The teacher cannot betray his students

Why do teachers massively sign an open letter against "Moscow business"

Initially, we were not going to write any letters. We just discussed on Tuesday evening in the teacher’s group on Facebook, or not to bring a zero -day poem of a modern poet to a lesson on Hamlet, where there are direct parallels with a Shakespearean play.

And suddenly - like a dam broke. "This must be engaged in adults, not children." “What we have become adapted.” - “They are the same children. Furious. We are not allowed to predict how our word will respond. ” “Yes, it’s safer to talk about the Decembrists.” - "What if we keep silent, and the rest will keep silent, and then what?" “We must do and say everything that we can, within our personal responsibility.” - “It's time for teachers to wake up and have their own civil position! Stop afraid! " “Children will not forgive us silence and untruth.” And finally:

“Actually, all these people, beaten, subjected to mockery, deprived of the opportunity to prove their innocence-our children, our former students ...

I suggest thinking about an open letter. Unless, of course, we do not think, as Chekhovsky Luganovich, that "since a person fell under trial, then he means he is to blame."

An open letter was written two hours later - on Wednesday night. By the morning of Thursday, he was signed by more than two thousand teachers, including 18 school directors. Among the signed the letter, Muscovites and Petersburgers predominate, but the geography is extensive: there are teachers from Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Izhevsk, Arkhangelsk, Perm, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Tagil, Kirov, Volgograd, Cherepovets, Nizhny Novgorod and Novgorod the Great, Petrozavodsk, Orel, Samara, Vladimir, Vladimir, Vladimir, Vladimir, Vladimir, Vladimir. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Voronezh, Kaliningrad, Novorossiysk, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Astrakhan, Novokuznetsk, Yaroslavl, Kaluga, Saratov, Penza, Belgorod, Khabarovsk, Surgut, Togliatti, Magnitogorsk, Sterlitamak, Makhachkala, Derbent, Pyatigorsk, Pskov, Cheboksar, Cheboksary, Cheboksary Lipetsk, Kaluga, Rybinsk ... The list can be continued, and small cities, villages, villages will be presented in it - that is, it cannot be said that these are again from the notorious “good Moscow schools” are harnessed for their own.

The position in the letter is stated extremely simple: you can not lie to children.

The state cannot simultaneously demand that children be taught to be honest, decent and law -abiding - and rudely, shamelessly violate the law in real life.

In the school, the value of freedom that the whole Russian classic is talking about, and not notice that the innocent are sentenced to imprisonment speaks. You can not study the Constitution with schoolchildren - and pretend that the freedoms guaranteed by it do not trample in reality. Children do not forgive lies.

The teacher's letter says:

“It is impossible to talk to schoolchildren honestly and frankly about the Decembrists, about hard labor, about the Gulag, about the“ twelve ”of the Blok, the“ Requim ”Akhmatova,“ one day of Ivan Denisovich ”Solzhenitsyn and many other classical works of Russian literature, to teach them to talk about freedom of choice, morality, a person’s responsibility for the society in which he lives, all this from year to year from year to year. We have to do during preparation for the final essay, and at the same time pretend that nothing happens outside the classroom, that in the country where we all live, a flagrant lawlessness is happening before our eyes. This is hypocrisy, but we do not want to teach children hypocrisy. ”

But the school should remain out of politics. Clause 3 of Article 43 of the Law on Education directly prohibits the teacher to engage in political agitation. Teachers are well aware of this - hence the difficult teacher dispute about the personal responsibility of adults to children, about admissibility to express their civic position in the class.

One of the “Signatals”, Maria Helfond , Associate Professor of the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Higher School and Teacher of the Nizhny Novgorod Gymnasium, says: “In my opinion, this is not about politics, but about ethics. The teacher - like any person - cannot remain indifferent when reality rudely refutes what he tries to teach when they break lives to innocent people. It is impossible to talk about Pushkin and Chekhov so that there are no parallels with reality. This does not mean that it is worth talking about politics in the lesson - probably not, the school should be outside the policy.

But we must be responsible for their words and beliefs. Otherwise, at some point, it will be a shame to enter the classroom. ”

Perhaps that is why the impossibility of tolerate the situation with unrighteous courts was spoke and the priests and teachers started talking - people of those professions who, on duty, are obliged to talk with children about reasonable, good and eternal.

It is this feeling - shame and the inability to speak in the class about ethics and freedom - and the letter is dictated. Nadezhda Shapiro , a literature teacher of the capital's school No. 57, comments: “When you are an eyewitness or just a contemporary of obvious humiliating lawlessness, it is somehow shameful to say nothing. And it seemed to me that maybe not only it would become easier for me, if you say aloud what you think, in a good company. And it is important that it is not human rights activists, not media faces, not professional politicians, but people of the mass profession will make humanly simple and understandable adult words-and thereby remind of honest norm, without which life is wrong. ”

Says Olga Ladokhina , a teacher of the Moscow Filippov school: “I recall the terrible pictures of cruelty and my powerlessness at that moment. I and the academic year of the beginning with the story “Yushka” Andrei Platonov: “The heart in people is blind”-we have learned this, and now we need to do something with this. I want to protect the children. "

Teachers are worried about the course of the country of the country, on those who can be beaten, and those who have the right to beat with impunity:

“We do not flatter yourself: those who beat, arrest, judge unlawful - these are also our graduates. That is why we are deeply concerned that the inability to use our constitutional rights for some and the opportunity to grossly violate these rights for others are two sides of the same medal, two directions of domestic policy, which simultaneously marginalize a peaceful protest and tightens its suppression. Constantly working with historical documents and domestic literature, we know well that the course on the split of society is historically doomed. <...> None of us want to live in society, deeply split into two halves that cannot agree with each other; None of us want a repetition of the situation in which the crack passes through the families, and his brother rises to his brother. ”

That is why teachers demand in their letter "to free the unfairly convicted <...>".

But does it make sense in open letters? Will there be some kind of crook from them? Veronika is a reason , a teacher of the St. Petersburg Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239, skeptically remarks: “It is impossible to be silent. But I do not really believe in success. " Psychologist Julia Kurbatova from the Lyceum “Ark XXI” in Krasnogorsk near Moscow explains: “My husband, Rustam Kurbatov, director of the Lyceum“ Ark XXI ”, we believe that this is the only way to resist the absurd, the abomination that is overwhelmed by the country. This is a way not to prove, but to confirm (first of all to yourself) that you are a person, to maintain dignity. This is a way of resistance, horizontal unification of people, it is the hope of the emergence of civil society.

Personally, this is pushed by a completely animal fear for my children and now grandchildren (this is when it is so scary that you already cease to be afraid). ”

Sergei Volkov , head of the Department of Literature of the New School (Moscow) summarizes: “This letter is written for everyone. For all people. We have such a profession, for us all people are people. We repeat the obvious things many times: lives are written with and, twice two four, and the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. For this, we exist to patiently explain. Now, it seems, the time has come to explain that the moral law and the starry sky above the head still have not gone anywhere. That you can’t lie, you cannot kill and rob, you can not forge. That conscience is not an empty phrase. That it is necessary to remain a person in any circumstances. Usually we explain this in our classes, and then we decided to join forces and remind everyone about it. It seems to us that this reminder sounds especially effective. Well, who does not understand, you can also crack the head of the head. ”

Irina Lukyanova , literature teacher of the Moscow School "Intellectual", observer of "New"