Julia Seeleva from Tomsk and Nadya Sporysheva from Moskau worked on this contribution. Julia describes how the Chernobyl issue is represented in Russian classes. She also gives some examples from different school books, where Chernobyl is mentioned. Nadya presents a History school book and an ecological textbook.
Julia Seeleva:
When I studied in high school and university I rarely met information about Chernobyl. If you open history textbook or physic or ecological or something else you can see only whole and a little bit information. I don’t want to say about physics books because it is not my interest and I’ve never interested in this knowledge. I would talk about history.
When I start work on this task I understand the meaning of educational aspect/ when I learned I didn’t know anything about Chernobyl, may be year and then now Chernobyl is Ukraine city. And my sister and brother know not so much.
In our educational process the main thing is not level and quality of knowledge but is volume.
So when you open schoolbook you never see separate paragraph about Chernobyl. I read ten history schoolbooks and in whole it is little information. Content of this report is that on 26th of April 1986 was happened disaster on Chernobyl NPP. Information about Chernobyl is rarely situated in paragraph about economic and social reform in USSR. For Example: one schoolbook said “The rate on the enthusiasm, not supported necessary technique and qualification of workers, has led not to acceleration, and to considerable growth of failures in various branches of the national economy. Accidents became and the largest of them was -Chernobyl atomic power station in April, 1986”.
Another side of problem is that this period (beginning 80-s) called in Russia “perestroika” (re-build). And disaster was failure of Gorbachev’s politics of government. The policy stood on class of workers and their enthusiasm. But catastrophe deleted all this and they didn’t trust to government.
In one of the schoolbook I found more information.
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