Next Step : Experimental Moscow School a Lesson in Freedom : Russian educational reform is aimed at shattering the rigid mind-set inherited from the Soviet era.

Snitching some cake from a table in the teachers’ lounge, 11-year-old Sasha Terentyve wriggles onto the sofa, settling himself between a physicist and an archeologist as he flips through a book on Greece.

A short, sandy-haired boy with a mischievous grin, Sasha now considers the intellectuals his close friends. He’s also on hugging terms with actors, astronomers and artists--all of whom double as teachers in Moscow’s experimental School of Art, Culture and Freedom.

Only a year old, Sasha’s school has been on the cutting edge--some might say the eccentric fringe--of Russian educational reform.

By seizing every officially sanctioned innovation and pushing change beyond what educators in more mainstream schools have dared, administrators have created an alternative institution that shatters the rigid mind-set inherited from Soviet education.

Teachers present their eclectic curriculum--which includes public speaking, etiquette and theatrical set design--in classrooms also equipped with sofas. Field trips occupy one-quarter of overall educational time. Last fall, the entire seventh grade spent a month near the Black Sea, living in tents, peering through telescopes, digging through ancient ruins and studying the flowers and trees of the balmy Crimea.

“We want to build a different kind of educational system,” said Sergei Bebchuk, the school’s co-founder and vice principal. “We want our students to be independent and honest.”

These goals are part of the Russian Ministry of Education’s plan to revitalize the system it inherited from three generations of Soviet pedagogues by promoting alternative schools, both public and private. A recent ministry report called for child-centered rather than ideology-based schools and established a fund to support experimental programs. Last year, to encourage its trailblazing programs, the School of Art, Culture and Freedom received about 20% more money from the government than other comparably sized public schools, according to Bebchuk.

“In ordinary schools, the teachers beat ‘education’ into the students with hammers,” physics teacher Georgy Bilichenko said. “They churn the children through a meat grinder and crush them into molds until all the students are alike. Here, we want to preserve the genius in each kid.”

Whereas Soviet-era schools emphasized rote learning, social assimilation and an early weeding-out of children earmarked for vocational trades, the School of Art, Culture and Freedom brims with cheerful chaos.

Students drop by the administrative office for tea. Teachers spend weekends planting apple trees with their classes. Children and adults alike kneel on dusty floors to sort camping equipment.

Even repair of the crumbling two-story building, on Moscow’s southwestern out skirts, has become a group project.

The relaxed atmosphere may be attributed to the school’s non-traditional staff. Only one of 30 teachers is a diploma-certified pedagogue. Administrators recruited the others from laboratories, think tanks and theaters, even though hiring unaccredited staff was illegal until the middle of last month, when the Russian Parliament passed an education reform law.

The school also flirted with the law when the ministry granted administrators free rein with the school’s bank account, nine months before the law was changed in May to permit such financial autonomy. Thus, instead of a minutely detailed budget, Bebchuk received a lump sum from the ministry, which he could allocate as he chose.

Using this fiscal freedom, the short, wiry vice principal--whose beard and mustache alone distinguish him from his students--bought inexpensive table-tennis tables to serve as desks and used the savings to purchase a piano.

Since May, all public schools across Russia have the option of accepting the same financial autonomy. Yet, few principals so far have leaped at the chance.

“People liked the old system, where they could run to us whenever they had a problem,” said Yelena Lenskaya, director of a Ministry of Education project that sends teachers abroad to learn new instruction methods.

“But the government can no longer look after all the schools like a mother hen hovering over her chicks,” she said.

“Unfortunately, the most difficult thing to change is people’s attitudes. We can make many wonderful laws, but that doesn’t do any good unless people change.”

Timidity has also hamstrung changes in what children study, another realm in which the School of Art, Culture and Freedom is decidedly avant-garde.

For decades, the Soviet government controlled every facet of school curriculum, dictating not only broad outlines but also the exact number of hours to be devoted to each topic.

In the last three years, these central controls have crumbled, along with the Soviet state that imposed them, and teachers are free to design their own lesson plans.

Most schools, however, have retained the familiar five-subject-per-pupil curriculum--sticking to teaching methods that 63% of Russians in a 1991 poll criticized as useless, boring or unresponsive to student needs.

“Our philosophy of education here has always been very conservative and slow to change,” explained Valentin Kornilov, first vice rector of Moscow State Pedagogical University.

Against this background, the handful of experimental schools that have opened in the last two years seem extraordinary.

There’s a historical-immersion school, where students “move” through historical periods as they advance from grade to grade. There’s also a school that stresses decision-making, where students participate in day-to-day administration of the school itself.

And there’s the School of Art, Culture and Freedom, where students may study ancient history with an archeologist newly returned from Greece and, the following week, stage a play with professional actors. Their daily schedules always include English, Russian and mathematics, so there is some structure.

“In our country, there has always been only one path to follow, one person to emulate,” physics teacher Bilichenko said. “Now, we want to teach our students to look at everything carefully. We want them to be better than we are--smarter, kinder and more honest.” Apparently, this new approach is gaining popularity.

Although it is a public school, Art, Culture and Freedom has a selective admission process, based on a creative-essay entrance exam. Last summer, 500 seventh- and eighth-graders competed for 60 slots in the brand-new school by facing tasks such as describing “something that cannot be described” and answering the question: “Would it be better to be a tree or a forest?” Next year, enrollment will total 150 when the school expands to Grades 5 through 11.

A major attraction is that each class contains only 15 students; in contrast, other public schools assign up to 45 children to each class.

“At first, I didn’t want to come here because I had a good impression of my old school,” said Inna Kunavalova, 13. “But when I returned there for a visit, it seemed very cold and unpleasant.”

Jumping off the arm of an easy chair in the teachers’ lounge, she then wandered off to play the piano during her lunch break. Her classmate, Lena Lebetivo, agreed.

“The knowledge we get in regular schools is not enough to live and work normally,” she said. “In the future, the better educated, more cultured people will come from schools like this.”