As part of a push to get more Russian business leaders involved in education, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down with some of the nation’s most gifted students for a televised chat about the value of life, love and learning.
They gathered at Sirius, an education center Putin established in Sochi after the 2014 Winter Olympics with backing from multiple billionaires.
Promoted by the Kremlin as a model for grooming talent, Sirius runs 600 exceptional students per month through intensive courses in everything from physics and coding to chess and ballet.
Illustration: Mountain people
“The more intelligent and educated people are, the less aggressive they are,” Putin, a self-confessed street thug in his youth, said to the children in July last year.
Putin’s own aggression on the world stage has become an unexpected catalyst for an investment boom in Russian education. As US and European leaders continue to work to isolate Russia over alleged meddling in US elections and the conflict in Ukraine, a growing number of tycoons are pulling their children out of Western schools and putting money into private projects that aid Putin’s attempts to reverse a decline in national academic rankings.
Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine a month after the Sochi Olympics, more than 30 billionaires and senior executives with investments abroad have founded or helped fund projects to nurture students at home.
The outlays coincide with a halving in the number of new Russian enrollments at boarding schools in Britain, long the educational destination of choice for the nation’s elite, to 608 last year, British Independent Schools Council data showed.
Herman Gref, head of state-owned savings bank Sberbank of Russia, opened a school called Horoshkola with his wife, Yana, in Moscow in September last year, joining billionaire Suleyman Kerimov’s Zarechenskaya Shkola and transport tycoon Nikita Mishin’s Novaya Shkola.
However, none of the 135 private schools that have popped up since 2014 can compare with Ros Agro founder Vadim Moshkovich’s US$200 million Letovo project, which includes a state-of-the-art facility on the edge of Moscow that opens this fall.
Moshkovich, who sent his two eldest children to Stanford University, said that what makes his school unique, apart from the price tag, is that rich people like himself cannot buy a child’s way in. Even his youngest son will not be admitted unless he passes the blindly graded entrance exam like everyone else, he said.
“I’m not building a school for children of officials or sanctioned businessmen or oligarchs from Rublyovka,” Moshkovich said in an interview, referring to one of Moscow’s poshest districts. “Education is the key driver in the modern world and I want Russia to be competitive. This is for soul and country.”
The first nation in space has fallen behind relative newcomers in math and science, mainly from Asia. A top-six finisher in the precollege International Mathematical Olympiad every year until 2015, Russia tumbled to a worst-ever 11th last year, behind upstarts such as Vietnam, Iran and Thailand. On a broader level, Russia is middling, ranking 32nd out of the 72 countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment exam of 15-year-olds, far behind Estonia, a fellow former Soviet republic.
The World Bank in November last year said low government spending on education and health in Russia “may jeopardize both economic growth and the well-being of the population.”
Russia spends about 3.6 percent of economic output on each category, compared with 4.9 percent and 7.2 percent respectively in the EU, the Washington-based lender said.
Retooling the educational system after communism’s failure remains a work in progress.
Critics like Moshkovich, who got his graduate degree from the then-Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation, have said low morale and chronic underfunding — even the best teachers can earn less than US$250 per month — are just parts of the problem.
They have said state primary and secondary schools still rely too much on memorization and standardized testing, and do not do enough to encourage critical and creative thinking.
Moshkovich, 50, who made his fortune in sugar and pork, retired from the Russian Federal Council in 2014 to focus on education. He hopes the methods he is developing at Letovo will stimulate reforms nationwide.
His school is to offer students both a Russian diploma and a certificate from International Baccalaureate, a Swiss nonprofit with a curriculum it says “prepares students to succeed in a world where facts and fiction merge in the news.”
Letovo is modeled on the best international institutions in the world, with an expert council staffed by recruits from schools that understand the importance of atmosphere in learning like Winchester College in the UK, Montgomery Bell in the US and Raffles in Singapore, Moshkovich said.
His US$80 million campus includes dormitories, tennis courts, a soccer field, a running track, a stream and an artificial lake rimmed by pine forest. The other US$120 million is set aside in an endowment, most of which is already deposited in Sberbank and earning interest.
Tuition is to cost about US$20,000 per year, half of what a comparable British school charges, but parents who cannot afford the full amount will be eligible for grants on a sliding scale.
“There’s no other project like it in Russia,” said Valentin Shchukin, the founder of Albion, a company in Moscow that has been helping Russians place their children in British schools for 24 years.
Letovo might be a game changer not only for his industry, but for the Russian system as a whole, Shchukin said, adding that everyone who is interested in education is watching very closely, because its success might spur more investment, giving parents even more domestic schooling options.
Letovo is already taking applications for Sept. 1, when it is to welcome 170 students in grades seven to nine.
Once fully operational in 2020, Moshkovich said 1,100 students in grades seven to 11 would be receiving instruction from 160 of the best educators money can buy, including 60 foreigners.
“I’ve already fulfilled my ambitions in business, I won’t be able to spend the money I’ve earned,” the billionaire said. “My goal now is to provide Russian children with a world-class education.”
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