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.

First, educating a child for 11 years is significantly more expensive than educating one for nine. Since the state needs money for the war, there is no point in wasting it.

Second, a young person who completes 11th grade may perhaps have read more books and may even have grasped that the Earth is a sphere that revolves around the Sun. But they still cannot actually do anything, which means they will spend another five years drifting around a university — possibly even on a state-funded place. That’s more money spent........

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