Between Regionalisation and Centralisation: The Implications of Russian Education Reforms for Schooling in Tatarstan

Abstract

This article focuses on post-2000 Russian education reforms, specifically the eradication of regional components from the school curriculum (in 2007) and the introduction of the Unified State Examination (in 2009), as part of a wider shift towards centralisation in Russian education. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a semi-urban community in the Republic of Tatarstan over the period 2009–2013, the article examines what impact these reforms had on local practices of schooling, on the educational strategies of the population, and on minority language education more widely. It reveals that, while the new institutional framework imposed by the reforms limited the exposure of pupils to regional and ethno-cultural identity narratives, local educators managed to use the limited possibilities within the schools to promote ethnic and regional belonging.

Notes

¹ Minority language schools or ‘national schools’ (national’nye shkoly), as they were officially designated, were established by the early Soviet state-builders as part of the policies of so-called ‘nativisation’ (korenizatsiya) (Martin 2001). However, a major retreat in minority language schooling was seen during the shift towards Russian in schooling for non-Russian nationalities under Khrushchev in the 1950s–1960s (Silver 1974).

² It must be noted that the expansion of minority language schooling was uneven across Russia’s regions. Until recently, there was no comprehensive overview of the developments of minority language schooling and ethno-cultural education in various Russian regions (for Finno-Ugric republics see Zamyatin (2014)). In the 1990s, Tatarstan saw a significant increase in the number of national schools in the urban areas whereas in other regions of the Volga-Ural region, such as Udmurtia or Mari El, these changes were less visible (Alos i Font 2014; Protassova et al. 2014).

³ To protect the anonymity of my informants, I have not disclosed the name of this town.

⁴ Participant observation during lessons was usually not audio- or video-recorded, following the explicit wish of the teachers, and observations were written down as field notes.

⁵ Interviews were conducted in Tatar and Russian. I interviewed 40 pupils in total from both schools.

⁶ Various so-called ‘innovative’ (innovatsionnye) types of schools were opened (for example, the so-called lyceums and gymnasia) along with private schools that offered alternative educational programmes.

⁷ Zakon RF ‘Ob obrazovanii’, 10 July 1992, available at: http://www.consultant.ru/popular/edu/, accessed 7 November 2017.

⁸ Mandatory teaching of Russian and Tatar, as official languages of the republic, is enshrined in the constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan (Article 15).

⁹ Educators, for example, have elaborated recommendations on how to integrate traditional Tatar games into the teaching of mathematics at school (Soloshenko 2007).

¹⁰ In the late 1990s, the authorities of Tatarstan initiated reform to change the orthographic base of the Tatar language from a Cyrillic to a Latin-based script. This reform was banned by a Russian federal law (2002) that stipulated the mandatory use of the Cyrillic alphabet for all state (including regional) languages in Russia. For the centre–region disputes concerning the switch to the Latin version of the Tatar alphabet, see Suleymanova (2010).

¹¹ The course on ‘Basics of the Spiritual and Moral Culture of the Peoples of Russia’ (Osnovy dukhovno-nravstvennoi kul’tury narodov Rossii) was initially proposed as the course on ‘Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture’. In this framing it provoked much public criticism and discontent (Karpov 2013). At the time of writing, the teaching of the course is limited to fourth and fifth grades.

¹² This included elimination of the elections of regional governors (2005), bringing regional constitutions into accord with federal constitution and legislation, and other measures (Goode 2010; Prina 2016).

¹³ Artemenko is the head of the Centre on Ethnocultural Strategy of Education of the Federal Institute for Education Development.

¹⁴ Artkemenko also stated that as a result of this ‘separation’, allegedly 70% of school children in Tatarstan did not feel themselves as citizens of Russia—a statement that provoked strong criticism in Tatarstan. See, ‘Stenogramma Soveshchaniya Ministerstva Obrazovaniya i Nauki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Zvezda Povolzhya, 18 November 2008.

¹⁵ As Prina (2016) observes, in other regions this law has been adopted with far less opposition.

¹⁶ Moreover, this contradicted the republic’s constitution, which mandates equal time spent on the teaching of Russian and Tatar languages at all schools in Tatarstan.

¹⁷ ‘Ob utverzhdenii Federal’nogo Gosudarstvennogo Obrazovatel'nogo Standarta Osnovnogo Obshchego Obrazovaniya’, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, 2010, available at: http://www.edu.ru/db/mo/Data/d_10/m1897.html, accessed 20 November 2017.

