Universities were allowed not to reduce tuition fees for online-education

According to TASS , citing the responses of the Russian government to parliamentary bills on the regulation of distance education and e-learning, the Cabinet did not support the proposal of the Communist Party faction deputy Oleg Lebedev to ban the use of distance learning technologies, e-learning in educational programs of primary general and basic general education. He proposed to prohibit the introduction of "distance learning" in elementary schools and to conduct experiments to test new educational technologies on young children.

“As noted in the response of the Cabinet of Ministers, the ban on the use of distance technologies in education will lead to an 'unjustified restriction' of the rights of students to freedom of choice of technologies for programs that are enshrined in federal law,” the news agency reports.

The second bill was submitted to the State Duma by a group of deputies from the LDPR faction. The document assumed a reduction in the cost of training if, for two working weeks in a row, education in universities is conducted exclusively through e-learning. This concerned, among other things, emergencies, as well as cases associated with the introduction of covid restrictions.

However, the Cabinet of Ministers said that according to the law, "educational organizations are free to define educational technologies for the educational programs they implement". These include both distance technology and e-learning.

Meanwhile, a protest movement against distance learning is growing among parents of schoolchildren. Many of his parents consider distance education "the final elimination of national education".

Professor Vera Arguna (Ivanovo) and Chairman of the International Union of Parents "Together" Irina Zhiltsova (Penza) sent to Novye Izvestia a story full of important details about the All-Russian interdisciplinary scientific and practical conference with international participation on the topic "Digital education: progress or degradation?" and they advise everyone who is not indifferent to what is happening today in the field of education in Russia to familiarize themselves with these results.

“The conference was attended by doctors and candidates of sciences, practicing teachers, educators, psychologists, sociologists, doctors, lawyers, civil activists and representatives of parental communities from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Penza, Ivanov, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Samara, Saransk, Kostroma, Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Belgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Balashov, as well as from Germany and Austria . The event was organized by the educational committee of the National Union of the Renaissance of Russia, the International Union of Parents "TOGETHER", the Independent Research Center (SIC).

The conference participants stated that in Russia there is a long-term destruction of universal mass quality education. Over the past decades, in fact, equal access to full-fledged education of all strata of the population has been lost, universal mass education is being replaced by caste education.

The final nail in the coffin of the education system will be the introduction of a digital learning environment (DSP), which is part of the national project "Education".

Digital learning developers do not hide the fact that traditional supervised learning is costly. Apparently, only those strata of the population who can pay for it will be able to study at school with a teacher.

Opinion polls have shown a negative attitude of parents towards the implementation of DSP. Since the beginning of 2021, the Independent Research Center (SIC), together with activist parents, conducted a survey of parents in 16 regions, covering 20 cities in the country.

More than 90% of survey participants in each city do not agree to entrust their child to artificial intelligence and those who control this AI; advocate for the preservation of traditional schooling with other children; do not agree to a learning experiment in DSP.

From 80% to 95% of respondents believe that such radical changes in education should be the subject of a PUBLIC discussion.

Parents insist on the creation of Working Groups in their regions together with departments and ministries of education to discuss the need to introduce DSP, since all responsibility, as participants in the experiment, rests with the parents as well.