At the course - mines

Representatives of the confessional communities of Muslims, Jews and Buddhists opposed the project of the Orthodox Culture course for schoolchildren from the first to the eleventh grade, Kommersant reports . They fear that the approval of the program will mean the actual introduction of an eleven -year school course of Orthodoxy.

Representatives of traditional denominations urge the authors of the program “not to rock the boat” and not to discard the inter -religious dialogue “almost a decade ago”.

According to the deputy chairman of the spiritual department of Muslims, Damir Mukhetdinov, the project project "provokes a new round of acute controversy with an interfaith shade."

The permanent representative of the Buddhist traditional Sangha Sanja Lama Andrei Balzhirov believes that in case of approval, the course can provoke a split in society. Now most schoolchildren study secular ethics or world religious cultures, and Buddhism is not paid enough attention, he said.

Traditional religions, like the Russian Orthodox Church, should also participate in the creation of curricula and writing textbooks, said Rabbi Zinovy ​​Kogan, vice-president of the Congress of Jewish religious organizations and associations of Russia.

On Monday, the Federal Education and Methodological Association for General Education of the Russian Academy of Education sent a draft school program on the basics of Orthodox culture for an examination at the Moscow City Pedagogical University, involving the teaching of this subject throughout the training course-from the 1st grade to the 11th. For teaching the foundations of Orthodox culture, according to the project, it should be allocated 1-2 hours a week in each class. The examination is proposed to be carried out by August 22.

As the rector of the Moscow State Pedagogical University and deputy chairman Igor Remorenko noted, now the foundations of the Orthodox culture are only one of the options of taught in the 4th grade of the subject "Fundamentals of religious cultures and secular ethics." Instead of studying the Orthodox culture of the family of schoolchildren, they can study any other of the other three main denominations in Russia, the main religious cultures of the world or just secular ethics, ”the rector of the Moscow State Pedagogical University noted. In the case of introducing a new course of the foundations of Orthodox culture, he added, it will be necessary to make adjustments to educational standards.

Remorenko noted that the expert council is obliged to consider any proposals from the RAO, but a positive conclusion "does not mean that the course will necessarily be introduced: the document should receive approval of several more instances." “On the mismatch of the program, educational standards, I think, will write our experts,” the Rector of the Moscow State Pedagogical University suggested.

In February 2015, it became known that the Russian Orthodox Church seeks to teach the foundations of the Orthodox culture from the 2nd to the 9th grades. In May of the same year, the Moscow Patriarchate came up with the initiative to introduce the subject "Moral Foundations of Family Life" in grades 10-11.