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I’ve lived my whole life in places where there was only one
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school—in military towns, there is now a move underway
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once again, a return to the Soviet-style unitary
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system. Basic math shows that
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a private school in Moscow
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simply cannot survive. The Department
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of Education is not transparent at all
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when it comes to its finances—what it does,
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where the money goes, what it buys—there are no reports.
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We know nothing, you understand. Physical education
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is one of my favorite examples of how
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the modern Russian school system
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can, of course, distort everything. Why is my
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school—the school my
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daughter attends—being merged with the neighboring school and a kindergarten?
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Maybe that’s a reasonable decision. But where
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is any explanation at all? We have almost no
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real, militant trade unions in Russia, including
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in Moscow. It’s just that the oversight system
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should not simply lead
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to bureaucratic hell for teachers. As soon as
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the Unified State Exam (Russia’s standardized school-leaving exam) becomes the main metric, it
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starts to be distorted. Parents don’t work with them
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on the Russian language; no one works with them
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at all. The topic of supplementary
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education doesn’t come up in your discussion. And that
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is probably a gap—it's an important issue
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that interests a great many people. Yes, moving on
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moving on, school—we didn’t go further, the class didn’t