Teaching Old Church Slavonic in Schools Absurd and Mercifully Unrealizable, Spitsyn Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Last week, Viktor Sadovnichy, the rector of Moscow State University, called for the introduction of Old Church Slavonic as an elective in Russian schools, an idea Yevgeny Spitsyn, a historian and educator says is absurd and mercifully unrealizable: Russian pupils need to study Russian more, and there simply isn’t anyone to teach the other language.

            In a comment for the Nakanune news agency, Spitsyn says that such a proposal is absurd given the catastrophic state of Russian language instruction in Russian schools.  “The level of literacy is falling” because “the number of hours of Russian language classes leaves much to be desired” (nakanune.ru/articles/114552/).

            In fact, he continues, “in certain schools the amount of instruction in foreign languages is much greater than in Russian,” with two foreign languages being obligatory in some schools already. In Moscow, most students study foreign languages for twice as many hours a week as they do Russian.” 

            This is a tragedy that shouldn’t be compounded, Spitsyn says. “Language is the foundation of the nation and the study of language is directly connected with the study of literature. By my own experience,” he continues, “I had problems with Russian.” They were overcome only by studying the language and reading literature. That is true for others too.

            But fortunately, this bad idea isn’t going anywhere, the historian says. There simply aren’t going to be enough teachers to make it happen and “cadres decide everything.”  But the proposal reflects a dangerous trend, a desire to retreat into the past and away from the modern world and a scientific understanding of that world, a pulling back no country can afford.

            Others have been equally savage. Igor Yakovenko, for example, noted that “not a single scientific work was ever written in Old Church Slavonic simply because up to the 18^th century there wasn’t any science, and when it appeared or more precisely was imported by Peter from Europe, the language of Russian science was all the same Latin” (ej2018.ru/?a=note&id=33108).

            Learning additional languages, even “dead” ones like Latin or Greek, is a useful intellectual discipline, the commentator says; but introducing ones without any obvious utility beyond church services at the expense of learning one’s own national language or other disciplines is about as wrongheaded as can be.