Worried parents and a changing education economy are fueling an ‘unschooling’ boom in Russia’s northern capital

Private education is booming in St. Petersburg, thanks to changing attitudes about mental health and parental concerns about a dumbed-down curriculum, overcrowded classrooms, and patriotic brainwashing. Since the pandemic forced millions of families to manage their children’s education at home, a growing supply of “economy class” informal schools has also made tailored lessons affordable for many. Journalists at the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga spoke to the creators of “Simply Learn,” a project that catalogs the city’s private schools for interested parents. Meduza summarizes what Bumaga learned.

The Moscow City Pedagogical University estimates that parents pulled roughly 54,000 students from public schools during the 2021–2022 academic year. Experts told the newspaper Kommersant that another 93,000 pupils transitioned to a part-time or remote learning format, visiting their registered public school only irregularly for certain lessons or tests. These changes raised Russia’s part-time student population fivefold, and the “unschooling” trend has continued even after the coronavirus pandemic.

Marina Ragozina and Natalia Korol, the founders of the Simply Learn project, told Bumaga that parents in St. Petersburg now have multiple options for educating their children outside public schools. For example, parents can hire tutors or move their kids to “family schools” — a growing industry of (typically unlicensed) remote or home-based education programs organized horizontally to unite families engaged in self-education. Homeschooling is even possible without technically unenrolling a child from public school, whether by informal agreement with the child’s school teacher or through “external studies” programs where the student remains registered with a state school.

According to St. Petersburg officials, 1.2 percent of the city’s children are homeschooled, and another 2.06 percent are formally enrolled in private schools. However, Ragozina and Korol say these figures are underestimates because the authorities don’t count the hundreds of unlicensed organizations in the city. The Simply Learn catalog lists 301 of these groups, and Ragozina and Korol say it’s still incomplete.

Most of what you find in Simply Learn’s catalog are “family schools” — an increasingly popular “budget-friendly” option that costs parents around 30,000 rubles ($300) per child per month, which is roughly half the average expense of formal private schooling. 

Bumaga writes that the quality and pedagogical philosophy of family schools vary widely. Some parents celebrate this approach’s flexibility in terms of curriculum and sensitivity to individual students’ needs. The growing attraction of “psychotherapy” has made St. Petersburg parents more attentive to their children’s comfort levels, learning styles, and cognitive needs. Also, government-mandated patriotic lesson plans have worried some that their kids will be brainwashed in public schools.

Teachers and tutors at family schools told Bumaga that working at public institutions has become too encumbered by bureaucracy, especially the “digitization” of excessive progress reports. 

At the same time, concerns linger that family schools aren’t preparing students for the standardized tests Russia uses for university admissions. Additionally, despite common objections to the government’s new patriotic-themed lesson plans, most parents say these propaganda exercises are more a waste of precious classroom time than a serious danger to the children’s minds. 

Years ago, in the 2017–2018 academic year, more than half the first graders who transitioned to family schooling returned to public schools the following year. More recently, some parents told Bumaga that they simply lacked the time and money to manage outside the state school system, even with the growing budget-friendly options. For mothers and fathers with the necessary resources, family schools remain attractive. Some parents have stuck with unschooling albeit reluctantly, telling Bumaga that they would have spent the tuition money on tutors anyway if they’d reenrolled their children in public school.