¹⁸ ‘Ob utverzhdenii Federal’nogo Gosudarstvennogo Obrazovatel'nogo Standarta Osnovnogo Obshchego Obrazovaniya’, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, 2010, available at: http://www.edu.ru/db/mo/Data/d_10/m1897.html, accessed 20 November 2017.

¹⁹ The forth variant of the curriculum was actually intended for the schools where language of instruction was other than Russian (see ‘Ob utverzhdenii Federal’nogo Gosudarstvennogo Obrazovatel'nogo Standarta Osnovnogo Obshchego Obrazovaniya’, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, 2010, available at: http://www.edu.ru/db/mo/Data/d_10/m1897.html, accessed 20 November 2017).

²⁰ Teaching of Tatar as a mandatory school subject has provoked resistance from individual Russian-speaking parents in Tatarstan at various points in time. In 2004 a Russian parent from Kazan brought a case before the Russian Constitutional Court against Tatar-language lessons arguing that mandatory teaching of the Tatar language violates his child’s rights to a full and adequate education in the Russian language (Prina 2016). The case was however turned down by the Russian Constitutional Court. In 2008–2009 a self-organised group of Russian-speaking parents established an internet community against the Tatar-language lessons and held a ‘Russian march’ against discrimination of Russians in Kazan (Khodzhaeva 2011). In 2010–2011 this group has organised street protests in Kazan against the teaching of Tatar language at schools and in 2011 submitted an open appeal to the Russian Ministry of Education to reduce or end the obligatory study of Tatar at schools (Khodzhaeva 2011; Prina 2016).

²¹ In fact, only in Tatarstan could the teaching of regional language be fully retained, throughout primary and secondary school. In other republics of the Volga-Ural region, the teaching of regional languages was substantially reduced (Zamyatin 2012).

²² Officially, it was merged with another publishing house, Tatknigoizdat.

²³ The introduction of the USE has been a highly contentious topic. As observers have admitted, it merely relocates corruption to schools and negatively affects pupils’ academic performance and critical thinking skills because of its mere focus on providing the right answers and getting the highest possible score (Dolotov 2009). For more on the consequences of the introduction of the USE in regions, see Luk’yanova (2012).

²⁴ Decree of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation no. 362, from 28 November 2008 ‘Prikaz ministerstva obrazovaniya i nauki Rossiiskoi Federatsii “Ob utverzhdenii Polozhenya o formakh i poryadke provedeniya gosudarstvennoi (itogovoi) attestatsii obuchayushchikhsya, osvnovshikh osvnovnye obshcheobrazovatel’nye programmy srredngego (polnogo) obshchevo obrazovaniya”’, available at: https://rg.ru/2009/01/30/attestacia-dok.html, accessed 13 November 2017.

²⁵ Aida Kamalova, the parent of a Tatar student, brought in 2009 to court a case against the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation challenging this stipulation as a violation of the language rights of her daughter. After the case was rejected by the Russian Supreme Court, Kamalova submitted it to the European Court of Human Rights. No information on the present status of her claim could be obtained.

²⁶ Since 2010, Kriashen (Christianised Tatars, kreshchenye Tatary in Russian) have been able to register as a separate ethnic category in the Russian census.

²⁷ Interview with a school principal in one of the Russian-language schools in town, 26 October 2009.

²⁸ Thus, some parents in the town complained that the school nurses continued to speak Tatar with children, despite the fact that kindergarten was officially Russian-speaking.

²⁹ Tatar parent A, interviewed in a Tatar school of the town, 10 February 2010.

³⁰ Switching from Russian to Tatar was, for example, explicitly forbidden in some Russian-language schools in my field site.

³¹ The form of address for a teacher in a Tatar school.

³² Tatar parent B, interviewed in a Tatar school, 15 October 2009.

³³ Similar situations emerged in other parts of the world, for example, in Peru (Hornberger 1989), where native-language schools actually facilitate the acquisition of competence in the dominant language.

