Who Quacks, Ducks or Frogs? Bathtime International.

Bathtime in the Anichkin-Ingram household is an international relations minefield. Does a duck, for example, go krya-krya or quack-quack? Are country folk awakened by a cockadoodledoo or a cookarekoo and does the sheep – Vita has a whole menagerie of plastic bathtime playmates – go beh or baa? The one that really gets me is the horse – who has ever heard a horse going eeh-gogo? But then, as Sasha quickly points out, where in the world does a pig (khryu-khryu) go oink?

Meanwhile little Vita’s head is twitching from side to side like a spectator at a tennis tournament as she watches what she had hoped to be two intelligent parents screaming bewildering farmyard noises at each other.

In fact, child psychologists seem to maintain that the child won’t become remotely schizophrenic from having a frog that either croaks or kvahks (quacks?), depending on which adult is making the inane noises at the time.

Is it possibly the parents, then, who become mentally imbalanced?

For, of course, the fight for Vita’s cultural heritage extends beyond the bathroom.

All the way to the kitchen, in fact, where I stuff her with Marmite, both to discourage a Russian sweet tooth and on the grounds that you can’t make a stronger statement about your Englishness than having grown up on Marmite. But now Sasha has her eating it off black bread.

Of course it won’t much matter if she watches ‘Blue Peter’ alongside ‘Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi’ (‘Good Night, Little Ones’) when we sooner or later resort to television as a part-time substitute for parenting, and she will have the distinct advantage of two great literary traditions to call her own.
But there are, nevertheless, serious minefields ahead, especially when the bicultural family straddles the defunct, for now at least, Iron Curtain.

Like all nearly talking children, Vita refers to all pictures of women as mama and all men as papa.
Thus when she pulled a biography of Stalin off the office shelves the other day, pointed to a portrait of Uncle Joe and triumphantly mouthed the word ‘Papa!’ I naturally launched into a long-winded denial which was inexorably heading toward a ‘Russians-as-baddies’ scenario when I remembered to my horror that she is Russian – partly at least.

Sasha eyed me cautioningly and we somehow distracted her until we have had time to agree upon a unified policy toward the past.

Most crucial of all, points out Sasha, is what exactly are we going to say to her when we settle down, en famille, to watch his favourite movies: John Le Carré and James Bond?

Originally published in The Moscow Times in Educating Vita column by Alexander Anichkin and Miranda Ingram. Read another 'Educating Vita' column 'Tolstoy: What We Need Most'.

'Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi' opening jingle:

What is a University?

Britain plans further cuts in spending on higher education. Universities are pressed to provide 'employable'  courses. 

Among the many obscure books in my library there is A Cambridge scrapbook, compiled by Jean Lindsay. The book belonged to my mother-in-law. I found a clipping from the The Times letter's page tucked inside the book. It's Jean Lindsay writing about the purpose of university education. I've never read anything on the subject so clearly put in so few words, even though she writes from a feminist angle. Here is the letter:

It is a pity that the value of a woman's university education should be judged by the extent to which she subsequently uses the specialized knowledge she acquired while reading for her degree. Is the university education of a man who gets a First Class in the Classical Tripos wasted because he subsequently goes into the Treasury of the Foreign Office? The value of a university education is more than the formal instruction in a specialized  branch of learning; it is the training of certain qualities of mind such as objectivity, the ability to sift out essential points from a mass of detail, the capacity to realize when a point has been proved.

"a trained mind and self-confidence are of inestimable value to society"

These qualities persist even after the historical details or the shades of literary criticism have been forgotten. But there is far more to a university education than the reading for a degree, the essay writing, and the discussion in a weekly supervision. As Canon Raven once put it, 'the main purpose of the place is friendship, and the building up of character by intercourse with men of kindred tastes and different training.' If the university exists to promote ' the vast and essential business... of coming to terms with the universe', this is done largely by conversation among contemporaries and this experience is as salutary for a girl as for her brother.

"These qualities persist even after the historical details have been forgotten"

Whatever she may do afterwards, a trained mind and self-confidence based on understanding of herself and of her surroundings are of inestimable value to the girl herself and indirectly to society.

Jean Lindsay, 

Girton College, Cambridge

 

In Praise of the Common Intellectual

One fantastic feat of the Bolshevik regime in Russia was pushing 150 million Russians in the 1920s through compulsory literacy courses. My grandmother, now ninety two years old, loves to recall how, as one of twelve siblings in Siberia, she had to share a pair of felt boots with her brother to go to school: he went in the mornings, she went in the afternoon. At the same time as Diagilev’s ballets were impressing the world with their cultural sophistication and Sikorsky had built his first helicopter, nine out of ten Russians still could not read or write.

The new Soviet state believed that knowledge is power, and the more knowledgeable the people the more powerful the state. And they seemed to have a point: we sent Sputnik and Gagarin into space, ahead of the Americans. By the 1950s everybody was not only literate, but most had secondary education and millions more were students in higher education.

"In the end neither manual workers

nor the intellectual elite maintained any self respect."

We were, of course, rightly proud of ourselves. But by this time the down side of free, mass, education was also becoming apparent. As sparks fly over the current education debate in Britain, as Labour calls for top up fees and promises to turn half the population of Britain into certificate wielding graduates, I, as someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, feel a foreboding sense of deja vu.

