Role-playing: at Moscow’s School for Self Determination, students and their teacher
bring Antiquity to life.
Russia
|
A
growing divide
Do they see
a future? According to a report published by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
in Florence, the number of 15 to 18-year-olds opting out of school in Eastern Europe
and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) rose by three million between 1989
and 1998, from six to nine million, more than one third of that age group.
Countries with lower enrolment rates are those lagging behind economic recovery and
reform. On average, school graduation rates have dropped by —13% in the CIS, ranging
from —6% in Russia to —13% in Kyrgyzstan and —26% in war-torn Tajikistan.
Evidence also suggests that a greater divide is emerging when it comes to educational
access. According to a cited OECD review, “As Russian society becomes increasingly
stratified in terms of wealth, Russian education is increasingly stratified in terms
of opportunity.” The report, “Young People in Changing Societies,” which includes
interviews with youth in the region’s 27 countries, calls for more “youth-friendly”
schools in terms of teaching methods, curricula and the school environment. It draws
attention to a health threat to youth, notably an impending HIV/AIDS crisis in a
region which was one of the least affected parts of the world a few years ago.
www.unicef-icd.org
|
Tatiana Sergeyevna displays the school’s computer, declared a health hazard.
Lunchtime
at Rtishchevo’s School No. 2. |
In
a town of 40,000 souls, a school has managed to keep up standards on a shoe string,
while in Moscow, a trailblazing principal ploughs along with his alternative approach
to learning, attracting both criticism and curiosity
Tatiana Sergeyevna Korobovtseva
works hard to keep her spirits up despite the constant and chronic challenges of
teaching in the small railway-junction town of Rtishchevo in the region of Saratov,
650 kilometres away from Moscow.
At 40, she is the deputy director of Secondary School No. 2 and looks back over a
career that spans the entire recent epoch of upheaval and change in Russia. Mikhail
Gorbachev had only just come to power when she started teaching and the Communist
Party line still dictated much of the curriculum. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost
(freedom) and perestroika (rebuilding) hastened the collapse of communism in 1991
and a new flush of educational freedom swept through Russia. But the chaos of Boris
Yeltsin’s liberal experiment brought poverty, uncertainty and a collapse of central
authority that eroded many of the new liberties offered. Tatiana Sergeyevna saw her
standard of living plummet along with the real value of her wages when they were
paid on time and a host of problems arise she could never have foreseen back in the
Soviet Union’s twilight years of the mid-1980s. Vladimir Putin’s surprise ascendancy
to the Kremlin a year ago has changed nothing, she says.
Today, Tatiana Sergeyevna, her director Vyatcheslav Sashenkov and the other 38 members
of staff, do the best they can with the bare minimum of resources to maintain educational
standards at a school considered one of the best in the town of 40,000 people.
Per capita funding for the school’s 690 pupils is a paltry two roubles a day, about
$50 a day for the entire school. Her monthly salary is 1,500 roubles ($56), the school
director’s a dollar more. Many of the children come from families with lower incomes
or with only one parent. A paid-for canteen service helps ensure most children get
a hot meal at lunchtime for three roubles (about 10 U.S. cents) a serving. A board
of trustees made up of parents, heads of local enterprises and teachers raises money
to help the school and the poorest students, but the lack of up-to-date teaching
materials, textbooks and computers remains sorely felt.
Many have left teaching in the last decade to go into business or to work as “shuttle
traders” living off the slender profits to be had from buying cheap goods in Turkey
or Poland and selling them at a small mark-up in Russia. Those who remain tend to
be the dedicated ones or those with nowhere else to go. When asked why she stays
on, Tatiana Sergeyevna’s answer is both typical and revealing. “I love my job and
could not conceive of life without teaching. It is a quality of all Russians that
we are used to fighting for our survival and using laughter and humour to get through,”
she says.
Humour is especially essential for Tatiana Sergeyevna, a math and computer specialist.
She has never had the opportunity to use the Internet and can only teach programming
in theory because the school’s 13-year-old Soviet-made computers have been declared
a health hazard due to their high level of electro-magnetic radiation emissions.
“I try not to talk about the Internet very much with the children and instead set
them tasks to be solved using algorithms. They write programmes in their exercise
books. I have to make do with this,” she says.
Her director Vyatcheslav Sashenkov laughs hollowly when told the Federal Education
Ministry plans to train hundreds of thousands of teachers in using the Internet and
to provide every school in the country with at least one worldwide web-connected
computer within the next decade. “In the entire school there is only one student
who has her own personal computer and the nearest Internet provider is in Saratov,
200 kilometres away. The regional governor Dmitri Ayatskov provides money for computers
whenever a new school is built, but that still leaves existing ones without the means
to provide proper computing facilities.”
But it would be wrong to picture life at School No. 2 as all doom and gloom. The
academic freedoms ushered in after 1991 have given new scope and vigour to the curriculum.
National guidelines for core subjects such as Russian language, history and math
leave much choice in other areas. Teachers are free to devise their own lesson plans
and optional subjects for after-hours tutoring with a liberty unknown in Soviet times.
