Russia’s education system is about to undergo a radical transformation. Next month, when the new academic year begins, classes will be required to teach teenagers how to assemble, handle and clean Kalashnikov rifles, how to use hand grenades and how to administer first aid in combat.
This military training for sixth-formers – 16 and over – will be taught as part of their ‘fundamentals of life safety’ classes. Such classes have existed in various forms since the 1980s. In the past children have been taught quite practical skills, including how to stay safe in terrorist attacks, deal with radiation poisoning following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and, more recently, the basics of online safety.
‘When a school teacher tells you that what is happening is normal, they hold authority’
The new briefing packs being distributed to teachers of Years 10 and 11 (equivalent to Years 12 and 13 in Britain) reveal how overtly militarised the new curriculum is. Students will be required to ‘practise Kalashnikov automatic fire techniques’, ‘learn the basic duties of soldiers in combat’ and ‘learn to carry the wounded out of combat’.
Last month it was announced that sixth-formers would also be taught how to assemble and operate unmanned drones as part of these same classes. This addition came after Vladimir Putin called for drone training to be included in the curriculum in April as ‘early career guidance [that] will ultimately benefit the country’.
Although the independent Russian media outlet Important Stories has published evidence showing that schools across the country have started buying up drones, Sergei Chernyshov, a former teacher and historian designated a ‘foreign agent’ by the Kremlin for opposing the war in Ukraine, doesn’t think many institutions will actually be able to follow through with this requirement. ‘We should not expect that in the lessons of life safety, just because this programme has been adopted, children will be taught how to use drones,’ he tells me. ‘There might be only 2 or 3 per cent of schools who can afford drones.’
The Kremlin’s plans for ‘patriotic’ education of Russian schoolchildren, however, doesn’t stop at practical skills training. Over the past few months, the ministry of education has been busy rewriting and standardising the school curriculum. For primary schools, this applies to just Russian classes; in the secondary school curriculum, history, geography and social sciences have also been modified.
Schools in all regions will now teach an identical curriculum for these subjects and they will only be permitted to use state-written textbooks. Officially, the reason given for this centralised curriculum revamp, dubbed the ‘federal basic standardised programme of education’, is to ensure that children receive an equal standard of education regardless of where across Russia’s nine time zones they live. But a closer look at the education bill passed by the Duma suggests a more ideological motive behind these reforms.
The new curriculum will create an ‘awareness and manifestation of all–Russian citizenship, patriotism, respect for the Russian language as the state language of the Russian Federation’. The aim of teaching history will be to ‘rebuff the falsifiers of Russian history’, while the new geography curriculum will encourage ‘a sense of patriotism’ in students.
Chernyshov believes the aim of such lessons is to legitimise and normalise the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine. ‘Education is an important factor in the current legitimisation of this war,’ he says. ‘That is, when a school teacher tells you that what is happening is normal, they hold authority.’
The Russian leadership has barely bothered to deny the ideological link between the war and the educational reforms. When Sergey Kravtsov, the minister of education, announced the curriculum revamp in June, he declared that the ‘information war’ unleashed on Russia by the ‘collective West’ made it clear that the education system needed to focus on ‘objectively telling the truth to children’. As such, he also announced that, starting from this year, Russia’s ‘special military operation’ would be included in the history curriculum for sixth-formers.
Schools will also have to continue to teach a weekly class called ‘conversations about important things’, which was introduced last year for every year group. These supposedly age-appropriate classes are, in the words of the ministry of education, designed to ‘instil patriotism in children’.
Last year’s classes included showing seven- and eight-year-olds photographs of emaciated child prisoners in second world war concentration camps as part of a module commemorating the ‘genocide of the Soviet people by Nazis and their enablers’. Meanwhile, 14- and 15-year-olds were given a module titled ‘Russia – the leader of the global nuclear industry’.
Nevertheless, according to Vasily Razumov, who lost his teaching job after being accused of ‘discrediting the Russian army’, not all teachers have been implementing the lesson plans. ‘I have a friend who does not teach these lessons according to the training manual,’ he says. ‘He just asked the children at the beginning of the year what was really important to them. They created mind maps: questions of friendship, self-organisation, time management, for example. He does not cover the political agenda at all. This is his way of sabotaging the lessons.’
‘The education system has really turned out to be the devil’s agent. This is the scariest thing’
The fear of being informed upon by pro-Kremlin colleagues, students or parents means that many teachers do submit to teaching the lessons as required. Schools, Razumov says, are ‘a place where the main driving mechanism is fear’. Additionally, many teachers, says Chernyshov, actively support the new classes and are happily complicit in promoting the Kremlin’s propaganda.
‘The worst thing [about these reforms] is that it all comes from below. That is, we haven’t seen mass layoffs in schools, teachers, university management, we don’t see any forms of protest. The education system has really turned out to be the devil’s agent. This is the scariest thing.’
Political affiliations are increasingly playing a big part in who schools hire for jobs. ‘If you are loyal to the authorities, if you accept the leader, support him in every possible way, then they will hire you,’ says Natalya Podolyak, a teacher from Siberia who also lost her job for ‘discrediting the army’.
It appears that next month’s government reforms won’t even be the last. The ministry of education has already announced that by September next year the life safety classes will be renamed ‘the basis of security and the defence of the Motherland’ and will feature modules taught by veterans of the Ukraine war.
How effective will these classes be at brainwashing? Podolyak doesn’t think many teenagers, who’ve been exposed to the West with its comfortable way of life, will buy the narrative the Kremlin is trying to peddle. ‘You won’t be able to deceive them,’ she says.
As the invasion of Ukraine stutters on with huge casualties (the latest estimates by the UK Ministry of Defence put the number at 220,000 Russian soldiers injured or killed), it is not difficult to see why Putin wants Russia’s students to pass from the classroom to the barracks. Last month, he backtracked on amendments to raise the age of conscription to 21. Instead, from January, men aged between 18 and 30 will be required to carry out at least a year of military service. Similarly, in April, the Duma amended the law to allow volunteers as young as 18 to sign contracts with the military. Before this, a university or vocational degree was required, which meant that volunteer soldiers younger than 20 were rare. Now, with his own survival increasingly on the line, Putin is creating a new generation of cannon fodder.
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