Russian schools and propaganda

With the invasion of Ukraine, the teaching of history as a demonstration of Russian superiority has been intensified in schools. Education is now a propaganda tool. But school facilities are underfunded. The Soviet-style ideological system remains in place.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - In these months of war, there has been a proliferation of parliamentary and governmental projects and decrees extolling the importance of school education in the country, especially the teaching of history. This is considered a fundamental dimension of the patriotic spirit and a demonstration of the moral and cultural superiority of the Russians with respect to the hated West and the entire world. A typically Soviet ideological mould of the 'best school' of true ideology, has been renewed.

Thus the school has become an instrument of propaganda, but many observers stress that this prospect is only further damage to a school system that has long been in crisis. An analysis by Rbk-Media shows that primary and secondary schools in Russia have suffered for years from a total lack of funding for infrastructure, and thousands of schools are in a very poor state, apart from a few purely cosmetic interventions of a very "Soviet" type, such as repainting walls and replacing a few layers of linoleum on floors destroyed by pupils' snow shoes. In many regions, action is only taken on school buildings that are at risk of collapse.

It is not just a question of a lack of funding, which is sometimes dispersed or misappropriated, so much so that expenditure on food even exceeds the teachers' living expenses. Yet there are increasing complaints about poor rations for pupils, many of whom have suffered allergy problems or severe discomfort from bad food.

Lessons in the regions furthest from Moscow are held in two or three shifts, with a considerable deterioration in the quality of teaching: teachers cannot cope with the workload, families are also put to the test by the discontinuity; classrooms and school materials are overused.

In such a stressed context, the parliament and the government are competing to introduce new standards and programmes all the time, obviously for propaganda purposes, to prevent any ideological discrepancy in the new generations. Over the past 10 years, students in particular, starting in their teens, have been very receptive to the anti-corruption protest campaigns of Naval'nyj and his comrades.

Teachers are constantly having to pass refresher tests to satisfy the demands of the top management and save their jobs and salaries, and some have been dismissed for not adhering to the official line, not to mention a few courageous teachers who have expressed some criticism.

With the exception of a few excellent schools in the big cities, the Russian education system is very backward from a technological point of view, and does not take advantage of digital opportunities, remaining similar to the 'assembly line' of the schools of the past. The level of students is chronically very low, and it does not seem that solutions to raise it to an acceptable level can be found any time soon.

Foreign languages continue to be a privilege only for those students who can be initiated into studies of "national interest", i.e. those who are expected to be able to recruit for security services and political careers, and this too is a legacy of Soviet times. The humanities are also traditionally undervalued and taught in a haphazard manner in order to exhalt "scientific primacy", which is in fact also of old fashioned approach, excluding the study of scientific achievements of Western origin - in the USSR it was called "capitalist countries".

Nothing like a hierarch from days gone by, despite his relatively young age, is the Minister of Education, 49-year-old Sergei Kravtsov.  In recent years Putin has put him in charge of guarding the system to avoid leaps forward or ideological deviations, managing it all with extreme doses of bureaucratic formalism.