Clifford J. Levy describes his family’s experiment in extreme schooling — in Russia:
But the fantasy of creating bilingual prodigies immediately collided with reality. My children — Danya (fifth grade), Arden (third grade) and Emmett (kindergarten) — were among the first foreigners to attend Novaya Gumanitarnaya Shkola, the New Humanitarian School. All instruction was in Russian. No translators, no hand-holding.
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When we started searching for schools, we assumed that a large public one in Moscow would be too daunting. Julie stumbled upon the Web site of New Humanitarian, a private school with 150 or so pupils and small classes. It promised an enlightened and innovative interpretation of the classic Soviet education — all the rigor, without the suffocating conformity. Moscow progressives! Maybe the transition wouldn’t be too rocky.We were, of course, naïve. New Humanitarian, which runs kindergarten through high school, was still rooted in Russia’s educational and societal traditions. Students recite by heart from Pushkin’s “Yevgeny Onegin” (“My uncle was a man of virtue. . . .”) and tackle algebra as early as fourth grade. Children older than 9 are regularly rated, based on test scores. Student rankings are posted on a central wall for all to gawk at, like the latest sports stats.
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When Bogin was growing up in the Soviet era, the party used schools to mold loyal Communists. Teachers wove propaganda through the lessons and enforced memorization like drill sergeants. Bogin detested it. “I didn’t want to be a slave,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be a person who is ordered and must obey the orders without any thinking. I didn’t consider myself to be a person who repeats texts without any criticism or thinking or any alternatives.”Just as political dissidents fought the Soviet regime, so, too, did others oppose the educational system. Bogin was one of them. After studying English in college and serving in the army, he decided to become the kind of teacher he craved as a child. At a school in the Moscow suburbs in the late 1980s, he challenged pupils to challenge him — and everyone else. It was the height of perestroika under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Soon after Communism’s fall, Bogin opened New Humanitarian, one of the first private schools in Russia, in a cramped building that had been a nursery school for children of workers at a military factory. New Humanitarian remains there, and Bogin’s inability to renovate the building or find a bigger one reflects to some extent the establishment’s ambivalence toward his brilliance as an educational provocateur. (While the school is private, it is still heavily regulated by the government.)
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As things settled, we were discovering that New Humanitarian was a pretty remarkable place. Bogin set up a system of what he called curators, two or three teachers whose job was to oversee the 10 to 15 children in each grade. Curators generally do not conduct lessons but observe classes, identify problems and take children to meals and activities. Everyone ate breakfast, lunch and snacks in the cafeteria, where comfort food, from borscht to blinis to cinnamon rolls, was served by doting cooks. My kids gobbled it up, and Emmett stopped wielding a fork and knife like a caveman. Many children, including ours, stayed at school until 6 p.m., doing homework with curators. This was a godsend for us, because we had difficulty helping with assignments.New Humanitarian had standard subjects, like history and math, and Danya had many hours of homework a week. But Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages. He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational. To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three.
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Bogin had another innovation: classes were videotaped. This was not a vestige of Soviet surveillance. Rather, he wanted to critique how teachers interacted with — and nurtured relations between — children. Bogin and his staff often worked late into the night, reviewing footage and discussing methodology.Life at New Humanitarian was full of academic Olympiads, poetry-reciting contests and quiz bowls. The school stressed oral exams, even in math, where children had to solve an equation at the blackboard and explain methodology. Children were graded and ranked, with results posted. We were not accustomed to this: in Brooklyn, the school instilled an everyone’s-a-winner ethos. At New Humanitarian, Danya says, “they send an entirely different message to the kids: ‘Learning is hard, but you have to do it. You have to get good grades.’ ”
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New Humanitarian cost about $10,000 a child our first year. We could afford it — like many companies that send workers abroad, The Times paid tuition. Yet for Muscovites, the school was a strange breed. It was too expensive for most but not appealing to the rich, who often preferred compliant teachers and lavish facilities. With its warped floors and narrow hallways, New Humanitarian looked like an old annex to a public school in Queens.The school attracted upper-middle-class parents who were impressed with Bogin. In my children’s grades, the parents were lawyers, professors, bankers, architects, publishers, restaurateurs and a cosmetics manufacturer. They drove nice cars, lived in apartments that had been privatized in the post-Soviet era and vacationed in Western Europe.
I looked upon them as Russian versions of the parents who populate the Upper West Side, TriBeCa or Park Slope. Moscow has some strong public schools, but the system as a whole is dispiriting, in part because it is being corroded by the corruption that is a post-Soviet scourge. Parents often pay bribes to get their children admitted at better public schools. There are additional payoffs for good grades.
The parents at New Humanitarian exhibited one stark difference from their counterparts in New York: they were apolitical and often fatalistic about their nation’s future. Like many Russians in the Putin era, they turned inward, shunning public life and focusing on the personal. To do otherwise was risky. You can criticize the government in private as much as you want — K.G.B. snoops no longer lurk. But anything more than that and you might be fired or lose a contract or get a visit from the police. That anxiety is always there.