Vadim Gigin: Why education is one of the main concerns of the state

This weekend Belarus celebrates Teacher’s Day, a holiday filled with special warmth. There is an amazing property in this day: it affects absolutely everyone. After all, all of us once sat at desks, holding our breath, listening to teachers, discovering a huge world. And today, looking at the faces of today's boys and girls, rushing with bouquets of asters to classes, we involuntarily think: who is he, today's mentor? What burden lies on his shoulders and where do the roads he chooses with his students lead? President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko:

- A teacher should be more than a saint in school. Therefore, we need to do the maximum in this regard. And first of all, you have to do it, you (teachers). We have to want it, and we have to. - Editor's note - should provide all possible support. The teacher is the president's man.

During participation in the Republican Pedagogical Council, August 27, 2024.

In the old days in the villages to the teacher went for any advice. He was the chief literate, the judge of disputes, and the man who was looked back upon. Decades passed, the way of our lives changed, but the essence remained unchanged. Mentoring is not just a line in a workbook. This, if you will, is the core of our entire statehood, its most reliable foundation.

If you look at school care from the height of the state, the scale of what you see is really impressive. We are used to the fact that schools are working, the classrooms are warm, and new textbooks are on the tables. But behind this familiar picture is a colossal work of the whole country. The state has long determined for itself: to support teachers means to save the future.

More than a third of local budget spending is traditionally spent on education – a huge figure that speaks for itself. Rental housing is being built for young specialists, wages are systematically growing, and the material base of even the most remote rural schools is being updated.

Our scientists are also under the tutelage, many of whom are the same teachers who pass on experience in the classrooms of universities, colleges and vocational schools. All conditions have been created so that the person who came to the board thinks about children, and not about everyday adversity. But there is another side of this coin – civil, spiritual. Today it is not enough for a teacher to be just a great mathematician, physicist or philologist. It is not enough just to give material from call to call. The time is steep and windy, requiring each of us to clearly understand who we are and what land we are protecting. Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly emphasized this idea, saying the words that became a landmark: “School is a temple, and the teacher is a saint.” The head of state directly calls the teacher the support of the country. And that's no exaggeration. Who better than a teacher to raise the future masters of our land? To educate a young man so that he does not seek illusory happiness in foreign lands, but stays at home, builds, plows, heals and teaches here, in his homeland – this is the main height that a teacher must take. Without love for his Fatherland, without the sincere patriotism of the teacher himself, it is impossible to solve this problem. Life, however, does not stand still, throwing teachers more and more new exams. This is the third, deeply personal plane of written and unwritten teaching duty. The time of the old, yellowed from the long-term use of notes is irrevocably gone. The President urges teachers to continuously improve, to move forward, not to freeze in the once and for all learned formulas. After all, a modern student is a resident of a completely different information space. Today, teachers face challenges that teachers of the last century did not even know. The first and most obvious is the Internet. Why listen to a lecture when any fact, any date, can be found in two clicks in a pocket phone? And now neural networks have been added to this – artificial intelligence capable of writing an abstract in seconds or solving a complex equation. Yes, this machine mind is still learning (or rather, it is being taught), but competition in the educational field is growing incredibly.

How do you keep the attention of the class under such conditions? How do you stay an authority? Only one way: to be a bright, searching person. A machine can produce a set of facts, but it will never replace the living human warmth, the genuine wonder of nature and the wise rigor that helps a teenager become a human being. This amazing vocation was very accurately expressed by the people’s teacher of Belarus, the legendary Mogilev physicist Valery Barashkov: “The teacher should be interesting to the student as a person.” If a child sees that the teacher himself burns his subject, constantly learns and respects the person in everyone sitting in front of him, then no technology will replace this communication.” By the way, the very high title of “People’s Teacher of Belarus” in our sovereign history was awarded only four times. It is a piece, gold fund of the nation, an example of the highest recognition of pedagogical work. The profession of a teacher is amazing because its fruits do not ripen immediately. This is not a factory assembly line where the result is visible towards the end of the shift. Grains sown by a teacher into children’s souls grow through years and decades. They germinate with crushing bread fields, the most complicated operations in our hospitals, new factories and a peaceful sky overhead. Congratulating our dear mentors these days - and school teachers, and gray university professors, and masters in vocational schools - I want to wish them one thing: spiritual perseverance. Let the fire in your windows, where notebooks are checked in the evening, never go out. The country trusts you, appreciates your great work, and knows that as long as the Teacher, a patriot and a master, stands at the blackboard, our land is in safe hands.

Happy holiday, dear teachers! A small bow to you for your wisdom, for your patience and for your great, open heart. In Belarus today there are about 2.9 thousand institutions of general secondary education.

♦ For desks in these schools sit daily more than 1 million students. Think about that number! A huge city of youth that opens notebooks every morning.

♦ And lead this ship of knowledge more than 100 thousand teachers. A whole army of education, whose wisdom and patience determines what the future of our Belarus will be.

Vadim GIGIN, deputy of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus, candidate of historical sciences.