A true patriot must defend the homeland by every possible means.” How the teaching of life safety has changed in Russian schools

“A true patriot must defend the homeland by every possible means.” How the teaching of life safety has changed in Russian schools

The school subject OBZh has been replaced by OBZR — fundamentals of safety and defense of the homeland. The discipline appeared in the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its main task, according to the curriculum, is to prepare children for military service.

At the same time, teachers have to come up with lesson plans based on their own ideas and old textbooks, Vyorstka found out — the Ministry of Education still has not published a textbook for this subject. And schools and district administrations, despite tight budgets, are looking for money to equip classrooms to the new standards.

A teacher named Guzel from Tatarstan complains in a teachers’ community that equipping her classroom, “with desks from Soviet times,” with “goggles and drones,” as required by the new standards, costs 500,000 rubles — the school does not have that kind of money. But she tells a Vyorstka journalist that a teacher who “loves their homeland” will cope with teaching the subject.

“Of course, there is now more basic military training and medicine, which is very good in my view. The children really like it when there is a lot of hands-on work in class,” another OBZR teacher, Yevgenia from Samara, tells a Vyorstka journalist.

Read about what changed in Russian schools after OBZh was replaced by OBZR in the investigation by Vyorstka and the project “Not Normal” (with VPN):

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