words, words. The number of universities is decreasing, the number of places is decreasing, so quotas will only complicate the process of competitive admission

Secondly, all the signs of gender discrimination are present here. I don’t know whether Mrs. Golodets is aware or not, but so far (thank God?) only women give birth here. It turns out that the access of the male part, traditionally these women and who take the balance, to the heights of a career and earning money for the benefit of the whole family through the higher education system is limited.

It turns out to be a strange social policy, in which the roots and foundations of independent family support are cut off.

However, why be surprised at the oddities if in Golodets’s reasoning we are talking only about young mothers (not wives, not married couples), if our government is interested not so much in real family policy in relation to the classical full family, but in ordinary offspring, including through expanding the number of single-parent families.

Thirdly, Golodets should think more about increasing maternity benefits and salaries for husbands, think about expanding the network of jobs and putting in order preschool education, than about flooding student audiences with young mothers.

However, the main thing, in my pedagogical opinion, is not this. The main thing is the idea contained in Golodets’ words about a university not as an educational institution whose task is to produce the necessary and highly qualified specialist, but as a universal means of solving extra-educational problems, as some kind of appendage of the social protection service.

The birth of children, demographic policy - all these are important things. But they have nothing to do with the issue of university enrollment. One should enroll in a university for the abilities necessary to obtain a future specialty, for the knowledge needed for future professional activity, and not for the ability to be fruitful and multiply, which God has endowed us all without distinction.

Is the higher education system created in order to turn into a school for young mothers who receive higher education as a free added bonus to maternal happiness?

However, is this happiness itself possible when a mother is in a hurry for a session, sitting and poring over a textbook and a drawing, instead of cooking porridge for the baby or going for a walk with him in the park?

Probably not, impossible. But who cares? The main thing, as Mikhal Sergeich Gorbachev said, is to start, and it will somehow form itself.