Object Lessons

* Originally published in cherta.media

In early November, schoolchildren in Russia returned from their fall vacation to start the school year’s second quarter. During the previous quarter, they had been brought up to speed on the details of the new patriotic elements in the curriculum – a Conversations on Important Topics module, the raising of the Russian flag during assemblies, and the singing of the national anthem.

But judging from what they told us, for them it was all a completely pointless additional burden that interfered with their preparations for upcoming exams and hampered the smooth flow of the academic process. The teachers we talked to agreed, but the school administrations had completely different thoughts on the matter. So our reporter took a deep dive into the atmosphere surrounding the start of Russia’s school year.

When tenth grader Anya (All names have been changed at our interviewees’ request.) from Karelia began the new school year on September 1, her class was on monitor duty. In addition to checking that the other students had brought their indoor shoes and were not misbehaving in the corridors, Anya and her classmates had been put in charge of a ceremony that would start every school week going forward. All the grades would assemble in front of the school to watch the best students raise the Russian flag while the national anthem was sung – or that’s how the architects of this new procedure saw it in their heads. The way it worked at Anya’s school was somewhat more prosaic.

Only two classes gathered outside the building. Some of the kids were shifting from one foot to the other; others were huddling against the chilly wind. There was frosty weather in the forecast, meaning that the school was going to be cold again. The building’s wooden window frames, installed in the 1970s, had been replaced only in the principal’s and assistant principal’s offices, with the rest of the promised renovations postponed indefinitely – all except the new front entrance and the flagpole that the students were gathered around.

The flag-raising was accompanied not by the anthem but by the sounds of the older students chattering among themselves. A startled Anya swatted away a wasp, while four randomly chosen boys tugged on the flagpole rope. According to Anya, the principal wasn’t there; she had found something more important to do than speechifying.

Once the flag was up, the older students straggled into the auditorium to watch documentaries about Russia’s role in the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the fight against terrorism. While the narrator was chronicling the September 2004 hostage-taking at the school in Beslan, the young audience members were on their phones. As Anya remembers it, the assistant principal didn’t explain what the films had been about, but wanted them to discuss what they had seen with their parents. Anya didn’t do that. She had enough to worry about with getting through her schoolwork and thinking about the college exams that would come, like it or not, in two years’ time.

That was how the Conversation about Important Topics program was launched in a typical Russian school. In the reality of the classroom, almost no one was pleased with these “classes in patriotic education.”

Where Did the Conversations Come From?

Vika has been teaching Russian language and literature in Petrozavodsk for more than two years. But in May of last year she attended what seemed to her the oddest school event of her entire working life, when the principal brought in an ataman, head of the local Cossack community, to talk to her fifth graders. As Vika recalls it, the staid, bearded man began his talk with the assertion that “You know what color underpants American superheroes wear, but you don’t remember the names of the heroes who fell in the Great Patriotic War.”

After that, she says, the kids glued themselves to their cell phones and stayed that way until it was over. So went one of the Lessons in Courage that were supposed to refresh the students’ memories of what happened during the war and teach them more about those involved.

The Lessons in Courage foisted on Vika’s class was a precursor of the Conversations on Important Topics. But while the Lessons were optional and occasional units timed to coincide with the run-up to the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, the Conversations were supposed to be a weekly thing.

Those new classes in patriotic education became public knowledge in April 2022. Going forward, it would be an Education Ministry requirement that schools hold weekly Conversations on Important Topics, during which teachers would discuss Russia’s history and culture with the children. Beginning in the new school year, every Monday would begin with the raising of the flag, the singing of the anthem, and a homeroom hour spent on something that the authorities felt the youngsters should know.

The backstory involves a rethinking of schools’ educational goals. In May 2021, the Education Ministry issued an order laying out some new educational standards. The document also had a lot to say about molding schoolchildren’s understanding of “the Russian Federation’s place in the world, its historic role, territorial integrity, and cultural and technological development, and its contribution to the world’s scholarly heritage.” For example, history classes would have the students delving into the reasons behind “the country’s rebirth in the 2000s and the reintegration of Crimea into Russia in 2014,” while in social studies they would learn, on top of everything else, “to identify and describe the traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” In other words, the desired body of knowledge was outlined, but no specifics were given as to how it was to be conveyed.

“For me personally, these patriotic education conversations fit well into the existing syllabus,” says Vika. “In my literature classes, for example, I can tell the children about Russian literature’s contribution to world culture. But others are saying that talking about patriotism means staying in step with the government’s current agenda.”

After February 24, 2022, discussion of the “special operation” in Ukraine was added to the patriotic roster, which meant that, in certain areas, classes on the Russia-Ukraine conflict were first taught in the spring of that year. Children in Kaluga Oblast analyzed President Putin’s speech recognizing the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics as sovereign territories. Meanwhile, in Vladimir, the children were told about “the defense of the civilian population of the Donbas,” and warned to stay away from antiwar rallies.

