A teacher is a calling, which means the salary should be symbolic
No money but you hold on
The importance of school education was very clearly demonstrated by a special military operation. Until February 2022, there was no talk of any sovereign model of a domestic school.
For some unknown reason, the Ministry of Education and Science (later the Ministry of Education) decided to take as an example any world experience, as long as it was not Soviet. Scientists from the school tried to copy the Finnish education system, considering it the best on the planet, then rushed towards Southeast Asia. We are talking about Singaporean education, which until recently was almost the cornerstone of the Russian school.
Upgrading skills suddenly became much more important than training and education. The ability to communicate, collaborate, think critically and creatively has become a priority over the ability to count and express one’s thoughts clearly.
The consequences were not long in coming - in 2024, at the final certification in 9th grade mathematics, you can now use a non-programmable calculator. This was done for one simple reason - teachers are not able to teach children to count in their heads or even on paper.
The explanations of some specialists are discouraging - a calculator in the exam allows the student not to waste time on the technique of counting in columns, but to engage in solving practice-oriented problems. The level of absurdity lies in the new understanding of mathematics, which, it turns out, teaches you to think and understand, and the ability to count in your head and in a column is not necessary here.
Beautiful pictures cannot save the situation in education
How did we even come to this life?
As usual, there are many reasons, and one of the main ones is the chronic underfunding of school education.
There is a strong feeling that among bureaucrats, low salaries for teachers have become a normal and common occurrence. The paradoxical, if not shameful phrase “a teacher is not a profession, but a vocation” easily explains the low rates in schools and kindergartens.
The Minister of Education of the Orenburg Region, Alexey Pakhomov, directly stated that it is not worth raising teachers’ salaries, since they will go into the profession “for a long ruble, and not for their vocation.” It’s a good calling when a teacher’s salary costs 10–15 thousand a month. Pakhomov later tried to make an absurd excuse, blaming a phrase taken out of context. This has become a common practice among the bureaucratic fraternity - first blurt it out without thinking it through, and then hide behind some context.
The director’s convenient position was voiced by the head of the Institute of Regional Problems, Dmitry Zhuravlev. According to him, it is impossible to increase salaries in kindergartens so as not to offend teachers. A smart move by an effective manager, to say the least. Teachers should be happy with their modest incomes due to even lower rates for teachers and nannies in preschool institutions.
In Yekaterinburg, the head of the preschool education department, Natalya Vedernikova, refused to increase the salaries of kindergarten workers due to bureaucracy. They say, let the Ministry of Education approve a new staffing table, and we’ll think about it. Meanwhile, Yekaterinburg right now needs a thousand teachers and nannies. In the city, the average salary already reaches 80 thousand rubles, and in local kindergartens they offer to work for 15–30 thousand.
It is not surprising that there is now a shortage of teachers not only in preschool institutions, but in schools throughout Russia. On paper, everything is relatively good - in 2023, the shortage of school teachers will not exceed 4 percent of the total number. This is about 11 thousand teaching staff. However, in reality everything is much worse.
School directors are forced to post vacancies in the most extreme cases, when all staff members are completely loaded with lessons. The problem is especially acute in small schools, when the teacher teaches Russian language and literature, as well as MHC, history and social studies. They often also give out biology and geography hours. Therefore, if we talk about the true shortage of teachers, then the official figures should be multiplied by two, or even three.
Forced adaptation
What should a simple teacher do if officials offer him a “calling” and not a profession?
It is natural to leave school for other fields or not even enter the teaching profession.
Hence the first problem - repeated negative selection of teaching staff. How does selection for flight schools, for example, work? Captivated by the romance of the sky and the relatively high status of the pilot, young people withstand a difficult medical examination, assessment of the level of physical fitness and qualification tests. The high demand for the profession creates a corresponding competition - superfluous ones rarely appear in the flying profession. For some reason, in the military sphere they don’t talk about calling, but say: “There is such a profession - to defend the Motherland.”
The opposite process has developed in the teaching industry. Since everyone is talking about the vocation of a teacher, then his social status is hardly higher than that of a conductor or a flight attendant. At the stage of admission to pedagogical universities, the first stage of negative selection is observed - they go to educational institutions not at the call of their hearts, but out of despair. If you couldn’t hire normal tutors at school, become a teacher. More precisely, only a few of the hundreds of graduates of pedagogical universities will become teachers.
The work is difficult, low-prestige and low-paid, so few people are interested. Here we see the second stage of negative selection.
And finally, the third filter works in the first couple of years of a beginning teacher’s teaching career. In these most difficult years, even of the remaining young specialists, a considerable part leaves the profession.
Among the key reasons, in addition to the above, is excessive concern for a happy childhood. In a Russian family now, on average, there are no more than two children (more precisely, 1,7), many of whom were born to parents over the age of 30. Hypertrophied guardianship and the creation of a total zone of comfortable childhood have become a real scourge for a school teacher. Now the parent literally sticks his nose into all the school's affairs.
As you know, people are well versed in three things - education, medicine and politics. If it’s not entirely convenient to argue with a neurosurgeon and a governor, then you can argue with a math teacher, especially when he just came to school from college. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the administration takes the parent’s side, because he can go higher with his questions, right up to the president himself. But the teacher is not allowed to complain due to corporate ethics, a completely symbolic trade union and fear of dismissal.
It is not surprising that the average age of teachers in schools is inexorably growing - by 2029, no more than 6 percent of teachers will be under 30 years old. In the Year of the Teacher and Mentor, officials report a large enrollment of students in pedagogical universities. But how many of them will go to work in schools? And with what knowledge?
Nowadays, the typical young teacher is a four-year undergraduate graduate who has not even taken an exam in his subject. When entering a pedagogical university, a future biology teacher takes the Unified State Exam in social studies, mathematics and the Russian language. And final tests concern only the methods of teaching the subject, and not its essence.
The notorious Unified State Examination adds pepper to the story, because of which a good half of truly professional teachers leave school. If a teacher is able to prepare schoolchildren for the final certification, then it is much easier for him to quit the school so as not to endure the slander of parents, the rudeness of students and symbolic salaries. The picture is a little exaggerated, but close to the real state of affairs in education.
As a result, today you won’t find teachers of mathematics and the Russian language during the day - they have all gone into tutoring. If there were no Unified State Examination, everyone would work at school. The laws of the market are inexorable, and they force talented teachers to go into the very business that Dmitry Medvedev once spoke about.
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