I remember how, as the numbers of Soviet students, graduates, bachelors and doctors grew, there were fewer and fewer people to plough fields or fix pipes. Indeed, when I was a university student in the 70s, such was the labour shortage that we students used to have to spend a month on a farm, sometimes longer, helping to dig potatoes, and in winter we were ‘mobilised’ to pack rotting vegetables or unload rail carriages. Without the students there wasn’t enough labour to keep the country running.

More seriously, and worryingly, by the time everyone had a university or college degrees, our entire culture had changed. Since everyone was "educated', education started being seen as something worthless - people started sneering at the educated. Academics and intellectuals became despised whereas excessive respect and admiration was suddenly showered on anyone who could a actually fix something - much as plumbers are becoming the new elite in today’s Britain. Social attitudes turned from respect and reverence for the teacher, for the learned few, to outright contempt for anyone who chose to spend years studying books, but couldn’t put up a shelf or fix a dripping tap. I remember an Academician at the prestigious Zhukovsky Academy who would always let the cleaner lady pass first saying “She is more important than me: I can’t do my job if she doesn’t do hers.”

In the end neither manual workers nor the intellectual elite maintained any self respect. Manual workers would not try to do their best as there were so few others to compare their work against. And graduates, even those form the very best educational institutions, grew, in the pervading anti-academic atmosphere, more frustrated and more depressed. As soon as the Soviet controls on emigration collapsed they started leaving the country for American scientific centres: today, for example, it is claimed that some one out of ten American mathematicians have been trained in Russian academic institutions. Others, of course, have been wooed by rogue dictators to their secret laboratories.

Of course it is true that a nation is doomed to fall behind if too little is invested in education. But at the same time, education should be elite: elite and well funded - but not for everybody. Belittle higher education by handing it round at random and you end up with the real brains, the ones you want to hang onto, departing the country leaving behind a mediocre, apparently overeducated, population in which the manual worker is king.

Having the best laboratories is fine so long as you have enough people left over to dust your microscopes and wash your test-tubes.

This article was first published in the Times (London)

The Yobs, the Swots and the Intelligentsia

BRITISH STRATEGISTS SHOULD LOOK TO RUSSIA TO MAKE EDUCATION FASHIONABLE IN UK

Being the first to put your hand up and getting answers right is not always cool in British schools. While a handful of pupils manage to walk the fine line between academic achievement and popularity, it is more likely for the clever, hard-working child to be picked on as a "swot" or "teacher’s pet". Even "brainbox" is hardly a term of endearment.

The problem is more acute among boys, and government strategists in the UK are looking at ways to make education trendy.

In the former Soviet Union and now Russia, the opposite is the case there: pupils want to learn and there is no shame in it. Admittedly the Soviet education system had its defects —learning was largely by rote. Thinking for yourself, playing the devil’s advocate and asking questions were not encouraged. But within the classroom bright children were the heroes and the slower ones worked hard to be like them.

This popularity even extended to the playground, where it was the clever ones, not the truants, who were gang leaders and organised games. "It was the reverse to here," says Alexander Anichkin, a foreign correspondent who was educated in Moscow and now lives in Britain. "It was the people at the bottom of the class who were taunted and derided. Everyone worked hard so as not to come bottom. I was useless at chemistry but worked all hours so that my friends wouldn’t laugh at me for getting poor results. This attitude was encouraged by the teachers, who held up the clever pupils as examples."

Anichkin believes that political correctness is part of the British problem. "Here everybody bends over backwards to find excuses for the under-achievers. In Russia some people are frequently drunk, but that is not an excuse to under-perform at school. In Britain teachers can be afraid to encourage bright kids openly because it might offend the under-achievers," he says.

Education carries such kudos in Russia that the start of the academic year is a national event. Girls put bows in their hair, boys scrub their faces, photographers take pictures and children walking into school are made to feel special.

"that is a source of capital

that cannot be taken away from you"

Darya Razumikhina, a doctor of philology who has taught in Russia and the West, says: "There is a strong feeling that children are the country’s future and education is the key to that. Teachers are highly respected by society and have their own day when everyone thanks their old teachers or gives them flowers or chocolates. Knowledge is seen as more than exams. It gives you access to society, ease of mobility, and above all, status among your peers.

Konstantin Kedrov, a poet, literary critic and part-time teacher who was once thrown out of the Herzen - Moscow's leading literary institute - for anto-Soviet propaganda, makes the following point: "Education has always been seen as something more than facts and figures. In Russia children understand, suprisingly early, that is a source of capital that cannot be taken away from you. I was at school in the Fifties and to us gaining an education, acquiring knowledge, was almost an act of rebellion. It meant access to higher cultural and spiritual values that took you away from daily Soviet values - it was an escape from behind the Iron Curtain even while you still lived behind it. It was something that no whim of the system could take away from you."

"Interestingly, the same attitude prevails today. After the rouble crashed in August 1998 I noticed a renewed interest in education among the students. They saw the fortunes that people had amassed were wiped out and realised that education is ‘capital’ that cannot be wiped out by a stock exchange crash"

The success of education in Russia extends to attitudes outside the classroom. ‘There has always been a great respect for intellectuals, unlike in Britain where they are often dismissed as ‘the chattering classes’," says Anichkin. "Even the Communists, who were frightened of them, set intellectuals up with dachas and tended to leave them alone as long as they didn’t overstep the mark. People noticed this. It is a great insult, in Russian, to be described as nekulturny (uncultured).

"No one, whatever their social status, wants to be seen as uncultured. As a result even your plumber or your taxi driver will be able to quote a few verses of Pushkin"

- first published by Miranda Ingram - The Times 10/11/99 (London.)