No More Lessons From the Revolution

Yuliya Parkhomenko scratched her head anxiously when asked what she knew about Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, whose bearded likeness could until recently be seen on any wall or town square and whose name was added, mantra-like, to the names of most Soviet institutions.

“Lenin?” the 10-year-old repeated with wonder. “Well . . . he’s dead. . . .”

She paused, fidgeting with her blond braid. Suddenly a huge grin lighted up her face.

“And he used to play in a rock band called the Beatles,” she finished triumphantly.

Less than a decade ago, the big sisters and brothers of today’s Russian schoolchildren wore red neckties to school and learned how to load Kalashnikovs in case the “decaying West,” boogeyman enemy of Soviet propaganda, attacked their country.

But this fall’s students, in their jeans and rucksacks, cannot imagine the time before the Communist Party was driven from power and the Soviet state was dismantled. No longer force-fed politics by their teachers, they have little idea what Russia was like before capitalism.

The job of fashioning a school program that will equip this new generation to exist in a world without Marxism-Leninism has fallen to teachers, education officials and parents--all adults with roots firmly in the vanished old world.

With little money and even less understanding of what their children’s future might hold, they have nevertheless thrown themselves into the giant educational experiment with enthusiasm.

“We are not talking about a revolution in education here but about several years of very rapid evolution,” said Alexander P. Kuzyakin, head of public relations at the Russian General and Professional Education Ministry.

He emphasized that academic accomplishment remains at its high Soviet levels despite the changes.

Soviet schools prided themselves on strict rote learning of large numbers of facts, emphasized science and math training because state engineering requirements after World War II created a need for applied science experts, and accomplished almost complete literacy in what was formerly a largely uneducated peasant population.

Yuliya’s school, No. 1289, still looks the way it did in the old days--if only on the outside. Respectable housing blocks line a shabby road out front. Birch trees wilt behind iron railings. Mothers in perms and lipstick stream past, holding the hands of brightly chattering daughters or sons.

But these children are talking about computers, in-line skates and compact discs.

Like their conversation, what goes on inside the school has changed beyond recognition, according to Vice Principal Marina S. Kamenskaya, a devoted teacher with a graying bob and ironic smile.

“The approach is different,” she said. “There is no Soviet triumphalism, no more ‘This is the best-in-the-world system which provides the best-in-the-world opportunities.’ ”

Fileting the education system of its most obvious Soviet bones was easy. Most children simply stopped joining the “voluntary” junior party organs--the Young Pioneers and later the Communist Youth League--that once ensured them success in later life, although the organizations have not formally been disbanded.

Soviet Communist Party History is not taught. Nor is Civil Defense--preparation for World War III.

And at School No. 1289, the pupils voted to do away with uniforms four years ago.

The old educational monolith--in which every Soviet pupil turned the same page of the same standard textbook on the same day in every school across 11 time zones--has been pulled apart.

Now schools choose from three flexible components--a national curriculum, regional culture and languages, and individual school specialties--to ensure that pupils get the most appropriate mix of subjects. Teachers pick their own textbooks from a bewildering array being put out by the Education Ministry.

“Before, it was a problem for us to follow the same stuff because all of us had different inclinations, interests, likes and dislikes. Now there’s such a choice of new books that we can be at a loss,” Kamenskaya said.

There are still die-hard teachers nostalgic for tried and tested Soviet methods, she said. But parents quietly get private tutors if their children are assigned one of these veterans, Kamenskaya added, and “it’s nice to have them anyway. They don’t look inside a child’s head to see what he’s really thinking, but they keep good discipline, and they are a link with the past.”

Any drag that teachers with Communist sympathies might exert on school reform is limited by the fact that they can no longer teach from Soviet textbooks. Old primers filled with political nostrums and tales of Young Pioneers’ derring-do are not being reissued.

Freedom takes many forms. For teachers, one of the biggest joys has been a dramatic reshaping of the way Russian literature is taught.

Many of the internationally admired authors of the 20th century were banned in the Soviet Union. Famous abroad, they were known only to daring intellectuals at home.

Many of today’s teachers first read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” and Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” under the bedcovers in samizdat, or underground, manuscripts.

Now, to their continuing astonishment, they can teach the literature of emigration and dissent openly, along with the classics that Soviet schools always accepted: Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov.

