The President thanked the teachers for their work and wished them further success.
The federal stage of the 2018 Teacher of the Year contest started in St Petersburg on September 24. The jury includes winners of the contest from previous years and administration representatives from teacher training universities. The head of the jury is Rector of Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichy.
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Meeting with 2018 Teacher of the Year contest finalists
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon,
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on becoming finalists of the Teacher of the Year contest. The jury will still need to choose the absolute winner, to put it that way, but this is, actually, a matter of opinion of those who will choose.
On the whole, you certainly showed wonderful qualities, both professional and personal ones. My congratulations on your professional success. This is my first point.
Secondly, as they say on such occasions, I congratulate all of our country’s teachers that you represent on Teachers’ Day, which is tomorrow.
Yours is an important and noble profession, an important, noble mission to bring up children, young people, and raise specialists that our country needs. We all know, and you know better than anyone: a person has to be an active citizen. Each teacher shoulders the responsibility for educating citizens; each teacher, whatever he or she does, whatever subject they teach, also does this. This is absolutely obvious. What is the best way to teach? We all know that – a personal example. Therefore, it is a personal challenge for every teacher, for every educator, to model this kind of behaviour.
But this is also a special burden, and it is always a psychological burden. That is probably why, as I said, this is a mission. Not even a profession, but a mission.
You must know that we have been trying to pay as much attention as possible to this public service area, the most important area – education. Starting next year, we are launching another initiative, a new federal programme, Education, with solid federal funding of over 300 billion rubles for three years. We will build more schools, upgrade the existing ones, supply new equipment and, of course, introduce modern teaching methods, which is a major research field in itself.
When I spoke about a personal example, I certainly had in mind one highly important and difficult component of your work: in order to be able to teach children to learn, you yourselves must learn and study continuously. In the modern world, it is a mandatory requirement for a professional in any industry, and absolutely indispensable in education. As we said at the beginning, personal example is the main thing. When children see their teacher constantly in motion, in development, it certainly cannot go unnoticed.
I want to thank you for your work and to wish you further success. Our schools have achievements; it is absolutely obvious. We can see this at international competitions, where our children win more and more medals, take prestigious awards, even first places. This is certainly the result of our teaching community’s work. How else could it be? This is the only reason. These things do not appear out of thin air. Neither do they dissolve into nowhere. The energy of development has its sustainable source – your work.
Please accept my warmest greetings on the upcoming Teacher’s Day.