Students in Soviet Georgia Take New Course--Religion

Nearly 300 high school students in the south of this officially atheistic nation are studying religion as part of their regular curriculum under an experimental program that its controversial designer says could become universal in the Soviet republic of Georgia.

“Our goal is to provide a good knowledge of the history of religion, because Christianity helped to preserve the character and soul of the Georgian nationality,” said Shalva Amonashvili, general director of the Gogebashvili Pedagogical Research Institute in Tbilisi, the republic’s capital.

If religion has been mentioned at all in Soviet schools until now, it has been negatively, as an “opiate of the masses” and a tool used by the ruling classes to help oppress the workers. But “now we have pluralism in our society,” the educator added in an interview here. “Now they tolerate different approaches to different phenomena.”

Amonashvili was in Moscow to be accepted as a member of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, a prestigious and lucrative appointment that was denied him as recently as 1984 because of his progressive methods.

“Our educational process is oriented toward a child’s personality and against the authoritarianism that was prevalent in the past,” the 57-year-old scientist said. “In the 1960s and early 1970s, our entire direction, our effort, was branded ‘bourgeois.’ They tried to close down our unit.”

Now, Amonashvili said, he suddenly finds himself in step with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program to “restructure” Soviet society. “With perestroika , our brand of pedagogy became indispensable,” he commented.

The Georgian educator said the experimental history of religion class for high school students is in its second year, although it was revealed publicly only last week in a dispatch from Tbilisi by the official news agency Tass.

Tass called the course “evidence of the unconventionality of a creative search of Georgian educators.”

It is also an extraordinary departure from the post-revolutionary norm, which sometimes brutally separated church from state and decreed all types of religious instruction outside the home to be illegal.

The authorities have taken a progressively more lenient attitude toward religion since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, however, particularly in those constituent republics where doggedly nationalistic populations value religion as an inseparable part of their cultures and a protection against ethnic Russian domination.

Tass reported last fall that optional Bible study classes conducted by a Protestant pastor had been organized in some state high schools in Riga, the capital of the Soviet Baltic republic of Latvia, for example. Latvia, which was forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, has a strong Lutheran tradition.

Georgia, by contrast, voluntarily joined the Russian empire late in the 18th Century, seeking protection from Turkish and Persian domination. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Georgia declared a brief independence. But by 1921 it was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Still, the Georgians maintain a strong national identity, of which their indigenous church is a key part. Georgia has been Christian since the 4th Century, belonging to a national church loosely related to the Greek Orthodox communion.

“I’m not a religious man myself,” Amonashvili said, “but Christianity came to Georgia very early. . . . Religion and Russia were our shelters.”

Part of History

The educator argued that study of the Georgian religion is an indispensable part of understanding Georgian history and culture.

“The past is the source of the present and the future. But our youth is not familiar with the religious culture,” he said.

As for the danger that the study of religion risks turning young Georgian atheists into believers, Amonashvili commented: “My personal opinion is that if someone of the young generation turns to religion, let him be religious--but an educated believer, not just one who holds something he doesn’t understand.”

Amonashvili said galley proofs of his first, 9th-grade history of religion textbooks were delivered Wednesday, with separate texts for the 10th and 11th grades to follow. (The standard Soviet school has only 10 or 11 grades.).

The texts include biblical extracts and are designed “to provide an objective picture of how religious ideas developed in connection with culture,” he noted, adding, “The young generation doesn’t accept the biased approach, whether totally positive or totally negative.”

Instruction will not be limited to the Georgian or even the Christian faiths, he said, adding, “Each faith made its own valuable contribution to the cultural inheritance.”

In addition to three classes of high school students at his showcase, the First Tbilisi Experimental School, Amonashvili said, several other area schools that follow his curriculum are also teaching the history of religion to selected classes.

He predicted that the course would be “fully incorporated” into the curriculum in Georgia within two or three years. “By then, everybody will want to study it, because it will be really interesting,” he said.

Educators in other republics have also shown interest in the experiment, Amonashvili added. The central educational authorities, he said noncommittally, “are interested.”

In another reflection of the slowly developing truce between church and Soviet state, meanwhile, Amonashvili said he hopes to begin lecturing soon at a new Georgian church seminary in Tbilisi. He would teach psychology and pedagogy, he said, adding that the final decision “is up to the patriarch.”

Fisher, Times London bureau chief, recently finished an assignment in the Soviet Union.