“What I teach now was all forbidden before. They are learning things I never knew 40 years ago,” said literature teacher Matilda P. Malinovskaya, a heavily powdered old-style disciplinarian who spent the early 1980s in Cuba as Fidel Castro’s educational advisor.

“It makes me terribly, terribly sad to think that we were robbed of our own cultural riches for so long,” she added.

A similar freedom is being exercised in history class. Older students discuss high and low points of Soviet rule using contemporary documents and family memories and arrive at their own conclusions.

The artificial simplicity of the past has gone; there are no right and wrong answers anymore.

The children themselves are less interested than their teachers in this revelation of a past they never knew.

Kamenskaya said Soviet history and yesterday’s high literature are a closed book to a generation with no context for the satire or sense of the absurd that ran through much 20th century writing, Soviet or anti-Soviet, fiction or nonfiction.

“It’s videos and television and computer games for them, not reading. If the kids aren’t in an environment where all those old jokes are heard and discussed and explained, they won’t even understand what Soviet literature is about,” she said. “Later on maybe they’ll discover it, but not now.”

And there are plenty of other problems.

Along with the old restrictions, the old security of Soviet life has vanished. Drugs, drink, crime and violence are waiting on every street corner for children once cosseted and protected by the state’s mother love. Children grow up earlier. Teenage pregnancies and rape are more widely reported. Schools post guards at the door to keep out potentially dangerous lurkers.

Some of the curriculum changes reflect the fears of modern Russians.

One subject in the post-Soviet schedule is “The Basics of Security in Life,” in which pupils are exhorted not to get into cars with strangers and warned about the dangers of alcoholism and drugs.

Textbooks now use the harsh realities of this uncertain new world as subject matter. One example is a problem from Grigory Oster’s “Arithmetic Exercise Book”: “Criminals spend 13 minutes in a bank. They take two minutes to tie the bank manager to a chair, three minutes to break into the safe and seven minutes to stash the cash in a sack. How many minutes do they have left to surrender to the police and leave the bank with their hands up?”

But the most pressing problem is money, the bane of post-Soviet life. Teachers in public schools earn between $80 and $120 a month, a hairbreadth above the poverty line. Wages are paid as late as three or four months. Most teachers have to moonlight to survive.

“In education financing, wherever you stick your finger there’s a hole,” said Mikhail B. Mashkovtsev, head of the Far Eastern Kamchatka region’s parliament. “I know plenty of teachers who have left to work as street sweepers. It might be hard labor, but at least they get paid doing it.”

Strikes were held in early November, but trade union official Galina I. Merkulova said she has little hope that teachers’ wages will be raised or even paid promptly in response to last year’s work stoppage.

The result has been a “brain drain” of the best-qualified teachers to lucrative private enterprise or to the new private schools springing up like mushrooms in big Russian cities.

Merkulova said Russian schools were short 100,000 teachers this fall, forcing some schools to crowd children into big classes of as many as 40 pupils.

“There is virtually no financing for what’s needed--the material upkeep of school buildings as well as pay for teachers,” Merkulova said. “There are regions where schools had no heating last winter, and children studied in their coats and hats. They can’t learn like that.

“And now, for the first time, there are also problems with the delivery of textbooks,” she added. “How does it improve things that there’s such a choice of books in Moscow now if they never reach teachers in Vladivostok?”

To raise cash, many public schools run fee classes in parallel with their free classes. And up to 10% of schools in Moscow are now fully private, said Olga B. Litavrina, principal of one fee academy that costs between $150 and $300 a month per child.

“Teachers with real aptitude will only stay with us for a year or two. Then they move on,” Kamenskaya said. “If they can earn $10 an hour at a private school, and they have to pay thousands of dollars for their own kids to go through college, they have no choice. Here, they’re working for their souls; in the private sector, they’re working for their children’s future.”

A backlash against liberalism is beginning. Some parents say reform has gone too far. Their children are so busy expressing themselves and enjoying themselves in the classroom that they are not being properly taught.

“My son was learning silly, trendy subjects--’Knowledge of Moscow,’ things like that--at his public school,” said Marina I. Shchedrova, who teaches English. “So we went to the principal of a private school I’d heard was good and asked her what ‘extravagant’ subjects were on her curriculum.

“When she said there were none, and that she relied on traditional Soviet discipline and a thorough grounding in reading, writing and arithmetic, we enrolled Nikita there at once.”