from Russia Insider:

The following film, “Lessons of Standardization”, was created by Alexey Komov, Ambassador of the World Congress of Families to the U.N., and his colleagues, who together have been pioneering homeschooling in Russia, making use of tested home schooling methods in the U.S. A transcript of the video is included below.

Education is key to everything, it shapes every human being. This is fundamentally important for the future of any nation. People who after the collapse of the Soviet Union had a great influence on the educational system of the former republics have understood it rather well. For example, in the Ukraine during the last twenty-five years, many school textbooks have been written by George Soros’ NGOs and published by them in Canada. The result is quite serious and irreversible.

Alexey Komov:

—In Russia over the past quarter of a century the general level of education and literacy has fallen from one of the highest in the world to an all-time low. A key factor here is the accelerated destruction of the Soviet education system, without any meaningful replacement.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union many new concepts have been imported to Russia. Some of them had shown good results, but many had truly catastrophic consequences. One of the most striking examples is the reform of the education system.

A large influence on the new education curriculum was brought by NGOs related to George Soros. It is no surprise that there have been numerous attempts to smuggle so called “sexuality lessons”. In the turbulent 1990s, many brave new experiments have started in Russia.

Irina Shamolina, author of the “Classical Education in the Family” project:

The first school “reform” experienced by the parents and schoolchildren after perestroika was the prolongation of school for one more year. Why was it done? Nobody knows.

Then the entire set of manuals and schoolbooks were changed. Why for example have mathematics textbooks been replaced if they were producing superior results and our students were consistently winning many international competitions?

Afterwards, the testing system was introduced as the only way of assessing knowledge—despite the fact that it has proved to be ineffective in America and internationally.

Enlargement and consolidation of schools is currently underway. Several schools are merging into huge conglomerates. At the same time it is obvious that the more individual attention a child receives at school, the better. And rather small schools, where the principal knows each child personally, will always be much more effective than large conglomerates, where the principal or schoolmaster hardly knows all the teachers who work there.

Irina Shamolina

Huge schools, endless tests, primitive textbooks, training up to 18 years of age… This resembles the American public school model. So, the current Russian educational system was imported from the United States.

And what do we know about the educational system of secondary public education in America?

Firstly, it is known for its huge budget, the largest in the world for those purposes, and the second largest in the country after the military budget—with just as shockingly low results: America is ranked only number 28 among the developed countries according to its general level of literacy.

So why has this failing system been duplicated in Russia? The question remains unanswered.

Michael Farris

Michael Farris, J.D., LL.M, Founder and Chancellor of Patrick Henry College:

There was something dramatically changed about American public schools. There was no longer any concern about whether every child had an opportunity to learn—it was social engineering, and other grand schemes of the centralized planners in Washington, D.C., the teachers’ union; and they stopped worrying about whether or not children could read well, stopped caring about the values and morals in the public schools that had made them, really, a great place, as it was when I was going to school in the 50s and 60s.

Communist ideology was the main problem in the Soviet education system. In all other aspects it was providing quite a decent level of knowledge. Let us recall the achievements of Soviet students in international competitions. Why was it completely destroyed? Nobody knows.

The fundamental role of education has been recognized very well by American elites. A hundred years ago the Rockefeller, Ford and J.P. Morgan foundations launched a long-range program for the transformation of mass schooling in America and around the world into a well-oiled machine for the production of standardized minds, programed for mass production and consumption.

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