When
parents need extra hands to help out
During
the first flush of freedom in the early 1990s the school offered a wide range of
“fashionable options” as Sashenkov puts it: extra English courses, dancing, chess,
computing (using the then not-quite-so ancient computers now ruled out of bounds),
cultural studies. The teaching day stretched up to eight hours across six-day weeks.
But financial difficulties and, more recently health concerns, have curtailed this
enthusiastic activity. The regional State Epidemic Centre ruled that children cannot
attend more than six hours of classes a day and the school week has been curbed to
five days.
Extra tuition, particularly for those about to take university entrance exams, are
provided on a paid-for basis–one way teachers can add a little to their poor salaries.
A partnership between the school and two universities–the technical and agrarian–in
the regional capital Saratov, means brighter students can study in lyceum (upper
secondary) classes to prepare for college entrance.
The school has its problems: truancy, often supported by parents who need extra hands
to help out on the market stall, for example, is a growing challenge. But despite
the financial difficulties, which are common to all schools in the state sector,
particularly those far from Moscow, Tatiana Sergeyevna does not bemoan her lot in
life. “In defence of a provincial school, we think that the process of decay is less
pernicious here than in more urban areas. We have fewer unruly parents and pupils
and hardly any cases of alcoholism or drug use among our students.”
In Moscow, Alexander Tubelsky’s School for Self-Determination might as well be on
another planet, despite the fact that is also state-funded. This experimental school
has frequently found itself at odds with educational orthodoxy, both under communism
and the post-Soviet order. No stranger to the financial constraints encountered in
the provinces, Tubelsky’s battles have been more about intellectual and pedagogical
independence.
The educational philosophy at the school in the Izmailovo district of north-eastern
Moscow rests as much on a rich domestic vein of alternative approaches to teaching
and learning as it does on examples from overseas, notably Britain’s Summerhill and
the free school movement of A.S. Neill. Children and their unique abilities, aptitudes
and needs are at the centre of the school’s philosophy. Freedom of choice in subjects,
lesson plans and, yes, attendance are all guaranteed under an impressive school constitution.
“It’s a myth that a child needs to learn a certain set range of subjects in order
to complete his education and be a successful member of society,” says Tubelsky,
an expressive man with a thick mop of white hair, who has just turned 60. “But if
a child has spent his school life learning to find information and to use it for
his clearly set goals; if he has learnt to communicate and cooperate with others
and to understand the nature of what he is reading, then in the process he has acquired
and developed abilities that may be applied to whatever he subsequently needs in
life.”
With no legally established standards to meet other than minimum time requirements
for certain core subjects, the school is able to offer its 1,000 pupils and 200 kindergarten
children an academic freedom theoretically available to any in Russia.
Staunch
opposition to testing and ranking
The
activities of nearly 80 sixth graders–children aged 11 and 12 on a wintry Saturday
afternoon–offer a glimpse into how Tubelsky’s school, now in its 13th year of innovation,
works. The children are studying ancient civilizations, as their art-work and displays
from field trips to archaeological sites in the Crimea in the corridors attest. In
the school’s theatre, all are clustered around tables dressed in sandals and togas.
Some of the boys are resplendent in Romano-Greek helmets and body armour. The teachers
too are dressed in togas and despite the usual flights of balls of paper from one
table to the other and an occasional snigger, the atmosphere is positively businesslike.
Working math, science and computing into a topic that encompasses role playing from
the cave-dwellers onwards may sound faintly ridiculous to some, but Tubelsky quietly
assures that his approach results in between 60 and 70 percent of school leavers
going on to higher education and all becoming self-reliant, responsible and balanced
adults. “I cannot describe a typical graduate: the whole idea of the school is not
to categorize people, but the main feature I observe is that if they fail in something,
they never blame someone else. They reflect on the reasons for their failure and
try to use that experience to move on.”
Yulia Tourchaninova, a professor of education and former head of the Russian in-service
teacher training organization, a close associate of Tubelsky, puts it like this:
“It is freedom that generates and brings up responsibility. Slaves are the most irresponsible
people: it’s not their work, not their results and they don’t care. Only a free person
is a responsible person.”
It’s this inner freedom that the school aims to foster in students and is one of
the reasons it attracts a steady stream of visitors. Vehemently opposed to the international
conventional wisdom of standards, testing, ranking tables and academic streaming,
the school does not work with specially selected pupils: 80 percent are drawn from
the local district, a suburban area characterized by high unemployment, poverty and
criminality. The rest are accepted from families throughout the city anxious to take
advantage of the rare opportunities for self-development offered.
Finances and behavioural problems common to all Russian schools are no strangers.
The school’s monthly budget of $15,000 may be ten times as much as Rtishchevo’s School
No. 2, but is still low by western European standards. Donations from parents and
sponsors totalled $9,000 during 2000. Most teachers earn around 1,800 roubles ($64)
and many moonlight as private tutors. Disciplinary problems are resolved through
a school court, emphasizing the philosophy that all individuals must be held accountable
for their actions.
It’s a tough act for any school principal to maintain, more so in Russia where examples
of corruption and lack of responsibility abound. A casual comment by some students
when challenged by a group of visiting teachers from Volgograd over their “unworkmanlike”
dress sums up its success. “Why should we dress differently?” they asked. “We don’t
work here; we live here.” |