The Ministry of Education ran with this idea, deciding to embed “conversations” about the special operation into current lesson plans. From fifth grade on, the students were to discuss with their teachers “the goals of the special military operation” and memorize the names of “Russia’s heroic warriors.”

This news irked parents and community advocates alike. Just before the start of school on September 1, Myagkaya sila (Soft Force, a women’s sociopolitical movement that brings together antiwar municipal council members and civic activists) joined with the Teachers’ Alliance to put out an announcement that called on parents to boycott those lessons by not letting their children attend. As the announcement’s authors noted, “making this a must-do” was no way to develop a love for the motherland in children of any age.

After the public uproar over the special operation classes, the Education Ministry would waste no time in removing any reference to Ukraine from the homeroom hour outlines. Or so the activists thought. But a few days after the news broke, Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov announced that discussions of the special operation would not be confined to just one lesson. Instead, the topic of Russo-Ukrainian relations would be spread across a variety of classes. Where and how those references would be made, Kravtsov did not specify.

The homeroom teaching guidelines are carefully drafted, without any blatant propaganda. But, as recounted by one of our interviewees, when the Soviet films Father and Son and Father of a Soldier came up in a class for older students on Fathers’ Day, the teacher saw that as an opportunity to remind his students that the Russian family is the union of one man and one woman, and nothing else. Then, as the lesson was coming to an end, he brought his students around to the idea that “Today we have talked about the father’s important role being that of the family’s defender.” And just before the bell, he added that “Today too we see manifested the true patriotism of Russia’s defenders, primarily in how the special operation is being conducted.”

The government’s current agenda is sprinkled through other classes too. One script for an eighth-grade class on Senior Citizens’ Day includes this: “Today, in trying times for our country, servicemen – our fathers, our brothers – are in the Donbas, standing tall for the freedom of their fellow-countrymen.” And in supplementary material for study sessions on Teachers’ Day, it is suggested that tenth graders read and retell in their own words a short piece about a teacher named Viktor Shatalov. What distinguishes Shatalov among dozens of contemporary educational theorists are these two biographical facts: “In 2014, he became a citizen of the Donetsk People’s Republic. He has also become a member of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Union of Writers.”

Vika, the Russian language and literature teacher we met earlier, believes that these pepperings of propaganda are unlikely to have any effect on the children. “Thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds are generally apolitical,” she says, “and it’s hard to get them to go for any kind of propaganda. The lessons themselves are pretty boring and come in ho-hum packaging, so they’re unlikely to make any impression on savvy TikTokers.”

The visual style of these Conversations is really no different from a standard classroom slide show. The slides for one Father’s Day presentation were a collection of stock pictures with explanatory texts. For National Unity Day, eighth and ninth graders were to watch a presentation comprising illustrations from a history textbook and a very similar video with voiceover.

Even where parents don’t disapprove, these conversations have run up against a yet more serious problem. Many teachers and students simply aren’t prepared to waste their study time on material of this kind.

Student Reactions

“When I read reports in the media about the patriotic education classes we’d be having, I went to take a look at the syllabus. I’d only been through a few of the exercises before my jaw dropped. Propaganda? That’s what they’d be teaching us?”

Olya is a Moscow ninth grader. She believes that she’s lucked out with her homeroom teacher, because instead of talking about “traditional values” and battlefield valor in the time allotted to patriotic education, her class discusses preparations for the exams. The flag isn’t raised at Olya’s school, and the anthem isn’t sung before the homeroom hour. But another ninth-grade class doesn’t have it so good. This is how ninth grader Arseny describes his patriotic education classes:

“Sometimes the teacher gets too emotional about everything. For example, she’ll probably blow up at anybody who talks during the anthem. She tells us that we don’t love our motherland. One time she told a soccer player in our class that athletes cry when they hear the anthem. ‘And this is how you behave?’ she said to him.”

The schoolchildren we interviewed see these Conversations as yet another burden that distracts them from more important classes. Some teachers understand this, so are omitting the study of “our forebears’ heroic deeds” in favor of letting students talk about their studies and each other’s behavior.

Teacher Vika holds that for any teacher worth their salt, Conversations on Important Topics means talking over current issues (academic achievement, exam prep), not subjecting their classes to political propaganda. But teacher’s attitudes are shaped by their personality and character.

Arina, a high schooler from St. Petersburg, tries to ignore what’s happening in those classes. In only her second patriotism class of the year, the teacher gave the students a hand-out on how war brings out the best human qualities. On the same day, they were broken into groups to discuss political activism among teenagers. For her homeroom teacher, the political dichotomy was categorically simple: patriots take up arms to defend their country; “non-patriots” go to rallies.

