South Ossetia: roundtable discusses the law on teenagers

The roundtable held on October 19 considered the idea of the law on the rights and duties of adolescents. It is planned that an entire chapter in it will be on parents and inadmissibility of breaking children's rights.

The discussion was initiated by the Ministry of Education, Science and Youth Policy of South Ossetia; the topic of the roundtable was "Moral education of growing generation".

The participants of the roundtable have noted that adults and pupils should equally respect their rights and duties. According to Zamira Dzhioeva, deputy head of the above ministry, "pupils' behaviour should be on the agenda of every educational institution."

Nikolai Kabisov, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of South Ossetia offered to restrict the stay of minors in the streets late at night hours: "If parents have no idea where their child is at 10 o'clock in the evening, I think, such should be fined; this point should be included into the draft law, if we plan to create it."

Let us note here that this is not the first roundtable on the topic of moral upbringing of the younger generation held in South Ossetia. On October 8 a similar event was organized on the topic "Modern School in the Republic of South Ossetia (RSO): Challenges and Tasks", where school principals stated the excess of limits (guaranteed places), sent from the Russia's Ministry of Education to their RSO colleagues for entrants from South Ossetia to Russian universities.

"There are too many limits, and they corrupt the graduates. We get 200 limits per year for 400 graduates - it's too many. A school graduate should know that his limit should be earned by sweating at lessons, and not relax in confidence that a limit is guaranteed," said the principal of Secondary School No. 6 of Tskhinvali.

Gennady Kokoev, a member of the Parliament of South Ossetia and a teacher at the Economy Department of the South-Ossetian State University, stressed that "limits are good, but, on the other hand, the South-Ossetian State University gets a sort of 'residues', as the best school graduates leave for Russia under the limits."

Also, the roundtable highlighted the shortage of male teachers. "Exclusively women work at schools; this is due to the fact that no man will keep his family for such low salary; therefore, the profession of a teacher is losing its prestige," said the participants of the event.

Rural teachers expressed great concern over the acute shortage of teachers of physics, chemistry and mathematics in rural schools.