Optimization murder
It so happened that when I say "optimization" I immediately have an almost subconscious question: what else are they going to take away from people? And, I must say, I have never been mistaken, to my horror. "OPTIMIZATION" is the same disease of the brain of our state as liberalism is a disease of the brain of the "creative intelligentsia."
With the liberalism of the intelligentsia, everything is clear - this is a manic-painful desire "to allow everything to everyone" and to "forbid to forbid", marvelously combined with a reluctance to admit that the majority of the country's population thinks: "Everyone is allowed everything" only in a madhouse, and even then after taking precautions … But what about optimization? The word is something positive, with the same root with "optimism" … But, it turns out, deceiving.
In short: by officials' optimization we mean certain actions that will allow the state to spend less on some business, but at the same time continue to pretend that the business is being done … uffff, difficult, right? But this is difficult for you and me, but for the state everything is very clear. We have optimized "unprofitable" airfields by reducing their number in the country by seven times. Optimized unique military academies. Optimized leading universities and experimental agricultural plots that had no analogues in the world. Optimized weather stations. Optimized reserves …
By the way. The wildest result of all the "optimizations" of the last twenty years is that the money saved (or rather, the money torn from the body of the country with meat) was siphoned off into the purchase of green cut paper called the "dollar", and large territories of Russia were simply depopulated. How is this connected, you ask?
Well. I will answer.
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It has been noted for a long time: if a school is closed in a village, then this village will quietly die over the next few years. Over the past five years, the number of rural schools in Russia has decreased by 37%.
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The decline in the rural population is a common problem in Russia. And, of course, it would be absurd to take and accuse, for example, the regional authorities of the Kirsanovschina in a certain malice, the extermination of the Russian village. And in general, one can ask the question: are not cause and effect mixed up here? Perhaps it is not the village that is dying after the school closes, but the decline in the population of the village - especially children! - leads to the fact that the school becomes "unprofitable"?
Why, the “optimization”, “filialization” and other lisation of rural schools is not just a regional one, it’s not even a regional problem, but rather an all-Russian problem that appeared simultaneously with the overseas epidemic of yellow buses, which should comfortably transport schoolchildren from distant places in well-equipped large "basic" schools, but in fact they steal from each child from an hour to three hours a day.
Here is another fact that raises doubts. Can education be “cost-effective” in purely financial terms at all?
Not. No, again no and no! The school, in principle, by definition, does not and cannot bring instant income - unless it is a private college for the children of millionaires, and even then it is unlikely. If you start looking for ways to save money on schools, then such savings will come back to haunt not very quickly, but deadly. And the saved millions or even billions may well go to the gravestone of the whole state, carried away by the idea of "optimization".
The path itself - seeking financial gain in education, whatever that benefit may be - is vicious and dangerous.
I have already named the first "ay". More precisely - as many as two. This is the destruction of the village - the one who constantly leaves it from childhood, does not feel any attachment to it, will not return there for good, becoming an adult - and devouring children's time on endless tiring trips. But that's not all, alas.
A catastrophic drop in the level of education in the country - and it is precisely catastrophic, otherwise it cannot be determined! - hits rural children especially hard. Just, again, because they spend a lot of time traveling on the one hand, and on the other, it is very difficult to teach a child something, who has a constant thought in his head (often against the background of lack of sleep) that he still has to get home 20-40 kilometers. Of course, this is not the main reason that modern schoolchildren, in terms of their level of knowledge, fall short of schoolchildren of the same age as a kindergartener to a ninth grader. The main reason is that our education in general has become a field for experiments by some maniacs - otherwise you cannot say who managed to turn the best students in the world into a semi-literate (this is not an exaggeration) and superstitious rabble, who have no idea of discipline (which meansnot able to achieve anything in life). The main reason is that they have not yet abandoned the Unified State Exam and have not been put on trial - not just condemnation, but just the court! - all those who developed and pushed this killer idea and continue to defend it to this day, contrary to the obvious.
But, I repeat, for rural children this is aggravated by the isolation from their small homeland and the endless waste of time. Hence the insulting, completely untrue story about the "stupidity" of children from the village.
