'Children are raised by the Internet and the street”: Tatarstan prosecutor proposes to limit the use of the Network in schools

“Teachers have distanced themselves from educational and preventive work and shifted all responsibility to parents," the head of the Prosecutor's Office of Tatarstan, Ildus Nafikov, said at the final board meeting of the department on 8 February. He began his report with a reminder of the shooting at Kazan Gymnasium No. 175 and a proposal to work out a mechanism for restricting the Internet in schools, the journalist of Realnoe Vremya reports from the spot.

Nafikov noted that this tragedy highlighted a number of problems in the field of protection of the rights of minors and the organisation of their upbringing. In his opinion, the pressure of rating methods for evaluating the work of schools results in that the work with children concentrates either on the most talented or on the “difficult”, and most of them are simply not covered and left to themselves.

The prosecutor believes that children feel this injustice and react accordingly. The problem is aggravated even within the same school when dividing classes into simple and elite.

Parents don't have enough time and energy for their children either.

“As a result, children are brought up by the Internet and the street. This situation needs to be reversed. To do this, it is necessary to dramatically increase the role and status of the teacher," stressed the head of the supervisory authority and recalled the not yet forgotten times when the teacher was an authority and mentor but “now they just retell the school curriculum and are afraid to once again raise their voice to a disordered student”.

Ildus Nafikov also mentioned the problem of accessibility of education. He stressed that more schools are being built in Tatarstan than anywhere else in the country, if Moscow and St. Petersburg are not taken into account. However, the construction site does not keep up with demographic processes, and there is no adequate forecast of the development of the situation in dynamics. “As a result, a number of schools are overcrowded, while others are half-empty. It is necessary to calculate the need for educational infrastructure already at the planning stage of residential development," the speaker noted.

Concluding the topic of problem education, Nafikov demanded to put things in order with the family format of education. In his opinion, this format often negatively affects the quality of knowledge and social skills of the child, and therefore should be used only in exceptional cases — for medical reasons.

The Prosecutor of the Republic of Tatarstan stressed that the lack of control over students at home creates the ground for negative consequences. He reminded the story of a 13-year-old teenager from Almetyevsk, who killed his mother and went to a special boarding school. During the investigation, it was revealed that the child did not go to school, there was a falsification of the results of his certification in elementary school. “Prosecutors, take the sphere of family education under strict control!” demanded Nafikov.

Besides, the head of the department set the task of working out restrictions on the use of the Internet in schools. Noting that at present, entire segments of the virtual web are criminal trading platforms and hotbeds of extremism, fakes and traps for citizens.