Does not serve, but implements. How officials changed the role of the school teacher

Mikhail Pavlovets, philologist

A colleague caught the news: “The State Duma approved the exclusion from the law of the concept of “educational service”. Instead, the term “implementation of an educational program” will be used. The justification for this decision by the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Control, Dmitry Gusev, is also interesting:

"The teacher does not serve the student, he is engaged in the formation of personality, he teaches the child who came to his school. And these are completely different things. You can not humiliate the prestige of the teaching profession".

Here, of course, it is interesting, double confusion - the legal concept of "service" with the commonly used one ("Action that brings help, benefit to another" - "friendly service", but also: "positive harm"), and then mixing it with the concept "service staff", "service personnel", "serve" ("you cannot equate the work of a teacher with the level of a sales worker" - here Gusev already belittles the role of a sales worker, but at the same time: "a child comes to the teacher at school" - and not vice versa , "the teacher comes to the student at school", which is also one-sided, of course, but it well shows the nature of the relationship between the two parties).

Actually, a typical case for our country: first, from the premodern understanding of the profession of a teacher as a "service" (akin to the professions of a priest, doctor or soldier), they immediately jumped into a postmodern bright future, where education is the interaction of two subjects - a teacher and his student, one of which is voluntary helps another. But then they were afraid of this assertion of subjectivity and rolled back to the modern understanding of education as an impersonal "program implementation process": only the "program" that is "implemented" has subjectivity here - but who? to whom? But, I quote, “such concepts as “the amount of financial support for the implementation of the educational program” and “the amount of financial support for the implementation of the state (municipal) assignment” are introduced” - and the word “task” brings back the main thing: the subjectivity of the authorities that have fallen out of the relationship “teacher - student" in the "educational service" model.