The stratum of teachers as bearers of culture and authority disappeared in the countryside. Of course, this is connected, again, not only with the closure of schools. Teachers (they should not be called teachers, these are precisely historically very precisely designated teachers - slaves who serve the owners "in the field" of observing children) have long become one of the most loyal servants of the authorities. They are so firmly caught in the budgetary grip that they cannot even think about the greatness of their profession, they simply have no time for that - any such thoughts are buried under the rolls of papers and die under economic pressure. Teachers meekly and obediently carry out any initiatives of the authorities - they conduct political surveillance of children, introduce crazy concepts of "tolerance" and "freedom of the child's personality" into the life of schools, engage in risky pedagogical experimentation using "advanced Western methods",they organize mass pro-government events, exert moral and financial pressure on parents, serve as informers in the interests of the guardianship authorities, and inform each other - in a competitive struggle, in the hope of an increase of half a thousand rubles. And the authority of teachers in the eyes of both parents and students is inexpensive. And yet, in every village, it was the school that until recently was the center of holidays, human communication, and the teacher's word weighed a lot in a variety of disputes and even scandals.human communication, and the teacher's word weighed a lot in a wide variety of disputes and even scandals.human communication, and the teacher's word weighed a lot in a wide variety of disputes and even scandals.
Now there is none of this, it is empty and wild in the village without a school.
Living in a village for a child is both safer and simply healthier than in a city, especially a large one. Many parents, in pursuit of some kind of "cultural leisure", literally forcibly shove the child into the metropolis, drag him around the resorts on vacation, write in sections, circles and pools, pay a lot of money for all this, as if under hypnosis, in full confidence that provide their child with "harmonious development" and "safety". At the same time, as a rule, both parents and children live in constant fear of transport, maniacs, robbers, hooligans, etc. etc., moving through life literally by dashes from one protected place to another. Then the same parents drag the same child to a psychologist - to treat a whole complex of phobias (help, I don't even understand where he got it from!) And to develop independence (help,he himself is not capable of doing anything at all!). Naturally, they also "help" them for money. A child in a big city breathes what should not be breathed, eats what cannot be eaten, children in large quantities (we are talking about tens of percent!) Suffer from allergies and obesity - but he has a kind of mythical "space for development."
When I listen to these parents, it seems to me that they are just delusional or under hypnosis. (By the way, this state of affairs is convenient for the authorities. And here the point is not even that parents are paying literally for every movement of their child. Maybe this is too conspiracy theories, but I am sure that pushing people into megacities is aimed at creating, ultimately, easily controlled reservations, inhabited, or rather stuffed, in everything dependent on "specialists." And on the site of the former villages, cottage settlements are increasingly appearing, where children of the rich live like children and should live: among living water, freely growing greenery, under a clear sky, breathing normal air and not shaking over every step …) At the same time, an attempt of ordinary, "non-elite"parents to move with their children to the village immediately arouses keen interest in our ubiquitous "defenders of children's rights." The question immediately follows that “parents artificially lower the child's standard of living,” and this is not always just a hassle - I know of cases when children from such families were taken away.
Children stop understanding the world in which they live. They generally fall out of reality into artificial space. And the "scientists" are either cretins or bastards! - openly rejoice that it turns out that a new environment is being formed, which is incomprehensible and inaccessible to us, backward suckers.
Six years ago in the summer, I was a witness and participant in a story that literally amazed me. My Moscow friends stayed with my 13-year-old son. Early in the morning I went out into the courtyard and found the boy meditating over a bed of cucumbers. He studied the garden so closely that I was also interested and, approaching, asked what was so curious there. It turned out that the boy really liked the beautiful yellow flowers and he wants to know what it is and how to breed them. Honestly, at first I could not even understand what it was about. I did not see any flowers, there were cucumbers in the garden. When it dawned on me what it was about and it dawned on the boy that he was not joking, I even got a little scared. In turn, he did not immediately believe in my explanation that these were cucumbers, only when I found one of the first ovaries and showed him a small cucumber crowned with this very flower. For a Muscovite to see this was a revelation …
No, the fact that they don’t see cows and horses is little things already. Children don't see dogs. "Because getting a dog is a big responsibility!" Perhaps this is the case in the abnormal space of a large city. In the village, however, a dog for a child is not some kind of film-sounding "responsibility", but simply a dog, as it has been for centuries and as it should be. Playmate and yard keeper. Doing something with your own hands for a child from a big city is an unattainable thing. A cut on a finger is a reason for a real hysterical fit, and I'm talking about boys - about boys, and not about kids, and even adults immediately start running around with screams of horror … To older readers this may seem incredible, but I am not just I saw how the cut, which we used to seal with plantain on the go in childhood, now becomes - at the initiative of the child himself!- the reason for a visit to the doctor, where a boy (just a boy!) Asks with sincere fear and without shame: “But I won't die ?! And I won't get blood poisoning ?! " - and other nonsense.
