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Chechnya: Learning to Parrot by Tanya Lokshina 5 August 2004 The education system in Chechnya is teaching mountain children how to be both illiterate and beautiful reciters of Pushkin. RIGAKHOI, Chechnya—Last spring, I happened to visit Rigakhoi, a remote mountain village close to the Chechnya-Dagestan border, to collect information that might shed light on a bomb attack that had left a woman and her five small children dead in the ruins of their own house. The work itself--interviewing witnesses to the tragedy--was finished within the day. But in that remote region, very high up in the mountains, roads are virtually nonexistent, and a 20-kilometer journey can be an insurmountable obstacle. It might take an ordinary car hours to cross the turbulent waters of the mountain rivers. And then, hours can be spent waiting for the engine to dry out, clearing heavy boulders from its path, inching forward to avoid precipitous drops, and, if there has been rain, pulling the car out of the mud. So making the roughly 75-kilometer journey to Grozny at dusk was out of the question, and I could not but accept the hospitality of a family in Nokhch-Kiloi, a village 20 kilometers down the slope from Rigakhoi but in a different district, Shatoi. The homestead was a small, whitewashed affair, with two rooms and a kitchen, typical of this village of a few dozen houses strung out along the slopes. With no electricity or gas, the heat in the house came from a huge stove, and the light from a kerosene lamp. With the exception of the flour in the bread, the food–milk, eggs, cheese, freshly baked bread and jam—came from their three cows, their sheep and chickens, or from the bushes. A mountain road. Photo courtesy of Tanya LokshinaA mountain road The man of the house spoke Russian fluently. His wife, probably in her early 30s but looking 10 years older, spoke the language with difficulty. The children, all five of them, knew not a word of Russian among them and looked at me with utter curiosity, laughing at my attempts to use sign language and chattering away in Chechen among themselves. “Is there a school in the village?” I asked the mother. There is, she said: a school with 80 pupils, including her five. The eldest, a fragile, white-skinned slip of a girl with shaggy black hair constantly escaping from the bondage of her scarf, was 12 and already in the fifth grade. “How come, then, she speaks no Russian?” I wondered. The language must be taught in school, and even very poor teaching would not explain Aset’s ignorance. With the help of her mother, I asked Aset what subjects they studied in school. “Russian language, Russian literature, and math,” the girl replied. In the fifth grade they are supposed to study natural sciences and history as well, not to mention fine arts, but this is a republic at war and you can’t ask too much of the teachers. “Don’t they study Chechen in school?” I asked her mother, by now feeling totally confused. “No, because there are no textbooks in Chechen. So the teachers refuse to teach it; they wouldn’t know how to.” “But all that Russian, and at the same time. … Do you mind asking her what they’ve just covered in their Russian lit. class?” Aset seemed pleased with the attention. She edged closer to me and, instead of simply answering the question, immediately launched into a long poem by Pushkin. She recited it with much fire and inspiration, in a singsong fashion, her diction clear and her pronunciation impeccable. I did not know what to think. Until now, this girl had laughed and shaken her head at even the simplest of Russian words. Aset finished the poem and smiled a proud and bright-eyed smile. And suddenly it dawned on me. “Please ask her what the poem is about,” I said to the mother. She translated the question and Aset looked from her to me blankly. Then she said something to her mother, and, in her halting Russian, the woman muttered apologetically, “She does not understand your question. You did not like the poem? She skipped some lines?” “Oh, no, please tell her that she recited the piece beautifully, without a single mistake. I am really very impressed. I would only like her to tell me what happened in that poem, what the author was describing to us.” After exchanging a few words with her daughter, the woman finally said, “That she can’t do. She doesn’t understand the words. She just knows them by heart.” “And her teacher did not even explain to them the meaning of what they were learning by heart?” “No.” “Could you ask her to show me her textbooks?” Relieved to be faced with such an easy task, the girl ran to the back room and brought back three perfectly normal Russian fifth-grade textbooks, for math, language, and literature. “But how does she use them if she can’t read them?” I asked with exasperation. “Oh, she reads very well. She’ll show you,” said her mother, eager to prove me wrong. And Aset opened her literature book and started reading a story out loud. She read very fast and seemed to like what she was doing. I smiled at her and turned to her mother, “That was very good. Does she understand the meaning of what she’s just read?” “They do not teach them to understand; they teach them to read. She can also write, if you dictate slowly. But that’s that.” I found a simple equation in Aset’s math book. She cracked it in no time at all. I found an equally simple problem about two men sharing 10 apples. She gave me another blank stare. “But how does she do them in school?” “The teacher translates for them.” “And for homework?” “Her father translates. But they do not get much homework.” The woman looked up at me with a challenge. “Aset is really bright. She’s top of her class. She loves to study.” “Of course, she is a very gifted girl. Please, don’t take offense. It’s just the way they teach her at school is absolutely unbelievable, making them read words whose meaning totally escapes them. Not even giving them an idea that reading is about understanding.” “But the teachers, well, they’re also graduates of the same school, and mostly quite young,” Aset’s mother sighed. “So, they never learned much themselves. Also, they have a lot of work to do around the house and the cattle to attend to. So often the teacher just leaves the kids in the classroom and goes to mind her own business.” “But can Aset read and write in Chechen?” “Oh, no. I told you--there are no Chechen textbooks, and her teacher cannot work without a book. In class, her teacher speaks Chechen, and the books are in Russian, and they’re so expensive, these books. I had to buy them myself.” “And in the other mountain villages, the problems are all the same, right?” “Yes, there