A bilingual privately owned pre-school in Russia’s Zelenogorsk, Krasnoyarsk region, has taken down UK flags following a complaint from a student’s mother. They were put up 5 months earlier as part of a cultural and educational programme entitled Travelling around Countries, NGS24 reports.
Photo: Elena Penzina
Kristina Gasanova, the mother of a student, filed the complaint. According to her, children should not be shown symbols of an “unfriendly country”.
“The initiative of picking the country in the Travelling around Countries event was strange to say the least. Moreover, the symbols, attributes, and everything else linked to the country supporting murders of our boys, to put it mildly, has been everywhere for five months and as an identifier of lockers next to the kids’ pictures. Any reasonable person will at least ask questions about the moral side of it,” she wrote.
Member of regional parliament Elena Penzina also spoke against the British flags.
“I can draw this example: what do you think would happen to the head of the pre-school if in 1941-1945 a portrait of Hitler was hanging in the group as part of getting to know Germany, and kids had swastikas on their lockers? The answer is clear, isn’t it? But today no one is taking you to detention centres or sending you to Solovki [prison camp] without the right to correspondence. You are just asked to take down the symbols!” she wrote.
After several months of arguments with the pre-school administration, Zelenogorsk Mayor Mikhail Speransky interfered in the situation. He summoned the administration for a meeting to discuss “approaches to education”.
“The basis of any educational process always consists of several components: patriotism, love for our Motherland, respect for historic origins and for values that kids absorb with their mother’s milk, as they say,” he wrote after the meeting.
Many parents supported the pre-school administration online.
