Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 29 – Standards of
learning documents generated by governments around the world are among the most
boring writing imaginable, but they often contain arrangements that signal official
intentions for the rising generation and that will have a profound impact on the
future. Thus, it is with Russia’s regarding
non-Russian languages.
And while these provisions, which
exclude all non-Russian languages from achievement tests, are not as easily
understood and dramatic as Vladimir Putin’s decision to end the required study
of the languages of the titular nationalities in the non-Russian republics,
they are likely to have a broader and even more negative impact.
That is because, as Tatar scholar
Nail Gyylman points out, if students aren’t going to be evaluated in terms of their
progress in the study of these languages, both students and their parents will view
these subjects as less important to their futures and will drop them in favor
of other subjects on which they will be rated (mariuver.com/2019/09/29/uchash-lish-motivac/).
Officials at the Russian education
ministry rammed through with only the briefest periods allowed for discussion
new standards of education, announcing on September 18 that these discussions
are at an end and the regulations are to go into effect (regulation.gov.ru/projects#departments=119&npa=94555).
As Gyylman points out,
“on the whole, federal standards of learning are a collection of requirements
which it is difficult for non-specialists to evaluate.” But with regard to
native languages and literatures, the meaning of the new rules is clear: they
are almost the only subjects in which the progress of students won’t be
assessed after the fourth and ninth classes.
Not only
does that mean that there will not be a unified state examination in them, but
it also means that “for the administration of the schools, teachers, and students,
native language will have the lowest status of all subjects and that the hours
of native language instruction will be the first to be cut.”
Gyylman
continues: “Usually the lack of interest among the majority of pupils in the study
of native languages is connected with their low status and lack of use in
further instruction, work, and social life. But by the older classes, the
majority of pupils know that school training will do little to equip them for
life.”
And
consequently, he says, “the main and sometimes the only motive for studying one
or another subject among upper class pupils is the offering of unified state
examinations and entrance into higher educational institutions.” If there is no
such possibility for a particular subject, there will be much less interest
than otherwise
Moscow
had already reduced the importance of unified state examinations for native languages
– they are at best optional – but now, it has eliminated the assessment of
progress in those languages at still earlier grades, reducing still further the
motivation students will have to study them and reducing the quality of
knowledge and skills they might acquire.
What the
powers that be are trying to do is to create conditions in which pupils and their
parents will have fewer reasons to study these languages and thus choose not
to, allowing Moscow to place the responsibility for the decline in non-Russian
languages on those who speak them rather than to admit its own role.
Parents and
pupils who speak non-Russian languages must recognize what Moscow is doing,
protest against it by continuing to study these languages and demand that the
standards of learning by changed so that the motivation people have for studying
them will not be reduced to nothing.
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