is no difference.” WHY NOT TEACH IN CHECHEN? And so it seems that many hundreds of children in the mountains of Chechnya, particularly in the districts of Shatoi, Nojai-Yurt, and Vedeno, where Rigakhoi lies, are practically deprived of access to education. They never learn to read or write properly, instead putting together syllables and words in a language they do not understand. In a literate world, they are, in effect, a desocialized group with little future. And the price for Chechnya—and for Russia—is heavy. Over the past decade, Chechnya has lost many a talented writer, scientist, or professional to death or emigration. Having lost one generation and its skills, Chechnya is in the process of losing much of the next one. Photo courtesy of Tanya Lokshina In schools far outside Grozny, the Chechen capital, there are no qualified teachers. Those who teach in remote schools are the schools’ own recent graduates. And they are not the best students, because the best turn their backs on teachers’ miserly wages and find better-paid jobs. In Grozny, there are at least some qualified teachers, but the patterns are similar. The changes over the past decade have been dramatic. In the Soviet era, most teachers in Chechnya were Russian. Whether they wanted to or not, they would be sent, as fresh graduates of teacher-training colleges, to Chechnya’s towns and mountains. Naturally, they could speak only Russian, and their small pupils started chattering in Russian in no time at all. But after almost 10 years of bloodshed, Chechnya has become almost monoethnic. All those Russian teachers, many of them well-qualified, left long ago. Now it is a challenge to find anyone with adequate training. The teaching profession has become Chechenized. But teaching has not. There are textbooks that could be used to teach the Chechen language and its literature, but they are hard to come by even in Grozny. When they can be found, they prove to be books that Chechen children would not be able to relate to, produced in the Soviet era, with anachronistic vocabulary and paeans to Lenin, the Communist Party, and the achievements of the proletariat as they progress along the heroic path to communism. Even if that were not a problem, a parent might still opt for a Russian textbook, since those are much cheaper. And, although the Chechen Ministry of Education acknowledges that Chechnya receives the same share of free textbooks as other regions of Russia, Chechen parents usually must buy books for their children. Logic suggests that Chechnya should receive more free books, since the war has destroyed most of the old stock of books. But pervasive corruption means that much of the limited supply of “free books” ends up in the marketplace. There are plenty of Russian books on the market. At $30 for a set of fifth-grade books, even they are pricey in a republic where unemployment runs to 90 percent. But even in mountain regions parents like Aset’s are willing to spend scarce money to provide their children with whatever education they can get, even if it is in Russian and teaches their children neither to read nor to write. A route out of this absurd situation would be to introduce Chechen as the language of tuition in primary schools and to provide decent textbooks. Opponents to the idea point to an experiment carried out in the Gudermes and Achkhoi-Martan districts of Chechnya in the 1990s that, they claim, failed. But teachers reply that the experiment was doomed to fail, since very few textbooks were prepared in Chechen to back it up. The result was similar to the situation in Nokhch-Kiloi now: the teachers spoke Chechen in class but their students mostly had to use Russian books. The authorities show no enthusiasm for the idea of even providing Chechen textbooks, though the Chechen Ministry of Education blames the scarcity of books on administrative mistakes. Apparently, last year it forgot to place an order with the printers for the fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade Chechen language manuals by the start of one school year (1 September) in time for the next. It does not seem to learn from its mistakes: exactly the same had happened in 2003. This undermining of the Chechen language as a school subject seems more a matter of choice, verging on contempt, than of negligence. There is not a single school in Chechnya where the language of instruction is Chechen, even in those remote districts of the republic where children have no chance of speaking Russian and gaining an understanding of it. Officials who oppose instruction in Chechen argue that Chechens would not learn any Russian and would not be able to continue their education beyond primary school. But it is not an either-or question: Russian should be taught in schools as a second language, with special textbooks adapted to the linguistic needs of Chechen-speaking children. Nor would this be making an exception for Chechnya; in fact, not teaching in Chechen is more exceptional, since many of Russia’s national republics—including Tatarstan, a relatively powerful republic—have some schools where the language of tuition is the local language. Their students have not found that having Russian as a second language has limited their progress. What opponents of instruction in Chechen ignore is the consequence—that, like Aset, many Chechens end up unable to read or write either in Russian or Chechen. For Chechnya’s small mountain villages, without qualified teachers and cut off from all use of Russian, there seems no option but to make Chechen the first language if a disaster is to be avoided. It would also be ideal if, in Grozny and other cities, parents could choose between Russian and Chechen primary schools. But a usable Chechen textbook available at an affordable price and an end to implacable opposition would be progress enough for now. Until then, in Chechnya’s more rural and mountainous regions, the principal achievement of the Russian education system is to teach children how to be illiterate reciters of Pushkin. ------------------- Tanya Lokshina is programs director at the Moscow Helsinki Group and chairwoman of the Information and Research Center Demos. She has been working in Chechnya since 2003 interviewing victims and witnesses of human rights violations and conducting field research. She has published numerous articles on the situation in Chechnya at one of the top Russian independent news resources, Polit.Ru. She is also editor and one of the key authors of the book Chechnya 2003: Political Process through the Looking Glass published by the Moscow Helsinki Group in spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 Transitions Online.