chapter 27
The same pattern
As far as I can remember communists always proclaimed universal education as one of their greatest achievements. But, in the first place, they used it for brainwashing. In fact, it was not something new – any political regime has always exploited it for that purpose. Yet education is a double-edged sword, because it also gives you knowledge and widens your horizons. No wonder that dangerous ideas usually sprang up among the students. I remember how we used to rebel against the system. Actually, it was quite peaceful – we just laughed heartily at political jokes and at the portraits of our leaders hanging everywhere. Obviously, we felt superior, because we were young and bright and inwardly believed that we would never look like those on top, who were definitely much too old to rule our lives and seemed rather weak-headed into the bargain. What is more, their words too often didn't correspond to reality. After that they could hardly expect us to respect their dull speeches pronounced from various tribunes. Our country was the biggest but it was not the richest or the happiest place in the world as they zealously tried to convince us. That's why we laughed so much when someone told us a fresh joke about our leader or about the whole situation in the country.
And what a bore it was to learn the teachings of Marx and Lenin at school and then again at university! The small consolation was that people in China, as it was said, always had to carry brochures with their leader Mao Zedong's quotations in their pockets. It looked like poor Chinese had to endure more ridiculous things from their authorities than we did. For instance, the notorious hunt for sparrows. The clever idea was that those gluttonous creatures ate too much grain in the fields considerably diminishing their harvests. That's why the great helmsman Mao appealed to the nation and ordered to kill them all. I was too small to remember reports about this campaign in our papers but my mother assured me later that people were even offered money for tiny bodies of the unfortunate birds. Anyway, the Chinese followed the instructions as thoroughly as they usually do and the result was disastrous. Deprived of their natural enemies, various insects, and especially locusts, began to breed uncontrollably, and a year later attacked the fields in great numbers. No wonder that later trying in a hurry to restore the subtle balance of nature, Chinese had to buy sparrows in the neighbouring countries. I remember that my mother and I found this very amusing. But it was not. All this madness with killing sparrows provoked great famine and thousands of people in China starved to death. In comparison our own leaders seemed to us more sensible. As a matter of fact, we got very little information about their blunders but it was impossible to hush up everything. For example, constant shortage of food in our shops clearly showed that there was something wrong with our agriculture too.
I remember that only in the beginning of Leonid Brezhnev's rule - when I was in primary school - food was in abundance in our shops. Oranges, bananas, even olive oil of good quality were available for everybody. What is more, meat could be purchased without standing in a long queue and my mother used to send me to buy it. Later I always recalled that time with nostalgia. It seemed nobody knew for sure why our economic situation began to deteriorate so badly. People usually blamed some negligent managers or generous help to our “brothers”, that is to other socialist countries. Anyway, they always told us that those were only temporary difficulties and our socialist system of economy would defeat all the others in the end.
“We were born to make a fairy-tale come true” - these words from the popular song expressed, as it seemed to me, the very spirit of Soviet school education. When I was in my teens I loved to sing along whenever I heard it on the radio. It raised my spirits a little even at the time when I already knew that there was no truth in those enthusiastic words. As a matter of fact, it was not that what was waiting for me after university. In reality, I got a dull and low-paid job in some laboratory, where most of the people just imitated scientific work. I was always ready to run out of that place an hour or two earlier, preferring to stand in queues for meat or milk and butter than to listen to idle talk of my colleagues. It was not a very good time for a young clumsy creature like me to start her career as a housewife but there I was standing in queues and not knowing that the USSR was gradually drawing to its close. Still, at least ten years of that nervous and unstable life were waiting for all of us. Not to mention those awful “wild 90s” that were going to come after that.
In my mother's young days the situation was quite different. It was gradually getting better and all the hardships could be easily explained by the aftereffects of the recent War. Moreover good education gave young villagers a chance to escape poverty and hard labour in the fields and find a nice job in the city. Yet it was difficult to get it because the level of teaching was pretty low in the villages. My mother's teacher of Russian is a good example of that. He was likable and full of goodwill but the only task that they had ever got from him was to compose some sentences in Russian. It was not so easy for most of them as their native language was Ukrainian. But it was not really a problem because their kind teacher always turned a blind eye whenever good pupils helped the others or even wrote surreptitiously in someone else's copy-book.
They did have a lot of fun during those lessons, knowing beforehand that their teacher would be utterly happy to give them all high marks for their sentences. Yet there was no chance to improve their Russian with such manner of teaching. And Russian as the official language was really important for those who wished to leave the village. That's why in the end my mother and some of her friends came to their headmaster and told him about their predicament. When, after the inspection, the headmaster asked their teacher why he had not taught his pupils properly the latter was not perplexed in the slightest and answered with a serene smile: “But they have been so clever! You would think so too if you read all those sentences that they composed for me”. To be honest, I am at a loss here. Was that man really as simple-hearted as villagers believed him to be or was it just a clever pretense in order to avoid his punishment?
Anyway, it was not the only case when my mother fought for better education in her village. She came to their headmaster one more time after she discovered with a shock that it was not her younger sister's lack of ability, as she had always believed, but her teacher's fault that the child was so bad at maths. It was her teacher who couldn't solve problems and at that time when every pupil had to learn the table of multiplication by heart that woman didn't know it at all. And why should she if the wretched table was printed on the back cover of every copy-book that was meant for calculations? That or at least something like that she told the headmaster when he caught her at it. As for solving problems that teacher had her own way to reach the right answer. At first she performed some chaotic operations with figures in an attempt to achieve it. When, after numerous efforts, she failed that woman was never embarrassed. If her result was less than it was necessary she just told her pupils enthusiastically: “And now our question is what we will get if we add something to this figure”. Or she asked them to subtract something from it in the opposite situation. Surely this last step had always given them the right number that coincided with that one in the list of answers in their textbooks.
Not knowing any other teachers for more than two years her poor pupils really believed that adjustment was the right way to solve problems. Their semi-literate parents definitely couldn't help them to notice that something was wrong. My mother wouldn't have noticed anything either if strangely long solutions of simple problems had not caught her eye when she was turning over the pages of her sister's copy-book. When the child got a new teacher at last it didn't turn out, of course, that the girl was brilliant at maths. But her marks definitely became better and she learnt how to solve problems without pleading her elder sister to do it for her.
As for my aunt's first teacher only now it occurred to me that my mother has always used that woman as a measure of ignorance. How often I heard her saying with scorn: “Oh, them! I am sure they don't even know the table of multiplication”. People said about that teacher that she never sat for her own exams, sending instead some clever girl her cunning mother had hired for that purpose. If it was really so her examiners couldn't be unaware of it and this leads me to a frightening conclusion that at the time of my mother's youth bribes and corruption in Soviet educational system throve even more lavishly than they did in my young days.
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
