On 15–16 March, the university representatives had a meeting with the administration of St Basil the Great Gymnasium (Moscow) and the private institution of general education the “School of the Future” in the White Hall of VSU.
Oleg Kozaderov, Vice-Rector for Research, Innovations, and Digitising at VSU, noted the positive experience of cooperation between the parties, starting with the idea of the “School of the Future”, which emerged at the university in 2017. The project expanded with the opening of the first class of the Russian Classical School in Voronezh in 2020 and its preschool branch, a kindergarten, in 2021. The founder of the “School of the Future” Oksana Guskova also attended the meeting and noted the university’s great contribution to the development of the project. Dmitry Zhukalin, Head of the Department of Innovations and Enterprise Management, emphasised that the university is of strategic importance for the region due to the implementation of such child-focused projects.
The networking cooperation between VSU and St Basil the Great Gymnasium is supported by the Federal Innovation Platform programme. Elena Khavchenko, Director of the gymnasium and Head of the All-Russian Expert Group of the Russian Classical Schools, proposed to enhance the scientific cooperation between the university and the gymnasium in terms of implementation of classical national teaching methods. She invited scientists from the Faculty of Philosophy and Psychology of VSU to cooperate more closely.
“Anthropological research into the impact of classical national teaching methods on the development of children and adolescents will be very valuable from a scientific point of view,” noted Elena Havchenko.
Elena Ivashinenko, Director of the “School of the Future”, highlighted the value of such research for the school and the university and indicated that the school may serve as a platform for the research and the practical testing of its results. The heads of the Russian Classical Schools from Tambov and Lipetsk also came to learn from the experience of cooperation between the schools and the university.
