In 2024, the most recent year I could find data for, only 43% of Russian schoolchildren moved from ninth grade into 10th. For modern Russia, this is a historic low of 16-17 year olds in education.
There appears to be a concerted effort aimed at getting children to enroll in vocational colleges, acquire a useful profession early instead of spending another two years studying God knows what.
I remember that back in the U.S.S.R., my mother did not merely get upset when I received a bad grade at school. She was genuinely frightened. She would say: “You’ll end up in vocational school, you won’t get into university. Everything will be lost!”
Such a danger really did exist for young people back then. And now it exists again.
There are many supposedly rational grounds for a state policy aimed at pushing children out of the academic track and into vocational colleges.
