“There are good people in public colleges, but they suck at doing anything.”

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“On the contrary, I have the most patriotic conversations with my son”

Last week, on Thursday, I got a call from the police: they asked me to come talk, they say, a complaint was received against me by the Ombudsman for Children's Rights. What this complaint was about, I did not yet know. I just thought, “Before, I was mostly complained about being supposedly a bad director. I wonder what will happen this time."

The police department read the text of the letter to me - so I learned that my sins consisted in the fact that I “instilled in my child the values ​​of pacifism”, encouraged him to use the Russian flag in combination with the phrase “No to war”, took him on vacation to the “enemy » Georgia and tell him about the bombing of peaceful cities in a neighboring country. The wording surprised me.

What did not surprise me was the content of the second part of the letter, which spoke about the moral character of our family. The fact is that two years ago we were already faced with a similar situation: then some hater under a fictitious name sent letters about our family to all authorities. In these letters there was nothing about extremism and pacifism, there was only that we are corrupting a child. The current complaint was also signed by a non-existent surname, and I understand that this is a continuation of that story.

A police officer asked me if I was really having “anti-patriotic conversations” with my son and showing him Ukrainian symbols. I replied that I didn’t know what “anti-patriotic conversations” were, and I thought that, on the contrary, I was having the most patriotic conversations with my son, and showing Ukrainian symbols in Russia was not prohibited by law.

The dialogue was not pleasant to me, but it did not intimidate me either. In general, the policeman did not take this case too seriously: he saw that I was not some kind of anti-social element who thumps, swears and poses a danger to the child. I think they get a million such slanders and they all have to work out - it gets boring.

Our family will have to go through checks in the prosecutor's office, the police and the commission on juvenile affairs. After that, the authorities will decide whether we violated any rights of the child or not. But I don't think that any procedural actions will eventually be applied against us. I do not believe in great empathy of our law enforcement agencies, but we are now communicating with the prosecutor's office, and as if people understand everything, they behave like normal bureaucrats.

“ *Do you have a couple of minutes to talk about the war? *"

The fact that I took my son to "enemy" Georgia and do not support the war, people know from my social networks. A year has passed since the beginning of the war: during this time everyone understood each other's position, cleaned their ribbons. Now I don’t meet resistance and negativity in the comments, but there are different people - both informers and those who sincerely believe that I am conducting supposedly wrong propaganda.

I'm not going to stop speaking out because of this, because when this is all over, I will have to somehow look my child and students in the eye. And then the posts that I write give people hope that not everyone in education is an asshole who lines up children and agrees to hold "Talk about the important."

You need to understand that you cannot live in society and be free from society. We have students in college whose relatives are fighting on the side of the Russian army. And we are trying to respect them, to talk about it as hygienically as possible. For example, there are students who put up a box to collect clothes and funds to help the [self-proclaimed] DPR and Zaporozhye. I called them to my place and said: “Of course, you can leave it here, but then let's put a box nearby to help Kharkov, Kyiv region, Odessa. If you help one, then let's help others."

College students know about my position. I don’t go up to anyone in the hallway, I don’t ask: “Do you have a couple of minutes to talk about the war?” - but I quite honestly convey my position if they ask me. Most students understand what's going on. Four were even detained at an anti-war rally and fined them. The Ministry of Internal Affairs then sent me court orders with a request to conduct “educational work” with them. I, of course, did not do this.

“ *It is important for me to do something for which I will not be ashamed later *”

To refuse to carry out educational work with students who allegedly violated something is not heroism. I suspect that a significant number of principals of schools and colleges, maybe universities, do the same thing, they just don't talk about it.

In our region, almost all other colleges are public. And even if there, I'm sure, there are good people, but they piss to do something and somehow speak publicly. Therefore, against their background, I look like an oppositionist. If we had a healthy competitive education system, this situation would not have happened. And our education system is intimidated by everything in the world.

It is important for me to do something for which I will not be ashamed later. If a public school teacher is told tomorrow to beat children with sticks and she beats them, justifying herself by saying that otherwise she will lose her job, then this is not my problem. It's a teacher's problem if she doesn't give a fuck about what she does.