Euroasian Jewish News

EAJC Secretary General Professor Michael Chlenov

EAJC Secretary General Speaks Before New Educational Project Participants

The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, by assignment from the President and Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, is to implement an experimental new class in 19 regions from the 1st of April, 2010. This class, titled “Basics of religious cultures and secular ethics,” is aimed at the development of tolerance, the prevention of interethnic and interreligious conflicts in a multiconfessional educational environment.
This class, aimed at 4th -5th grade students, consists of six electable modules: “Basics of Orhodox Christian Culture,” “Basics of Islam Culture,” “Basics of Buddhist Culture,” “Basics of Judaic Culture,” “Basics of World Religious Cultures,” and “Secular Ethics.” The choice of the module is given to the parents of the student. According to data collected by the middle of January, 867 out of 21 thousand students who are to be part of the experiment have chosen Judaic culture.
From January 15, courses to prepare teachers (tutors) are to begin under the auspices of the Academy of Further Education and Retraining for Workers in Education is Moscow. They are to prepare teachers for the regions before April 1st.
As part of the preparations, the authors of the textbooks by which the course will be taught are speaking to the future teachers. The first class includes 160 teachers from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, the Kamchatka Kari, Novosibirskaya Oblast, Stavropol Krai, and Chechnya. On the 20th of January, the EAJC Secretary General, Professor Michael Chlenov, gave a general lecture on the basics of Jewish culture to this class.
When commenting the new course for the school program, the EAJC Secretary General noted, “I am not sure that the basics of each religious tradition should be taught as a spearate course. I believe that it is more useful to teach a general course in world religions. This course should be more balanced, however, than it was during the previous experiment, when 80 percent of the course were on Orthodox Christianity, and only 20 percent were delegated to the other religions.
What concerns Judaism itself, however, because of the very limited knowledge of this culture of all students – including those of Jewish heritage – the course must naturally be basic. Also, I am very skeptical of this idea, because there are no teachers in Russia at the moment who would be able to teach such a course in full to 4th and 5th grade students. In general, the fact that some students will study on Judaism (or only Orthodox Christianity, only Islam, and so on), without studying the basics of other religious cultures, does not seem right to me. It is much more important to teach children what is religious culture in general.
However it really is, though, I think that the appearance of this educational project can be thought of as an interesting experiment, and I hope that it gives a positive effect.”