Miriam Ingrams reports on how the influence of the Mafia has reached the classroom. A young female teacher was badly beaten up in a Moscow school recently by a gang of thugs. The thugs had been sent by a mother who was unhappy about the low marks her daughter had been awarded. “I drive around in a Mercedes and I buy my clothes in America,” she allegedly screamed at the teacher. “So who are you to give my daughter bad marks? I’m going to make sure you get taught a lesson.”
The police have so far failed to launch an investigation being afraid both of the thugs themselves and the woman’s husband with his Mafia connections. Other parents are refusing to send their children back to school since the entire incident happened in front of a full classroom and they fear for their children’s safety. The teacher, and two of her colleagues have resigned.
New Russia, the post-soviet state of millionaires and economic misery where terror and lawlessness triumph over the honest citizen, has reached even the classroom. The situation in education today and the prognosis for 1995 are as bleak as in the country as a whole.
Teachers, on an average salary of around Pounds 30 (182,000 roubles) a month, are leaving the profession in droves. The crisis is such that in schools all over the country whole classes have missed out on a basic subject for the entire year.
“There are schools in Moscow that have had no mathematics on the curriculum for the past 12 months,” said Peter Polojevets, editor of the Teachers’ Gazette.
The most exciting development in recent Russian education has been the abolition of political control over the classroom. But in practical terms this has meant very little.
The textbook crisis has only exacerbated the problem. In order for all schools to be fully equipped, state presses should by now be half way through next year’s print run, but they haven’t even completed orders for the current school year. This means that some 20 million schoolchildren will be without textbooks next year.
“It is a particular problem for mathematics, for example,” said teacher Julia Elisseeva. “But how can we go on teaching subjects like history from the old textbooks? As for new subjects like business and management, such books don’t even exist.”
Perhaps the most dramatic change in Russian education however is the unprecedented proliferation of private schools. Appalled by the conditions in state schools where teachers are reduced to providing their own chalk and visual aids, Russian parents who can scrape together the funds are sending their child to one of the so-called new “elite” schools which specialise in anything from table manners to academia. Fees range from around Pounds 120 a month to thousands. Favourites among the new rich even provide bodyguards and waitress service restaurants along with the tennis and squash courts.
But Polojevets is uneasy about the development: “As yet there is no government control over these schools and only a handful offer a full school curriculum. Furthermore, subjects are often charged for individually which means struggling parents may only be able to afford for their children to take three or four different subjects in one term.”
The consequences for Russia of an emerging partially-educated generation of school-leavers are all the more alarming taken with the fact that, according to Polojevets, some 62 per cent of university graduates are now opting to work abroad when they have finished their studies.
In the midst of all this gloom there are a couple of pieces of good news: once undreamed of exchange programmes for both teachers and pupils are now readily available and obviously beneficial. And the government, in the person of the very active deputy education minister Maria Lazutovio, has recognised the existence of special needs children and promised to provide appropriate facilities in the near future.
