Falling in love is selfishness, and “there is no marriage for love”

In schools in the Krasnodar region, high school students are taught the course “Moral Foundations of Family Life” as part of extracurricular classes in “Family Studies.” Teachers advise teenagers to build a family according to the Domostroy model of the 16th century: the man is the head of the family, the woman is the “helper” and “keeper of the hearth.”

A separate topic of the course is called “Women’s emancipation as a fight against God” - girls are actually not recommended to think about a career, and gender equality is called a Western concept that contradicts “the nature of women.” The course authors also claim that successful women allegedly “scare off potential husbands.”

The program also includes the term “telegony” - the pseudoscientific idea that children can inherit the genes of their mother’s previous sexual partners. Living together before marriage is called fornication, hormonal contraception is equated with abortion , and abortion is presented as murder and a threat to the state.

The authors of the textbook “Moral Foundations of Family Life” are Archpriest Dimitry Moiseev and nun Nina Krygina. At one of the seminars for teachers, Moiseev stated that we “live in the ruins of family life and modern high school students have no idea what a family should be like.” According to him, the goal of the course is to give schoolchildren “a harmonious family structure, preferably a large one . ”

❗️ The “Not the Norm” project found at least 20 publications in the Archive about conducting such lessons in educational institutions over the last academic year. In them, teachers and priests tell teenagers how to build relationships correctly, why a large family is needed, and why modern youth are supposedly going through a “spiritual crisis.”

“In our time, without spiritual education, it is difficult to protect children from mistakes. Already at the first lessons, the children met with the clergyman, talked about the importance of family, respect for elders, support and help,” said one of the representatives of the parent committee after the schoolchildren’s meeting with the clergyman.

A special emphasis in classes is placed on sacrifice in relationships. At one of the lessons, students were explained that “only by sacrificing one’s interests for the sake of another, a person becomes truly happy.” In another school, a priest, telling children about marriage, wrote on the board a diagram about the separation of infatuation and love, declaring that “there is no marriage for love,” and love is self-sacrifice.

The course “Moral Foundations of Family Life” is included in the elective “Family Studies”, which began to be taught in test mode in 42 regions of Russia in 2024. In the future, the Ministry of Education plans to introduce this subject in all schools in the country.