Surgeon, one of the founders of the center for the rehabilitation of orphans Herman Pyatov discusses whether orphanage graduates need a higher education
“Tyoma, you were given a loaf of bread for sandwiches for 6 people. You divided the bread evenly. A loaf costs 12 USD. How much is the bread that each of you has eaten?”
Tyoma is 16 years old, he finished the 8th grade.
We — me, Tyoma, and five other pupils from one of the provincial orphanages — are sitting at the dinner table in our rehabilitation center for orphans. Teenagers came home from work, cooked dinner, ate, and now I “torture” them, forcing them to calculate the estimate of what was eaten. This is part of the social adaptation program. For the kids, this is the hardest part. We bring children for 2-3 weeks, arrange a job in one of the state-owned Moscow companies. In the rehabilitation center where they live, there are no nannies and cooks — our wards cook their own food, do housework. But nothing scares them more than having to strain their brains to figure out the cost of a salad or scrambled eggs.
For me, Tyoma’s inability to answer a simple question about the cost of bread is quite expected. For 5 years now, we have been bringing to our rehabilitation center children from orphanages of final and pre-graduation classes, and we take the best, but all of them equally cannot solve arithmetic problems for the 3rd grade.
With the Russian language — the same problems. Most orphanage graduates cannot compose even a short text without grammatical and spelling errors.
But this does not bother anyone — orphans have benefits for entering universities. They go out of competition, the main thing is that there is an exam. Since the time of the USSR, a false stereotype has prevailed — higher education is a cure for all social diseases. However, this “medicine” does not work with orphans. Even having enrolled on benefits, in most cases, orphans are not able to overcome the program of the university. Half are expelled, those who graduated rarely work in their specialty. A highly qualified plumber, tiler, electrician earns as much in a day as a teacher in the outback earns in a month.
There are a huge number of highly demanded, highly paid professions, which do not require either a high IQ or deep knowledge of mathematics, physics and the Russian language. But with maniacal persistence we will try to shove orphans into universities, and import plumbers from Central Asia.