Parents of schoolchildren about the education system: reformists and conservatives

The article discusses the new features of the interaction of parents with school emerging in the period of the radical reformation of the education system. It shows a high interest of parents to the education system in Russia, their polarized assessment of the perspectives of the system that can be seen in the opinions of two groups of parents - the reformists and the conservatives. The reformists believe that the system is developing, the conservatives are sure that it is intensively degrading. The reformists claim that the education reform is necessary, they are satisfied with its progress, and the overwhelming majority of them positively assess various aspects of its functioning. The conservatives rarely give a positive assessment of the education system and they negatively assess most of its characteristics. The principal difference between them is that the conservatives make claims to the process of forming a harmonic moral personality of the student, and the reformists are focused on the issues of forming a competitive person in the society of mass consumption. Representatives of both groups rarely agree that it is necessary to make our school maximally close to the education standards of western countries, they believe that Russia should form its own education system that meets the requirements of the time.