"With fainting soul not athirst for Grace, to an exam I didn't wander..."

In Griboedov's "Woe from wit" there is a delightful character Skalozub, who says:

"I have good news: there is an education plan, I hear,
For boarding schools, Lyceums and gymnasiums,
They'll teach there simply, like they do it here.
They will use books on some occasions."

Skalozub was a simple person - as simple as a shoe. He himself would have been pleasantly surprised that in some two hundred years his words almost literally would come true.

In front of me is an Order about the specifics of conducting a state (final) certification, where with reference to an order of the Ministry of Education of Russia from 05.02.2008 N 36 and the order of Rosobrnadzor (The Federal Service for supervision in the sphere of education and science) from 16.01.2008 N 75 it says: "An exam in literature can be sat as an exam of choice".

Finally! How long can we torture our children with all these Pushkins and Tolstoys, Turgenevs and Chekhovs?! Let's also not forget the above mentioned Griboedov?! Enough!

So what does all this mean exactly? That the final exam in literature is no longer compulsory. If we consider the pragmatic attitude of modern youth...

Sometimes when I am examining students in cultural studies I ask them to name any three Russian composers. Only one in ten is able to name all three. Far from everyone remembers Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rakhmaninov. And I'm not even talking about Dargomijski or Taneev. Now it is literature's turn. I have already heard from students that "War and Peace" was written by Dostoevsky, and "Fathers and Sons" by Gogol.

When I was just starting to work at school, there was an order that Nekrasov's book "In the trenches of Stalingrad" has to be taken out of the school literature program. This was a singular prohibition. After N.K.Krupskaya, who in the 1920s excluded Plato, Dostoevsky and fairy tales out of school and higher education institution programs, everything was quietly reinstated. Then at some point Esenin would be prohibited, then someone else. Again it would be quietly reinstated. But Russian literature was still one of the core subjects in school education. Certainly, the greatest pride of our culture!

The knowledge of literature was already deteriorating through films that were based on the classics. This way watching a movie replaced reading ... Literature never had it easy.

It is obvious that not all masterpieces of Russian classics are understood by school students. But they are necessary nonetheless. Those, who will want to understand more in life will turn to these classics later, having some life experience. However if it's no longer compulsory to know them for an exam, and then the parents, who can't remember three Russian composers, said that it's boring as hell... All hope lies with those parents, who still remember.

A Russian version of this article can be found here.