Philologist: "Process of liquidation of Russian language departments in universities has reached terrifying scale"

In the Catherine’s Hall of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin held a meeting of the Presidential Council on the Russian Language, which discussed the implementation of the federal law “On the State Language of the Russian Federation”, support and popularization of the Russian language and literature abroad. During the check-in, Lyudmila Koltsova, doctor of philological sciences, head of the Russian language department of Voronezh State University, spoke about the failure of the bachelor's and master's system in training philologists, about the feasibility of returning a specialty, and about the problem of insufficient allocation of budget places at the philological faculty.

According to her, the process of liquidation of the departments of the Russian language has acquired truly threatening proportions: "This process is close to completion, that is, the elimination of classical philological education, at least in regional universities of the country ... For 2018-2019 and 2020, the admission figure is Master's program at Voronezh State University - the leading university of the Central Chernozem Region - has six budget places, while a group of masters in certain areas cannot be less than 12 people. are such decisions reduced? The recruitment to the philological faculties of classical universities, which have always been distinguished by their depth, fundamentality, breadth of education, is reduced, and the philological faculties of universities trained those teachers who were called upon to train teachers. "

“Now, professional centers of excellence are being created as part of the national Education project. And who will increase this professional skill is also unclear. I think that many representatives of the scientific and pedagogical community will agree with me that the dead word“ competence ”will which is based on our federal state educational standards, and the abbreviated creepy word "GEF", which changes endlessly, and it is not clear why these are standards? We worked according to standard 2, then according to standard 2+, then according to standard at 3, then on the standard 3 +. We now turn to the standard 3 ++. And what will happen next? 4, I guess.

This leapfrog with standards in which the main word is "competence", from which in Russian, as from a dead word, a verb is not formed, but only OK, PC, DIC and all these other obscure abbreviations are formed, behind which the most void is hidden the real one. And this concept replaced knowledge, skills, because a person should know, be able to and get used to working, and not compete - there is no such word in Russian. And as the ancients said: change the name of the thing, and it will change its essence, "said Koltsova.

“I also agree with most of the scientific and pedagogical community that the transition to a two-stage education system - undergraduate and graduate - is an unreasonable decision for pedagogical specialties, because as a result of an incomplete four-year education, we get under-education. And school principals do not want to take school of these under-educated people.

And with the magistracy, I already said what our state of affairs is. And not only that, in the magistracy, to recruit to the amount that makes it possible to create a group, we recruit people who do not have basic education. Physicists come to us, mathematicians come to us, come to us after military schools. They really want to study philology as a direction, but they have absolutely no knowledge of either terminology or basic knowledge.

Therefore, the return of the specialty to university education and the specialty that we once had — a philologist, a teacher of Russian language and literature — is an urgent need. Otherwise, there will be no one to fulfill the two most important tasks that you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, have outlined - this is to provide a decent level of knowledge, literacy and effective support for the Russian educational environment abroad. Only Moscow and St. Petersburg universities will not be able to accomplish these tasks by the number of their graduates, because philology in the regions, classical philology, literally needs to be saved, "the philologist noted.

“We have even reached such a state that not just in schools there are not enough teachers of the Russian language and literature and they work one and a half, two times, with exorbitant workload, but we can no longer find teachers of the Russian language at universities. The number is increasing foreigners, and we literally do not have teachers who could teach these foreign students at a fairly high level of the Russian language.

... I, the daughter of the teacher and the mother of the teacher, would like to end the speech with the words of an artistic character, a teacher, from Mikhail Tarkovsky’s wonderful story “The Flight of the Owl”: “I am a Russian teacher! I want our children to stay in our villages, villages and cities and "they loved their land! And so that the main thing for them was not a minute penniless success, which is endlessly talked about in today's schools, but the need to serve their land. That's just what knowledge is needed for!" And this knowledge gives man