Perfect Scapegoat

THE PERFECT SCAPEGOAT

By Stephen Wilson

  

   During the return of the Academic year in Russia school teachers seem to have been targeted by a vocal moral minority of parents who are venting their negative emotions on teachers for irrelevant forms of conduct which would hardly strike most people as 'immoral'. A climate of fear is being conducted which some say amounts to a witch-hunt.

 

 

All evening a tense school teacher named Aleksei had been preparing for the return to school on the 1st September. After all this preparation he plunged into a deep sleep. Unfortunately he did not hear his alarm clock go off. He slept in. So he missed the first lesson he was due to teach. He was punished by being deprived of his work as a class manager. Another teacher was fired from her job for posting a statement on a social site saying she dreaded the beginning of the New Academic year, a teacher was fired for posting a photo on a social site where she was dressed in a swimming costume, and a headmistress was fired because one of her first year pupils came to school with green hair. A school teacher even lost her job for blowing her nose among her pupils!

 

But perhaps the most prominent case occurred at school number 76 at Khaborouskoi where on the 1st of September, a young school teacher performed an innocuous dance called 'The Dance of Wings' { a kind of belly dance} which was viewed as 'obscene'! The twenty-two-year old teacher, Yulia Marchenko, was forced to apologize after a wave of anger from parents. She stated, "I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings but I had no intention of doing this". She had to apologize before parents and children at school. The result of this scandal was that the headmistress, Tanya Strokova, who had worked as a brilliant math teacher for 28 years, decided to resign from her post. However her resignation has not been accepted until the local management make an inspection! Yet most people saw nothing obscene about the young teacher's dance or the costume she was wearing. 

It seems a school teacher can never be too careful. They have to watch their every word and  be careful what photo or statement they post on a social network. Walls have ears and your never know who could be watching you or overhearing you. Fear has replaced the fun in the classroom! Fewer people can take a simple joke or tell a harmless anecdote.

 

What is odd about this situation is not only why those complaints are taken seriously at all, but why the teacher accused of 'immoral ' activity' is forced or put under duress to make a public confession. The confession itself seems designed to humiliate and deprive the teacher of dignity. It is comparable to putting someone on a cutty stool or pillory  in a public square where the public can walk by and jeer at them. Why is this all being done? Perhaps vested interests seek to contain and control teachers so they don't step out of line. The best way to do this is to foster an atmosphere of fear. But this is going to back fire. A new generation of young people are unlikely to take that much pressure from people. When a teacher was fired for wearing a swimming costume some fellow teachers started to post photos of themselves wearing swimming costumes in solidarity with the dismissed teacher. A flash-mob arose in opposition called 'Teachers are also human'.

 

How does this self righteous moral police distinguish between good and evil? Do they have some x-ray machine which can tell what percentage of a person is good or bad? Is it evil to wear a swimming costume or short skirt? Is it a disgrace to do a belly dance or dye your hair green? As if the morals of a person are mirrored in the color of his or her hair! They evidently express the narrow morals of a reformed alcoholic! 

The chairman of the union Teacher Vsevolod Lukhovitskii made an interesting statement in an interview with the newspaper Novaya Gazeta when he stated:

"Parents tend to be different. The life of parents is hard. When they come across the opportunity to vent their anger they will do this with joy. The more the better on teachers- as she or he represents an ideal target. The question is why don't the school head and management of Education acknowledge this? It is most likely because they are afraid. Now the education system is organized in such away that the main feeling in this is fear. Everyone is afraid of everything. They are afraid they will have to leave because of something. And a school head will do anything in order that people don't blame her or him for anything. It is clear that the teacher did not want to do anything bad. It is clear that there is nothing bad in belly dancing and that there was no real thought connected to this dance. But the school head considers this complaint all the same. She can't justify it because the management of Education always uses it to their advantage to compromise teachers {Kompromat in Russian but really just an abusive form of blackmailing a teacher}. It is pleasant for the parents now to hear independently about what they have been speaking about and the result is the management chooses the most stupid course of action: making an apology for something that never happened. The head also feels alone, unlucky, and understands that at any moment she can be removed. If this teacher had received support from her colleagues then the outcome would have happened differently'. 

In other words, teachers need to strongly support each other as well as draw on the support of sympathetic parts of the public. Without being a member of a trade union which can fight for them, teachers are like sitting ducks. And things can only get worse and escalate into a full scale witch hunt unless teachers resolutely resist.  

 

Acknowledged source - Read the brilliant article by Irina Lukranova  in Novaya Gazeta, number 99, 6.9.21,

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