Solzhenitsyn has no place in the school curriculum?

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The Duma is offered to remove the Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum. In the first reading with this news, I rather agree, Solzhenitsyn has absolutely nothing to do in the school curriculum, and this, of course, is not the Solzhenitsyn problem, the school curriculum, in principle, should be very processed, because a significant part of it is books that are completely inappropriate for adolescents. Part, since they are discussing completely non -teenage topics, I do not understand how to push censorship and protect children from non -child information and give them a “crime and punishment” for obligatory reading, part, simply because it will be absolutely incomprehensible to the student, and just the “Gulag Archipelago” belongs to this category. A person comes out of school years with absolutely without understanding works, but at the same time with a persistent sense of disgust for the entire school curriculum: due to misunderstanding, it cannot seem valuable and interesting. So, yes, Solzhenitsyn has no place in the school curriculum.

But it would be naive to believe that the officials decided to take care of child psychology and pedagogy: of course, they decided to remove the book from the school curriculum due to the fact that it was supposedly historical inconsistencies and the facts “sucked from the finger”, which the author added to the work to denigrate his homeland. And the works denigrating the homeland should be removed from the program, because literature should educate pride and patriotism and maintain historical memory. In my opinion, these two tasks contradict each other at the very start: no matter how you try, but historical memory does not come down to pride and patriotism. For every pride of Russian history there is a shame. And this is a rather natural thing, this happens in any country, everyone has something to be proud of and what to be ashamed of.

The Gulag Archipelago is a great book about Russian history, even though this is still a work of art. Despite the fact that there are critical analysis with the search for actual shortcomings and assumptions made by Solzhenitsyn, he did not sin before the truth and described the general background and the reality of this historical period. Roughly speaking, this book has one key idea: the Gulag was and he was terrible, he brought death and suffering to millions of people. To argue with this is unscrupulous, and this contradicts the same historical memory. But yes, it does not certainly fulfill the task of educating pride and patriotism. I read the “Gulag Archipelago”, of course, outside the school curriculum, this was not in my time, but I clearly remember this feeling of the gluttony of my own soul already from the fact that I indirectly related to this horror simply because I live in the country where it happened.

However, I strongly doubt that such emotional shakes are what a schoolboy can get when reading, because the school curriculum is always read completely differently as a purely formal element. I don’t remember that at least once school reading caused me sincere tears or empathy, although some books called them significantly later, already in adulthood, when I read them consciously. From this point of view, keeping the Gulag Archipelago in the school curriculum is literally a talisman from the students to perceive it as it should be perceived. But this is a too complicated forecast for Russian officials who, by nature, think formal structures.

These officials do not understand in the same way that the mention of Solzhenitsyn in the context of the ban will naturally cause the corresponding effect of Streisand and an unprecedented interest in this work from different segments of the population. It is unlikely that schoolchildren, because, yes, if someone is prohibited, it means that it is something interesting, but, on the other hand, we will be honest, it is a huge and very boring Talmud for a child.

But, if you look at, for example, at the fate of the modern novel “Summer in a Pioneer Tie”, which occupies the upper lines of bestseller thanks to a prohibitive campaign around the work, you can predict a certain increase in interest even in much more complex literature.