By: Chloe Huang
On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin signed into law education initiatives that order mandatory classes for the students at Russia’s 40,000 public schools. When the laws go into effect in September, these classes, which start at first grade, are meant to indoctrinate Russia’s youngest citizens.
While Russia has not made any significant attempts to indoctrinate children since the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin’s actions make it clear that this is about to change, especially as the war in Ukraine drags on. “We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,” a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, said. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”
Along with the Russian government’s recent actions of jailing or exiling anti-war activists, banning independent media outlets, and blacklisting bloggers and scholars that show anti-war sentiments, these initiatives mark the end of almost 30 years of openness towards Europe and the United States.
Putin’s education plan is meant to instill patriotism among Russia’s youth. “Patriotism should be the dominant value of our people,” said senior Kremlin official Aleksandr Kharichev at last month’s workshop for teachers, which was hosted by the education ministry. However, Russia’s idea of patriotism might be different from what most people think. As Kharichev puts it bluntly during his presentation, patriotism is “readiness to give one’s life for the Motherland.”
This comes at a time when young Russians can access Western media and read articles written by people with different views. The Russian government is worried about this, describing it as the West’s online “information war”. Indeed, a poll last month by the Levada Center found that 36% of Russians aged 18 to 24 opposed the war in Ukraine, compared with just 20% of all adults.
Some experts disagree about these policies’ short-term effectiveness, but students and teachers alike are already starting to see the effects of Russian propaganda. Some schools adopted classes like those outlined in Putin’s plans, and the change in students’ attitudes shows.
“They suddenly started repeating everything after the television,” Irina, a ninth grader in Moscow, said in a phone interview alongside her mother, Lyubov Ten. “They suddenly started saying that this is all deserved, that this had to happen. They couldn’t even attempt to explain this to me.” Irina and her family now live in Poland.
Teachers are noticing the difference in their students too. Ms. Milyutina, an English teacher in the city of Pskov, says, “those whom they don’t like very much they call Ukrainians.” As more students are overwhelmed with propaganda, no one knows what the future of Russian society will look like.
As outlined in Putin’s plans, classes will include the showing of pro-Russian war movies and a virtual tour of Crimea, a peninsula in Eastern Europe that Russia forcefully annexed in 2014. Students will also be lectured on the current geopolitical atmosphere and traditional Russia values. A new unit will be added to their history curriculum exploring “Russia’s Rebirth” under its current president Vladimir Putin.
Source:
– https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/world/europe/russia-putin-schools-propaganda-indoctrination.html