The adoption of the law will change our ideas about traditional general education and affect the future of a large part of the population - schoolchildren, teachers, parents. But amid massive protests, the discussion was postponed indefinitely.
Some believe that online education is an inevitable future and the sooner we step there, the better, others believe that this is the final collapse of quality education that we inherited from the USSR.
But what if the family does not have the means to buy an expensive computer? Who will provide children from distant villages and villages with high-quality Internet? It does not take into account the fact that parents will have to pay for both equipment and computer communications at their own expense. So what kind of free education, the right to which is enshrined in the Constitution, can we talk about?
And how do teachers work now? What programs, with the help of what equipment, should they conduct training? How will their work be paid? The authors of the bill did not find clear answers to all these questions. “They must be simply hoping that everything will somehow resolve itself. It is more important for deputies and officials that the budget will not suffer from the innovation”- this is the general leitmotif of the indignant responses of the teachers themselves.
We are talking about an explanatory note to the bill, where it is written in black and white: "Distance learning will not entail negative socio-economic, financial and other consequences and will not require the allocation of additional costs." That is, the state is not officially going to provide financial conditions for the new form of education. It was this point that caused a wave of protest among experts.
“If we pass a law, according to which the Ministry of Education gets the opportunity to develop the duties of teachers, to conduct subjects in this format, then it should require additional expenses from the regions or from the federal government,” objected Vsevolod Lukhovitsky, co-chairman of the Teacher trade union, to the deputies.
Today, parents are uniting in movements, demanding the return of their children to school. “We are against equating distance learning with traditional full-time education,” said Ilona Menkova from Koptev in her video message.
Another reader is outraged: “All people in their right mind are against distance education! Children will sit at home in front of computer monitors and telephones. Health and physical and mental end! It's just an imitation of education."
In the center of Yekaterinburg, as a sign of protest, someone installed an art object "Buratino" - a stump with headphones, a medical mask and a long wooden nose that pierces a laptop. This is the view of the authors of today's schoolchildren who have received distance education.
The remoteness also hit the socialization of schoolchildren. Parents have been complaining for a long time that young people already spend too much time in the virtual world. Many teenagers no longer really go for walks, but communicate with friends only on social networks.
“My daughter, a ninth-grader, has been studying online for a month now, the circle she went to does not work, as a result it is no longer possible to take her out into the street, even just to walk with the dog,” the mother of a Moscow schoolgirl complains to journalists.
Doctors sound the alarm - adolescents' eyesight falls, head and back ache, sleep is disturbed, some children have apathy and depression. “So it turns out that the authorities, fighting one threat, create another, possibly even greater” - this idea sounds in the statements of almost all experts.
ANOTHER OPINION
TEACHERS SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID OF CHILDREN
Teachers are against the opinion of parents. They are not ready to risk their own health and now they are simply afraid of their own students, each of whom can come to school sick.
“I think my colleagues wake up every morning with an anxious feeling:“What if I pick it up today?” I definitely keep this thought in my head all the time when I go to work. Naturally, when I come to school, everything fades into the background,”says Viktor Yakushev, a teacher from Yekaterinburg.
Meanwhile, experts reassure: 70% of children are immune to COVID-19. “The maximum - up to 71% - indicators of population immunity were established in children of preschool and early school age,” said Elena Yezhlova, deputy head of Rospotrebnadzor.
Deputy Director for Science of the Research Institute of Vaccines and Serums. I. I. Mechnikov, RAS Corresponding Member Nikolai Filatov confirms: “The virus that the world is now facing, unlike influenza and many other respiratory infections, is not so aggressive towards children, and this property should be used to the maximum.
Monitoring the development of the epidemic process in the world shows that children's contingents practically do not get sick. This means that the young body is protected by the immune system from COVID-19, and the circulation of the virus among children will inevitably lead to the loss of its virulence. In this case, the child will act as a live vaccine. If we open schools and kindergartens now, the virus will begin to circulate more actively among this contingent of the population, the heterogeneous biological mass of COVID-19 will become predominantly non-aggressive.
Let me explain. If the pathogen of the current virus does not cause disease in healthy children, it means that in their body it loses its virulence and, bringing this pathogen home to adult relatives, children actually spread a virus similar to a vaccine strain. Interaction with all pathogens is balanced, there is a natural immunization of the population, there is no explosion in the incidence, and we can cope with the massive spread of the virus in just three weeks and close the topic."
Prepared
Natalia Purtova.
Photo: ADOBE STOCK