Arina’s classmates and she herself did their best not to argue for the time being. They all realized it would be futile. Some gazed silently at the ceiling, while others played along and said that nobody should ever go to any rally, no matter what. So she decided to ditch the next class. But, she told us, these “lessons on important topics” are not optional but regular scheduled classes in her school. So on the following day, she had to explain her absence from class in writing.

“No one can force a child to attend classes that are considered extracurricular. And these Conversations are just that,” Vika notes. “Parents have the right to complain about teachers who are making it up as they go along by insisting on full attendance.”

The Conversations on Important Topics are not an academic subject. They are not prescribed by the Federal State Educational Standards (which define the requirements for mandatory school subjects). So they can indeed be categorized as extracurricular activities, for which attendance is not mandated by law. And the freedom to approach them in a variety of ways pertains not only to the children but to the teachers too. That pitch from Arina’s teacher about teens attending rallies was ad-libbed: the script for the second tenth-grade lesson doesn’t touch on that topic at all.

The outlines provided for these Conversations are basically recommendations. No one is barring the teachers from talking to the children about other things that are important to them personally. Nor does the law preclude them from choosing what to talk about in class and how to talk about it. On this, the teachers have the last word.

“Of course the teacher decides what materials to use. They can deliver a full presentation or show individual video clips. So there is some freedom here,” says Oksana, a teacher in Karelia. “But any school administrator can stop by without warning during the homeroom hour to check on what the teacher’s talking about.”

Aside from that, teachers can be “asked” to speak on current events. As Anya, whose story we told earlier, recalls, “When the lesson on Senior Citizens’ Day had just started, the teacher said ‘It is my duty to tell you that some new areas have been incorporated into Russia.’ After that, she gave a quick run-down on those areas, and then we started working on our hand-made cards for the old folks.”

Anya thinks that those lessons – and the raising of the flag – are only being done to check the boxes. A lot of teachers have neither the strength nor the desire to talk about anything other than the curriculum subjects.

She summed it all up for us this way: “It’s just strange that they’ve opted to pump us full of patriotism. We have enough to worry about without that.”

Yet some older students see nothing strange or harmful in these Conversations. Valya from Karelia thinks that they can be useful “for upgrading what we know about Russia’s history, culture, and nature.”

“The one question I have about these lessons is the way they’ve been pushed onto the higher grades out of nowhere. They have no value for ninth to eleventh graders, who’ve made up their minds already,” Valya says. “But I’m all for introducing something like this in the elementary and middle schools. Younger children, who will later be full-fledged citizens of our country, should know their Russian history.”

Valya’s position is not exactly typical of the schoolchildren we surveyed. Most of them are entirely indifferent to these classes. Only a few are sincerely irritated by the information that the authorities are trying to foist on them.

“I don’t like that the lesson outlines are so out of touch with reality,” says Olya from Moscow. “For example, the script for the lesson on Senior Citizens’ Day has a lot of big talk about how important it is to love and respect old people. But nowhere does it say that most older folks in this country don’t have the money to pay for their utilities and buy food. And there wasn’t a word about exactly how the government’s trying to solve that problem.”

Topics in Vocational Schools

The Conversations on Important Topics have shown up elsewhere in the educational system, because the under-eighteens who make up the student body in vocational and trade schools also fall within the Ministry of Education’s purview.

These lessons differ in no way from those in the regular schools, with the students scheduled to discuss subjects such as rocket scientist Tsiolkovsky’s birthday commemoration, Teachers’ Day, and the traditions of Russia’s ethnic minorities. Attendance at the flag-raising ceremony is mandatory too, as we were told by Sveta, a vocational school student in Veliky Novgorod.

She has never approved of the idea of “lessons in patriotism.” On September 1, when she learned about the upcoming innovations, she thought about skipping. But the teachers decided to put a scare into any potential ditchers from the outset.

“Right at the start, our class advisor told us anyone who skipped those classes would be sent to the vice principal,” Sveta said. “And the punishments could even include expulsion. He suggested that anyone with a problem about this should take it up with the Ministry of Education.”

As in the regular schools, the content of the Conversations in the vocational and trade schools depends on the individual teacher. So anyone who didn’t make a habit of pontificating on love for the motherland before these classes began isn’t likely to be doing anything differently afterward.

“I knew I’d be coming up against lessons like these sooner or later. But I didn’t think it would be this sudden,” says Lera, a vocational school student in Petrozavodsk. “A lot of my classmates aren’t happy about the Conversations. If you ask me, patriotism needs to be developed from childhood, not on the back of what’s happening in the country right now.”

At the September 1 assembly, she realized that the government’s patriotism-boosting program wasn’t having the desired effect on her. It was a clumsy affair altogether: the students crowded into the gym and sang (or pretended to sing) the Russian anthem as the flag was raised. But during the first homeroom hour after that ceremony, Lera’s fellow-students told the group advisor that they didn’t want to discuss the lesson outline topics. The teacher understood and suggested instead that the homeroom hours be spent on topics of direct concern to them.

