Recently I was interviewed on STV about a school... this is what was broadcast. The question is quite ambiguous, no one still has ready answers. What exactly the Ministry of Education will do is also at this point the moment is not clear. We can only say unequivocally that the ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury. And let’s hope that our children will be grateful to us for this. News of Belarus. This week, the Minister of Education proposed cutting the school curriculum by a third. Mikhail Zhuravkov believes that the burden of knowledge that children carry behind their shoulders has become too great. Over the past decades, textbooks have been filled with extra paragraphs and complex terminology - you need to leave only the essentials. Sonya is also small (she is five years old), but she already reads like children in the second grade, and knows that the correct name for a violin is “violino”. The girl’s success is the merit of her grandmother, a famous mathematics teacher. This teacher can sort out a geometry textbook for anyone in 16 hours and even help anyone get into medical school at the age of 12. An example of this is her student, the child prodigy Timur Sushko, who became a celebrity in Belarus. Many children can achieve such success. Only for this you need to teach differently. Lyudmila Shabashova, head of the center for accelerated education: What is covered in school in a year can be completed in a month or two. The task here is to reduce the number of lessons by 50 percent, but increase the program by 50 percent. Lyudmila Shabashova took her granddaughter’s education under personal control. This is what educational psychologist Kirill Budkevich did. He will not take his three children to school - he will teach everything himself. Lesha is 7 years old and he understands Japanese hieroglyphs better than the Russian alphabet. Can't read yet. A child finds military strategies on a chess field more interesting than the alphabet. Kirill Budkevich, educational psychologist: So that he does not write for the sake of me or for the sake of his grandparents, but reads because he wants to. I am waiting for his sincere desire, and then we will move on to more serious training. The best teacher for a child is his parent. Kirill Budkevich thinks so and created a movement in Minsk for supporters of alternative homeschooling. Kirill Budkevich: I always ask the most amazing question that no one can answer me. Why are you planning to send your child to school? What should school teach a child? The school must teach the child to read, write and count. Just these three points. The child learns everything else on his own. If Lesha studies at home with her dad, and Sonya and her grandmother complete external classes at the Lyceum at the Conservatory, then most children will study according to the standard curriculum at school. What kind of ideal school is it? And what needs to be done for her to become like this? This week the Minister of Education announced his formula. Here is a brief summary of what he proposes: introduce specialized education in grades 8, 9, 10 and 11, reduce the volume of the school curriculum by a third, develop a new generation basic textbook and relieve teachers of paperwork. It's more like the subtraction and addition example. But what the answer will be to this problem is still a question. Over the past decades, the school curriculum has changed. The increase in complexity began in the 90s and continues to this day. Oleg Zhuk, director of school No. 26 in Minsk: It is difficult to imagine electives for 3rd grade students in the late 80s, where children were introduced to economic knowledge. Today it really is. Modern life has made certain adjustments in this regard. But these people - honored teachers, professors, scientists of the National Institute of Education - develop school programs. They say that lighter options have already been in effect since the beginning of the school year in first, fifth and tenth grades. Within each subject, complex terminology has been eliminated, information has become more compact and accessible, reported in the “Week” program on STV. Vasily Rusetsky, head of the research center of the National Institute of Education, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor: A child at school learns alone, but