«War and Peace» within 4 hours

All school children today are studying in accordance with a unified curriculum, a so-called "Unified Framework Education Plan". All subjects in all secondary schools, including lyceums and gimgazias are now taught at a basic level. While delivering a speech at a ceremony, dedicated to the opening of a new school in Loshitsa District of Minsk, the President Aleksandr Lukashenko praised the recent educational reform and assured that from that day on any student, graduating from a secondary school with the basic education would be able to pass entry exams to Universities without additional tutorial assistance.

Why rushing?

Talks about secondary school reform started in May, at the end of the school year, and concerned the shift from the 12-year secondary education to 11-year. It all ended up with the Presidential Decree No 15, “On certain measures related to secondary education”, which was signed by the President on 17 July, a little less than one and a half month before the new school year starts. In general, it is clear that there was no time to prepare proper new educational plans, programmes, let alone text books. The reform was introduced and implemented under enormous time pressure without having any time for preparation.

Educational programmes and plans for the secondary school subjects were elaborated by the National Institute for Education under extreme time pressure and came out literally at the end of August. There was no time for publishing them and disseminating them around schools. Therefore, just a couple of days before the 1^st September, when the new school year officially starts, they were published on the website of the National Institute for Education (www.adu.by) as well as in the “Nastaunitskaya Gazeta” newspaper meant for teachers. Naturally, not all schools have the Internet access, just as well, not all teachers have the access and skills to use the web. However that is not the worst case scenario, in the end all schools received the printed documents on the matter. However after close inspection of the respective documents, many teachers were puzzled and, later on, literally shocked finding out there were no sufficient amounts of new textbooks.

Multi-volume works of classics within 3 school hours

For instance, the number of hours allocated for learning Russian and Belarusian Languages and Literature, in particular, in graduate classes has been reduced significantly. A teacher of the Belarusian Language and Literature having over 38 years of experience from Ivanovo, Brest Oblast, Ryhor Syravatka, says, “three hours for learning the subjects Language and Literature is nonsense and it is also not clear how it should be taught. The eleven-graders, the graduates, will have only two hours a week for languages and one hour for literature”.

A teacher of the Belarusian Language and Literature subjects, Valeria Som skimmed through the educational plans: “Uladimir Karatkevich, novel “Kalasy pod serpom tvoim” – 3 hours, Vasil Bykau, “Sign of Trouble” – 2 horus, Ivan Melezh “Swamp People” – 3 hours for learning. Kuzma Chorny, “Searching for the Future” – 1 hour. One hour is allocated for an overview of the world literature of 1920 – 50s”.

A teacher Ryhor Syravatka is surprised, “it is not yet clear how to squeeze in the three profound works by Bykau, Karatkevich and Melezh into the allocated 8 hours and at the same time to cover their biographies as well. I haven’t yet grasped what will come out of that and what would be the level of the knowledge of these school children”.

With regard to the Russian Literature, only four school hours are allocated for studying the Novel by Lev Tolstoy “War and Peace”.

Two years in the course of one

There are greater complexities and confusions in the school subject Belarusian Language. It is fully elaborated for the 11-year education scheme, as if the shift has already took place and has been enacted in full capacity. The plan of studies is not taking into account the transition period from one scheme to another.

For instance, the sixth graders finished to study Adjectives last year, this year they were supposed to move on and to study ‘Verbs”, etc… However in compliance with the new educational plan, they will proceed with “Gerundive” and finish with “Adverb”, i.e. several linguistic parts are skipped and left out.

In the course of the year the 9^th-yeat students will be learning about contemporary environmental issues within the framework of their biology classes. Indeed, that is a very important subject, however when they will be at their 11th year of studies, they will have to apprehend a very comprehensive and large basic biology course, which was previously meant be covered in two years.

Actually, the unluckiest of all are the graduates, those that have to go to so-called ‘apostrophe’ classes (9^th’ and 11^th’), they will be graduating this year from basic and secondary schools respectively. These children within a course of one year will have to apprehend a programme that was previously stretched for two years. Some important subjects are simply omitted. In the meantime there is no guarantee that those issues will not be covered by the graduation exams at school or by tasks of the centralized testing.

Many teachers, in order to embrace everything, are overloading students with homework, making them reading over 50 pages of text for each class. The conscientious and diligent students are spending all night over the textbooks and their parents are complaining…

Making notes and searching for written-off text books

In the meantime, the most significant issue of all is the lack of textbooks. A teacher Ryhor Syravatka was working as a teacher since 1970, “I was a school Director for a long time and I am well aware that there are shortages of textbooks literally every year on 1 September, however what happens this year is outrageous and unheard of. The situation is disastrous at the moment. I myself do not have these textbooks… The Education Ministry recommends looking for textbooks issued in 1998 however those were written off ages ago… Sometimes two textbooks are required for one subject, due to the fact that one half of the programme is covered by one textbook and the other by the second one. For instance, eight and nine graders need identical text books and there are not enough of them”.

Teachers were ordered to teach more during the class hours and school children were recommended to write detailed notes. There is no textbook on ‘Sketching’, a new subject introduced this year into the school curriculum, due to the fact that there was simply no time to draft it. The Director of the National Institute for Education of the Ministry of Education, Gennady Palchik, reassured that there should be sufficient amount of textbooks soon, however he admitted that there might be some confusion for a while. One would like to hope that the issue with text books is resolved by October.

Reforms needed on essence rather than pro forma

All: teachers, students and their parents agree that Belarusian secondary educarion needs to be reformed. However such reforms should be with regard to the essence of studies rather than pro forma. They should not be elaborated in haste, but thought through for years or decades. An honoured Belarusian teacher, a mathematician with over 40 years of experience, Mikhas Bualavatsky from Mogilev proposes the following approach, “first comes an idea which is widely and profoundly elaborated as an ‘idea’. If the ‘idea’ is supported by the practicing teachers, the relevant teaching guidelines and methodology should be drafted (text guidelines or PC programmes) and then tested at several selected schools. After that, when the materials are closer to perfection and teachers are trained in accordance with these new materials, a wider range of volunteer teachers could be involved. Only after there is a ‘critical mass’ of supporters of these reforms a process of implementation of reforms could be introduced on a mass scale”.

Ludmila Korsak