The destruction of the village as the basis of the foundations, as the root system and the symbol of Russia is perhaps the most terrible thing. Meeting guests from all over the world over and over again every summer, I show them our villages in the summer. People before tetanus are amazed at how beautiful places they stand, and how sparsely populated they are. Guests who come from far abroad generally find themselves in shock. One German told me bitterly that we, Russians, do not even understand how rich and free we are, because in Germany, even to enter the forest, you have to pay money, make a fire there - pay a fine, take your son with you - run into to a conflict with the guardianship authorities, to have domestic animals - to get a lawsuit with powerful corporations poisoning people with "approved and certified food products." Wild to watchhow we give up this immeasurable wealth for the sake of fitness centers, pools with chlorine solution and the abundance of shampoo-washed vegetables and fruits with a taste of chemical cardboard.
The village has become a place of total unemployment. More precisely, they made it that way. And this was done ON DEFINITION, precisely so that even those people who want to stay there or would like to move there, would not have the opportunity to do this simply because then they will be faced with a problem: how to live, or rather how to survive? To work only for food, to live exclusively by subsistence farming is the most terrifying sectarianism, and unsafe, and it is for children. I will tell you this right away and for sure - I also have such examples, and all these settlements of cedar-planters-Megroids and other Anastasievites do not contain and do not carry anything good, no matter how much they talk about “closeness to nature”.
Farming is practically impossible, farmers in Russia do not live, but survive, in which only tricks and extremes they do not rush to stay afloat and still drown. Because in the conditions of Russia, a farmer CANNOT start a really profitable farm as long as the WTO exists and the borders are not closed for GMO products. CANNOT, the natural conditions are as follows. Our village and our agriculture are basically the same unprofitable and unprofitable. But the rejection of their massive and constant support is a rejection of the country's food security … In general, from security!
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If someone at the word "village" comes up with a picture of one-story houses that have grown up to the windows into the ground under low roofs along a dusty curved path, then I have to slightly disappoint the skeptics.
I have seen abandoned multi-storey buildings dozens of times, in which there was gas and water. I saw the once wonderful asphalt roads, on which they stopped walking, and they were destroyed by the grass that grew through them. I saw burnt-out school buildings, clubs locked on rusty locks with rickety and peeling bulletin boards, abandoned playgrounds near closed kindergartens, dead water towers and huge empty spaces of machine yards and farms. And all of them were villages. Places where you could live are no less convenient than in the city, and work was close at hand.
Now all this is dead. Killed!
Yes, the outflow of people from the villages began during the Soviet era. I do not know what it was - someone's ill-considered policy or, on the contrary, a completely deliberate sabotage, the creation of an image of the village as a backward, deaf, uncultured place, from where to escape. But the village was not killed at all under the "damned commies". The Russian village was killed, plundered and ruined by the power of the "democrats". Just because it was dangerous for them, and not at all because of its “economic unprofitability”.
The village fed the country. The village tied people to their native land. The village gave children a healthy and free childhood. All this was intolerable to the "Gaidarysh" (may Arkady Petrovich Gaidar forgive me!) And the Chubaysians, all this anti-Russian devilry in power.
Now they are trying to convince me that the destructive processes in the countryside are only "due to inertia." That the authorities have long realized the importance of the village for the state and "turned to face it." That things will get better soon
Perhaps a person living in Moscow will be convinced of this. Maybe he doesn't even have to force himself to do it - to believe. And it is enough for me to walk twenty minutes on foot to see, to put it mildly, the insincerity of these statements. Moreover, small towns and villages, including my dear Kirsanov, are rapidly repeating the fate of villages …
… But this, as they say, is another story.
Oleg Vereshchagin