The schoolhouse in Vorsino stands next to the village chapel. Inside, a teacher is standing and reading to pupils who sit obediently in rows. 

In another classroom, a different scene unfolds. Ogabek Masharipov, a 23-year-old with Teach for Russia, a programme that sends young college graduates to teach in rural schools, banters with pupils and begins his lesson with an interactive exercise. He laments the ageing equipment and lack of space for pupils to gather outside class in the Soviet-era building, but revels in having taught them to assemble solar-powered toy cars out of parts of old PCs. Before he came, computer classes mostly involved paper exercise books.

Vorsino offers a snapshot of the country’s schools. Russia has a strong crop of teachers, as well as a talented and well-educated population. Over 55 percent of working-age adults have degrees. Student performance in international tests has been improving steadily; Russia now scores around the average for OECD countries. Yet years of under-financing — the government spends just 3.6 percent of GDP on education — and an archaic curriculum have left the system struggling to prepare children for the modern world. And as Vladimir Putin enters his fourth term promising to turn his attention to domestic issues, education has become an ideological battleground.

As in India which was strongly inspired by the centrally planned Soviet-era economic development model of the 1950s, the struggle over schools breaks down into two main camps, traditionalists who favour teacher-centric direct instruction, and progressives who favour student-centred experiential education. This divide is both long-running and global, but has particular resonance in Russia. 

As Igor Remorenko, a former deputy minister of education, explains, Russia’s traditionalists trace back to parochial church schools with their emphasis on sacred texts, while progressives carry on the spirit of early 20th-century Russian education reformers who preached learning by doing. The pedagogical divide mirrors the political chasm between conservative statists and liberal technocrats. Where the former see the main function of schools as vospitanie, a concept that means upbringing or character formation, the latter focus on obuchenie (teaching).

The liberal camp in education, an influential network of experts at places like Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), disparages the current school curriculum as unsuited to modern life. These would-be reformers are for flexible personalised education, project-based learning and an emphasis on building skills and competencies, rather than rote learning. “I’m also sad that kids now don’t know Eugene Onegin by heart, but I understand those aren’t the skills of the future,” says Isak Froumin, director of HSE’s Institute of Education.
Reformers frame their arguments in terms of human capital. Though Russia ranks fourth in the world in terms of formal educational attainment, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Human Capital Report, it comes #42 in terms of applied skills. “In some places, our girls still learn sewing,” says Froumin. “In China, they’re studying AI.”

Neither group has won yet. President Putin’s new national development strategy, issued shortly after his re-inauguration in June, calls both for making Russia’s schools globally competitive and for promoting vospitanie on the basis of “spiritual and moral values”, a nod to traditionalists. 

The modernisers aren’t twiddling their thumbs. A glimpse of the future can be found at Khoroshkola, a new school in north-west Moscow. Large open spaces and mobile desks encourage collaboration; new microscopes and MacBooks emphasise technology. Although such schools will educate relatively few of Russia’s children, liberals see them as testing-grounds for new educational pedagogies. Elena Bulina-Sokolova, Khoroshkola’s director, speaks of building a system with the pupil at the centre. For those who are motivated, such independence is a boon. 

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)