Valery Tishkov, "Those who grew up in a monocultural environment have a limited view of Russia"
The question of how history should be taught in schools has tormented experts and teachers since the collapse of the USSR. Now many believe that if the nation is divided in the understanding of its history and does not have common heros or a common approach to WWII, it is doomed to die.
Meanwhile, as suggested by the director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Valery Tishkov, "without a homeland there is no great motherland, because you cannot just love Russia, Red Square, never having seen it and without travelling over it, though it may be possible develop a sense of belonging to Moscow, the capital, or to St. Petersburg, its beauty and museums, without visiting them. But it is better for our students to visit these cities in real life. We once proposed introducing low cost tours so that school students may know our country, know who live in it, what peoples populate it, their cultures and traditions.
According to Tishkov, there is an urgent problem of limited knowledge about our native country. This problem concerns not only school children, the scholar notes. "A man who grew up in a monocultural environment, but still did not travel around the country, has a very limited view of what Russia is. Sometimes I wonder how many people, including well-educated ones, believe that Russia is only what is visible from the Ostankino Tower, and nothing more. Sometimes prominent cultural figures publicly declare that the Middle Ages starts outside Moscow. As if these people have never been to Astrakhan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Yakutsk, or Kazan. Therefore, knowledge of the geography of the country, its history, its past, its literature, is a great thing that keeps the Russian people and Russia in unity."
The scholar also spoke about the problems that arise in the development of new textbooks: "In the textbooks, which will be based on already adopted historical and cultural standards, the whole country just cannot be described. The country is so big, and everyone wants to feel that his own culture and history is represented in the textbook. How to show all the diversity and complexity of the past of our country? This is perhaps the most serious problem. The problem here is not the authenticity. A huge number of historical documents have been put into circulation in the past 20 years. We even called this process the history revolution, although I believe that many more documents are worth publishing. There was also a proposal to write the history of the peoples of Russia. I think the textbook should represent the whole country, all its diversity and all its parts from Novgorod or the Russian North and up to Sakhalin, Kamchatka, Alaska and even Fort Ross, which should be mentioned, as it was a part of our history."
