M O S C O W Interview with Leonid Shishkin - Passport magazine

Education
Do Russians push
their children too hard?
The pressure’s on for
Russian kids this month,
as they cram for exams
while keeping up a host of
extracurricular activities.
And the holidays won’t see
an end to their labours,
as they are packed off
for extra lessons at camp.
While the gifted can cope
with the most gruelling of
schedules with a smile,
others will struggle. Are
their childhoods being
sacrificed to the modern
age need to succeed?
Text by Peter Ellis
“I do it every day and I hate it. I really
don’t want to do karate but my mum
says I’ve got to,” says Pasha. With his
soft brown eyes, wavy brown hair, trust-
2 June 2010
ing face and all of his eleven years, he
doesn’t look like a killer. I ask him why
he thinks his mum makes him do it.
“To make me strong. Men have to be
strong,” he replies with a weak smile.
Pasha’s sister Sasha, 13, shares the
same woes. “And I’ve been doing it for
two year’s longer than him,” she whimpers.
The kids are two of my students,
who have been booked in for extra English
lessons by their concerned mother,
though their English is well in advance
of their years. We talked about their daily
routine: these school children have
schedules which would make an international
executive’s head spin.
Sasha and Pasha aren’t alone in being
busy. At weekends another of my students,
Alex, goes to boot camp, where
the day starts before breakfast with a
five kilometre run with a heavy backpack,
while during the week his free time
is taken up with extra English, Spanish,
and the martial arts. His father is hoping
to get him into the FSB: a Russian James
Bond in the making. But this seems part-
time compared to one of my colleague’s
twelve-year-old charges. She doesn’t go
to school except to take exams and is ferried
from tutor to tutor in a seven-day-aweek,
twelve-hours-a-day regime. “My
mum thinks I’m a genius,” she explains,
though recently she has managed to negotiate
some Sundays off.
Even when school’s out, lessons don’t
stop for many of Moscow’s youngsters.
Busy working parents can relax knowing
their offspring are being taken care
of at a host of summer camps.
“It’s great being a away from home
and with my friends. We had great fun
especially in the evening when we had
free time,” says Andrei, another of my
students who attended a two-week ‘bio
camp’ last July, where he was taught
woodland ecology, followed by a fourweek
language course in the UK.
Much of this extracurricular learning
is organised by the youngsters’ schools,
where they can experience the sort of
practical activities that UK schoolchildren
take for granted, though there