“Our advisor is pretty much on our side. She doesn’t mind us expressing various points of view. It’s a whole lot worse in other groups,” Lera says.

On one occasion, she sat in on a homeroom hour in one of those other groups where the teacher was having it out with her students over the subject of the special operation.

“The case she was making was that the ‘higher ups’ are no fools and that Russia always does the right thing. So most of the kids simply stayed quiet until she was done. Why argue when the teacher isn’t going to listen to you anyway?”

The students wanted to discuss the mobilization after it was announced on September 21. Lera and the rest of her group told their advisor that the latest news had them on edge. One was stressing out on behalf of friends and family; another was worried that students would be called up too. But hardly any of the teachers shared their concerns, instead suggesting that they attend an event to be held in support of the troops. By law, no student, in whatever kind of school, can be impelled (or compelled) to take part in any public political event. But the regular schools and the trade schools alike are taking advantage of the youngsters’ passivity and their parents’ unwillingness to assert their children’s right not to attend functions that they care nothing about.

“Several times they’ve tried sending us to join a patriotic flash mob – the kind where you have to line up to form the letter Z and stuff like that.* [FN: Z (written in the Western, not the Russian, way) has become a symbol of support for the war in Ukraine.] We always say no. Our group hasn’t been in trouble yet for not wanting to sign up for that sort of thing,” says Nastya, another of our interviewees. “But some people went anyway, because it got them out of class.”

Why Teachers Aren’t Thrilled

In early October, some schools were instructed to teach something new – Lessons in Courage that focused on the special operation. History teacher Oksana tells us that an order came from above to replace the Music Day lesson indicated on the Conversations on Important Topics website with a Lesson in Courage.

Although the presentation provided to teachers isn’t freely accessible, we were able to view its content. It compares the special operation to the Great Patriotic War and informs the children about “the rebirth of Nazism” in Ukraine. The lesson ends by introducing them to the “heroes of the special operation” and having them write letters to the troops.

“I don’t know why they even replaced the previous lesson plan. It was probably because of the mobilization,” Oksana says.

That lesson, titled “The Martial Glory of the Heroes of the Russian Land,” was given not only in Karelia but in Saratov Oblast, the Republic of Mordovia, and other areas too. But the teachers we spoke with are vocally unenthusiastic about lessons crammed with political propaganda being handed down from on high. Vika, for instance, observes that most teachers in her school are finding it difficult enough as it is to cope with the workload imposed by the federal standards. Teachers and medical personnel experience more burnout than any other professionals, and, depending on the estimates you read, the strength and the desire even to meet the standards’ minimum requirements are just not there in 75 percent of teachers. And the Conversations are just one more unnecessary burden, for which, adding insult to injury, they might not be paid.

In early September Vyorstka, an online information resource, reported that several school administrations were refusing to pay teachers for time spent on the Conversations. Certain principals and vice principals are of the opinion that these new teaching hours are extracurricular and therefore not part of the teacher’s salaried time. The Conversations’ official website also supports that, by labeling them “a cycle of extracurricular study sessions.”

The situation, though, can vary from school to school. Acquaintances of Vika who are teaching Conversations have received a monthly salary hike in the 1000-ruble range (a little over $15). Such a paltry sum encourages one of two approaches: either the teachers make a cursory run through the materials taken from the Conversations site, or they discuss conduct, schoolwork, and exam prep with their students in the time allotted to the Conversations.

“If we had more freedom, we teachers would tell those lessons where to go,” Vika says. “But now everyone’s too tired and too spooked to speak against them.”

Oksana believes that the Conversations could be useful, as lessons in general development and character building. “There’s been talk about patriotic education in schools for a long time, and now there is increasing focus on it. In point of fact, patriotism is primarily a love for the motherland. That’s not a bad thing. But today a specific political subtext has been wedged into the concept of patriotism,” she says.

The school administrations are more eager than anyone to follow that subtext. By way of example, Vika thinks back to her previous principal, a woman with no formal education as an educator who was even praised by the Education Ministry for actively pursuing “character building” in the classroom.

“She’s the one who started forcing the children into the Lessons in Courage. And she’s also requiring strict adherence to the Conversations syllabus and demanding that the flag be raised and the Russian anthem played. All right-minded teachers quit after she became principal. The only ones who stayed are those who didn’t care,” Vika says.

Vika’s conflict with the principal motivated her to find work in another school. But scrolling through her news feed one day, she saw a former student of hers who had been involved in a flag-raising on September 1. When asked how that could have happened, the embarrassed teen replied, “Don’t ask why I did it. It’s a black mark that’ll be there for the rest of my life.”