First day of school in Mongolia: Lesson one, Genghis Khan

In spite of communism’s overall grimness, or perhaps because of it, I find the ex-Soviet world’s children’s culture really endearing. The children’s railroads, for example, or the serious artistry of puppet theater — it all just seemed so wholesome, unsugared and noncommercial.

Fortunately some of that lives on today. A couple of years ago I was lucky to catch the last-day-of-school festivities in an Armenian village, which a friend accurately described as belonging in an Emir Kusturica movie. And today was the first day of school in Mongolia. This is a much bigger deal than it is in the U.S.: Everywhere I went around town today schools had balloon garlands over the doors and children singing songs. Students dress up (even if their school doesn’t have uniforms) and bring flowers to their teachers, and the principal gives speeches.

One Soviet tradition that is making a comeback in Mongolia is school uniforms. While all Soviet schoolchildren wore uniforms, the custom fell out of practice in the 1990s. But it’s being revived today, my translator said, because schools are uncomfortable with the fact that richer students can afford to dress so much better than poorer ones.

This uniform is the same as from the Soviet days:

Of course, it’s not all this gauzy. NewEurasia has a story on the first day of school in Kyrgyzstan and the rising cost of even “free” public education there (and elsewhere in the post-Soviet world). And my own year of teaching at a high school in Bulgaria was memorable primarily for my fantastically intelligent and serious students, but also for the shocking amounts of corruption by teachers, cheating by students and general venality by the administration.

There is one thing about the first day of school in Mongolia of which the Soviets definitely would not approve. They said that Genghis Khan was a reactionary and a nationalist, but he takes first place in modern Mongolian schools: According to an article in the UB Post I picked up today, the first lesson of the school year was on The Secret History of the Mongols, the epic Mongolian history of the rise of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.