The "six-day week" is finishing off schools, or Why are teachers in Russia fleeing the profession?

In early May, Novye Izvestia wrote about the huge shortage of teachers in educational institutions across the country and tried to analyze the reasons for the outflow of personnel. A month later, our editorial office received a letter — a cry from the heart of a teacher from one of the Sverdlovsk schools.

According to her, one of the main problems for teachers is the lack of free time, since most educational institutions work on a six-day schedule. This means that teachers simply do not have time to have a good rest and recuperate before the next work week. And on their only day off, most of them still have to check students' notebooks and fill out reports.

It is quite natural that the current situation leads to rapid fatigue, professional burnout, and often to nervous exhaustion of teachers. And once beloved work begins to be perceived as a hated hard labor, which has the most negative impact on the educational process.

“While ministers report on ‘innovations’ and ‘teacher support’, the reality in Russia looks much more prosaic: the six-day work week is killing off their health and the last of their motivation, but the Kremlin and the Ministry of Education are silently watching as schools are turning into a conveyor belt of burnt-out people,” the author of the letter complains.

The problem of a six-day school week has long been discussed both in teaching staff and in the expert community. Most experts unanimously speak of the ineffectiveness of the "six-day week", since Saturday lessons have turned into an imitation.

Teachers work on "autopilot" and children are unable to absorb information. Despite the quite clear conclusions, the government and legislators are in no hurry to correct the existing harmful practice.

"They tried to introduce the bill, but the Duma leadership did not allow it either. And, despite the fact that everyone is already shouting about this problem, the country's leadership is not just silent, but deliberately hushing it up. If society does not urgently intervene, we will soon have no one left who is capable of teaching children at least basic arithmetic: young people are fleeing schools, and veterans are swallowing blood pressure pills to make it to retirement, which is still being pushed back," the teacher is convinced.

In fact, in this case, we can confidently say that teachers, and students, are faced with a violation of one of the basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution - the right to rest. And this state of affairs nullifies all efforts made to increase the prestige of teachers' work.

"This is how the state is quietly bleeding the system dry, hoping that teachers will continue to toil without compensation or a second day off, while yet another report looks good on TV. I ask you to bring this issue to the public eye before teachers leave their classrooms en masse. If we continue to remain silent, the country will be left with beautiful reports, but without people who can teach, inspire, and simply live without constant pain in the back and heart. We need a five-day week not as a whim, but as an elementary right to breathe," the author concludes.

The way out of this impasse should be to provide opportunities for a full rest for everyone: both teachers and students. This can be done by reducing the bureaucratic burden and revising the structure of teachers' work, which will allow more time to be spent directly on teaching children. Otherwise, the education system will continue to rapidly degrade, and it is at the school desk that the future of any country is created.