³⁴ The exact number of Tatar-language schools is difficult to estimate since, while formally listed as Tatar, many schools in fact teach in Russian. Official statistics are difficult to obtain: publicly available figures on the website of the Ministry of Education of Tatarstan only go back to 2007. According to the information obtained by the author, while in 2008–2009 there were officially 1,098 Tatar-language schools in Tatarstan, in 2009–2010 there were 1,061 and in 2012–2013, their number dropped to 854. See also, for example ‘V Tatarstane sokratilos’ kolichestvo tatarskikh shkol’, Chelninskiye Izvestiya, 20 March 2013, available at: http://www.chelny-izvest.ru/education/18221.html, accessed 20 November 2017.

³⁵ It must be noted that teaching in Russian in Tatar-language schools, specifically in urban areas, was already taking place before the USE, as shown by the outcomes of the research project by Mukharyamova et al. (2004).

³⁶ In January 2017, a well-known Tatar nationalist organisation, the All-Tatar Public Center (vsetatarskii obshchetvennyi tsentr), issued a declaration on the status of the Tatar language, claiming that 699 Tatar schools had been closed in Tatarstan since the beginning of the 2000s. See ‘VTOTs predlagaet sdelat’ tatarskii yazyk edinstvennym gosudarstvennym v Tatarstane’, Idel.Realii, 17 January 2017, available at: https://www.idelreal.org/a/28238714.html, accessed 20 November 2017. In August 2017 a criminal investigation was launched against the All-Tatar Public Center under the accusation of extremism.

³⁷ A series of reforms, implemented since 2005–2006 has changed the structure of federal funding of budget institutions such as schools (their funding became dependent on the number of pupils enrolled) leading to the closure of small rural schools across Russia with children having to enrol into larger schools, sometimes quite distant from their place of residence (Gibatdinov et al. 2006).

³⁸ The difference between Russian and Tatar groups for the Tatar-language lessons lies in textbooks used and in the degree of difficulty, since Tatar groups are for children with a native or good command of the Tatar language while Russian groups are for those without any prior knowledge of Tatar. In the school where I worked, children were placed in Tatar groups based on their ethnicity.

³⁹ Tatar-language teacher interviewed in the Russian-language school, 18 November 2009.

⁴⁰ Tatar parent C, interviewed in the Russian-language school, 25 November 2009.

⁴¹ This was possible to do in the upper grades of secondary school (tenth and eleventh grades) where some of the hours assigned to Tatar-language teaching could be used for Russian lessons in order to prepare for the USE.

⁴² The notion of the ‘mother tongue’ is a complex one and is constructed differently in different socio-political contexts. As Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1989) assert, in ethnic revitalisation movements the mother tongue often takes an explicitly moral value and figures as a mobilising factor.

⁴³ Classroom observations, March 2010.

⁴⁴ Often, especially in the town, they were also not competent in their native languages.

⁴⁵ Here the teacher, as I observed on a number of other occasions, tried to invoke the feeling of pride by highlighting that Udmurts and Mari were multilingual and could speak several languages (Russian, Tatar, Udmurt/Mari and English), in order to have a positive effect on the ethnic self-esteem of the students.

⁴⁶ Comment by the teacher on the lesson of the Tatar literature in the Russian-language school, on 30 November 2009. Observations were written down as field notes.

⁴⁷ ‘Putin: zastavlyat’ cheloveka uchit’ yazyk, kotoryi dlya nego rodnym ne yavlyaetsya, nedopustimo’, Idel.Realii, 20 July 2017, available at: https://www.idelreal.org/a/28628963.html, accessed 18 November 2017.

⁴⁸ ‘Dozhivet li tatarskii yazyk do ponedel’nika?’, Business-Online, 19 October 2017, available at: https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/361187, accessed 18 November 2017.

⁴⁹ ‘Rustem Minnikhanov: tatarskii yazyk budet prepodavat’sya dva chasa v nedelu’, Idel.Realii, 8 November 2017, available at: https://www.idelreal.org/a/28841739.html, accessed 18 November 2017.

⁵⁰ After the consultations with the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, the regional parliament of the Republic of Tatarstan officially adopted on 29 November 2017 a decree that prescribes teaching of Tatar language at schools as an official language of the republic at a maximum amount of two hours per week; its introduction into the school curriculum has moreover to proceed upon the official consent of parents (by the way of voting on parents' meetings). See, ‘V shkolakh Tatarstana otmenili obyazatel’noe izuchenie tatarskogo yazyika’, Business-Online, 29 November 2017, available at: https://www.business-gazeta.ru/news/365340, accessed 20 December 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dilyara Suleymanova

Dilyara Suleymanova, Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15 8050, Zurich, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]