What will the minds from UMO decide?

Is it possible to put 600 lessons of Orthodoxy into one child's head and argue that this discipline is not the main one?

The new crusade of Orthodox pedagogy is like the old building of communism. Voting on teaching Orthodox culture at school will end on November 30

“He plagued adults with the question “why”? He was nicknamed "the little philosopher". But as soon as he grew up, they began to present him with answers without questions. And since then, he no longer annoyed anyone with the question “why?” ... - Marshak once wrote.

Children's poems - an adult diagnosis. Including the new initiative, in which the will of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ministry of Education, provincial dioceses and officials of the latest "Vasiliev call" merged. From 150 to 600 hours (project) of school education will be devoted to the basics of Orthodox culture, from the first to the eleventh grade.

The best minds of the UMO - the federal educational and methodological association for school education - 36 in number, must speak "for" or "against" by November 30. Absentee (and secret) voting will end tomorrow.

And in a country that forcibly severed ties with religion a hundred years ago and bloodily separated the state from the church, perhaps the most important Christian imperative, freedom of choice, will be violated.

Here is a direct cry from inside the problem: “Yes, I wrote a textbook for the 4th grade! Yes, I have been saying for years that such a subject is needed in schools. But you need to know the measure! Otherwise, you can get in return the friendly hatred of both bent teachers and parents, and, in the end, the teenagers themselves. Although deacon Andrei Kuraev has not been a persona grata in the eyes of the official speakers of the Russian Orthodox Church for a long time, this does not solve the problem.

Six hundred lessons of Orthodoxy in one child's head is an unparalleled and unprecedented leadership of the discipline. Neither literature, nor the Russian language, nor history are competitors here.

... For some reason, Pobedonostsev has been spinning in my head since morning: pince-nez, a black bow, a sternly passionate gaze. One of the most famous Russian reactionaries, according to the testimony of the French ambassador Maurice Palaiologos, had not only a broad education and unwavering conviction, but also a great charm of manner and speech. No wonder the Russian tsars and their brothers fell under the influence of his exalted patriotism and fiery convictions. And since today brings us back more than a century, I vaguely remember that one of Pobedonostsev's pupils, Nicholas II, believed that the main goal of gymnasium education was to educate the guardians of the throne. He measured the quality of education of his subjects by the only thing: did the schoolchildren participate in anti-government protests or not?

Konstantin Petrovich himself, no matter how he reformed the gymnasiums, trusted the parish schools much more, which, from his, chief prosecutor’s point of view, remained on the territory of the empire “the only reliable means for educating a new generation ... in troubled times, when from all sides corrupted and insane people are trying to instill in the people the depravity of thought.

History goes in a spiral, and quotes from Pobedonostsev for his heirs seem to breathe the topic of the day again. When discussing the "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture" at school, many lines of force arise, but there is almost no time to think - they are about to close into a single field.

The most electric, of course, is social . Are the Buddhists right - and a split could break out in the country because of a new subject? Maybe the Jews are right, they are convinced that a man should live in a big world, and he must imagine all religious views, or is it just the memory of the Pale of Settlement that wanders in them and stirs the soul? Or are Muslims more just - they are menacingly silent? Or Protestants, whose Huguenot genes keep casts of massacre and discord? The answers may come too late.

An equally significant line is pedagogical . Here, as nowhere else, cadres decide everything.

- Who will open the horizons of meanings, the beauty of ideas - a destitute, middle-aged teacher hunted by life in the Russian outback? one of the experts asked me harshly.

Against the background of the decline of humanitarian knowledge at school, this step seems to be very, very risky for knowledgeable people. If an incompetent connoisseur of cultural history gets down to business, the lessons of the defense industry will become not only peripheral, but also profane. It's not the law of God. This is a completely different subject, the teaching of which requires special, special training. No one trains such specialists in Russia, neither institutes for advanced training of teachers, nor theological faculties, nor universities. And luminaries capable of teaching “Orthodox culture” for eleven years without a break on our soil have not yet been born at all. It seems that even in theological schools they do not study so much.

And finally, the third line is political . Church-state relations are a longstanding and vigilant concern of Patriarch Kirill. But no matter how much the church states the crisis of education and spirit, there are no textbooks, no programs, no specialists in the country capable of coping with the volume of the task. The new crusade of Orthodox pedagogy is like the old building of communism. And neither the patriarch nor the president of the Russian Academy of Education, Lyudmila Verbitskaya (who doubted, by the way, that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the same for schoolchildren) will create a course overnight. This is a grandiose and capital-intensive, frankly speaking, task.

If the project is supported, schools will receive federal guidelines for studying the subject. But is it in the manuals?

What class of educators are called upon to educate "a worldview based on the Orthodox spiritual and moral tradition" and create a type of people - stoics, capable (here is one of the central goals of the project) "to consciously limit the consumption of life's goods"?

What a pity, what a pity that members of the Ozero cooperative will never take this course again! And with them a long line of deputies of the State Duma, an endless number of government officials of all levels and competencies. If only I knew! If we could make them prototypes of the state experiment on "formation".

Well, maybe the Bible on the territory of one-sixth of the land, almost untouched by repentance, in the 21st century is indeed a hundred times more important than daily bread. But in order to be heard, we need not manuals, but a Teacher. He came. One day.