Changes are coming again at school. Now they want to reduce the social studies program: 6-8. They want to completely stop teaching the subject in classrooms and reduce the number of courses in high school. In response, the Ministry of National Education proposes to increase the number of hours in history. And all this despite the fact that social studies remains the most frequently chosen subject at the Unified State Exam and is accepted in more and more universities every year. The public is confused, to say the least. Teachers are preparing a petition addressed to Kravtsov, parents are asking for more money for teachers. And no one understands what really happened.
But actually something extremely strange is happening. We are not talking about a minor adjustment, reducing the volume of the social studies program by 10-20 percent. The course is planned to be cut in half. If now from grades 6 to 11 272 hours are devoted to the lesson, from the new academic year there may be only 136 hours left. It is proposed to shift the beginning of the study of the subject from the sixth to the ninth grade, in the ninth grade it is proposed to hold only one lesson per week. This means 34 lessons per year. They say this is enough to pass the OGE. Very suspicious. There are 102 hours left for 10th and 11th grades. It’s also sparse. After all, even the hours we have now are not enough to fully prepare for the exam; social studies teachers are among the three most in-demand private teachers.
The Unified State Exam in social studies is also quite difficult. On the one hand, the subject is, of course, not the most difficult, but the competition for high scores is very high.
In 2023, 46% of graduates passed the subject. And the increased interest is easy to explain. Social studies is accepted in many fields. Even technical ones. Universities have already emerged where you can enter engineering departments with social studies instead of physics. Every year fewer and fewer students pass the complex physics course, and the country really needs engineers. But the program does not work very well: new students who have not mastered the exact sciences at school often drop out of the course after the first session. And now it seems they want to change the rules of admission to universities again, separating everyone more broadly into humanists and techies.
But in the humanitarian sphere, social science has long excluded both literature and languages. While my daughter was preparing to become a philologist, she took three electives instead of two: literature, English, and social studies. In different universities, social studies could be replaced with the first or second – it made sense to give the Unified State Exam with the highest score. In some fields, social studies testing may also replace history. Even after a significant increase in history hours (only in high school the volume of the program can increase by 1.5 times: from 340 to 476 hours), it will be strange if graduates enroll in some regional studies or ethnography with points in social studies.
However, the Unified State Exam in Social Studies has been prepared according to possible changes. The exam has also been significantly “lightened”: several sections have been removed from the demonstration tests that appear on official educational websites. And somehow it even turned out strange. Subjects such as “Democracy”, “Civil Society” and “International Law” were removed. Military duty. Alternative public service.” Maybe they transferred it to history?
But as we know, the story is enhanced by something completely different. The sections on the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were expanded and a section on special operations was added. Now they want to introduce “History of Native Lands.” Although such a course is already taught in schools as a non-graded subject, albeit as part of extracurricular activities. Schoolchildren go on museum trips, prepare local history projects – what’s the problem? And we need to add obligations!
They also promise to support the history lesson with, in bureaucratic language, “the element of patriotism”. Although it’s still weird. After all, it feels like that’s all we’ve been doing for the last 10 years. In addition to history, ORKSE and ODNKNR are introduced, and in the second year “Important Conversations” are often held, dedicated to various historical dates. As officials say, it’s all about patriotism. But it turned out that this was not enough. It turns out that to further strengthen patriotism, rumors about civil society need to be erased elsewhere.
Of course it’s ugly. It seems somehow speculative. It is as if the aim is not to impart knowledge to school children, but to “instill necessary values”.
Of course, values are great, but what are they without knowledge? So what values are we talking about? For whom and for what is it valuable? For society, country, state or a particular government?
There is another interesting detail. It is not just history that they are trying to replace social sciences. But also family science. Now, in some regions, a new course within the framework of social studies has started to be taught for trial purposes. They plan to introduce the new “discipline” as a separate course everywhere starting in September 2024.
See how it turned out. In fact, the topic of family relations was initially included in the social studies program (after all, the family is a unit of society), later the topic was expanded into a separate section. With a reasonable excuse, of course. They say that family is something that concerns everyone and it would be better to really understand how it works. It would be nice if young people understood the principles of parent-child relationships, for high school students it is already important to understand what various love relationships can lead to and what responsibility they should bear if something happens. If you talk about all this honestly and adultly with schoolchildren, remaining within the framework of a purely scientific discipline regarding the structure of society, then, of course, everything is fine. So what happens next? Then the scientific discipline is thrown aside as unnecessary, but a separate episode remains, and it suddenly turns out that it is not about how the family works in general, but about “intolerance of childlessness”. I did not reveal this, this is how the authorities explain it. What a rude trick!
The whole thing looks like some kind of wild social experiment. It’s as if someone is conducting some kind of crazy social experiment on us, constantly redrawing the school curriculum, cutting out some scientific disciplines and introducing new courses that have nothing to do with science. How to avoid falling into gloomy conspiracy theories? Here even the clearest and calmest mind will darken and scream about Orwell. But that’s not what they’re trying to achieve, is it?
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.