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Preschool education marks the most important developmental stage, one
that paves the way for worldview formation and for the encoding of notions
and actions with the help of words and phrases. There are two major types of
preschool learning. One is about home-based education, usually provided by
parents and grandparents, with the older family members serving in this case
as the main transmitter of culture for the young.
The other type is applicable to cases when both parents work outside home. A
prominent role in children’s early education is then played by nursery schools and
kindergartens. Starting from two or three years of age, kids whose parents work
fulltime have to spend most of the day with preschool teachers and caregivers.
The next stage is primary and secondary education. In that period, children
tend to spend less time with their teachers, so it would be only natural to expect
a resurge in parental influence. In reality, though, the role of parents shrinks
further because, on the one hand, child-teacher contacts gain in intensity, with
the teacher becoming a major transmitter of knowledge, while on the other
hand, the child’s inner circle expands and so, too, does the range of his/her
information sources.
Then comes tertiary education (vocational schools, colleges, and universities).
It is widely believed that by the time they pass on to this phase, most teenagers
will have almost reached adult maturity. So the role of tertiary education
establishments in personality molding is, more often than not, negligible.
A community’s status quo cannot be preserved unless a community member
gives birth to and raises a child. For simple demographic reproduction, one
woman (family) should give birth to 2.4 children (given infertility incidence,
infant mortality, etc.). In smaller language communities these days, there are
quite a few parents who believe that teaching the native language to their
children is no longer relevant and may even be harmful, so they choose to
concentrate on a national language instead. Because of this trend, a native
speaker population in small language communities will take an increasingly
high birth rate to reproduce itself.
Looking at the modern-day Yakutia, we can see that preschool education here
is rarely provided in the language of its indigenous inhabitants. The same is true
of any other non-Russian ethnic region or community in Russia. So children
who spend much of the day in a nursery-school environment are just bound to
grow up without knowing their mother tongue.
The second developmental phase (through high school) further consolidates
the alienation from their mother tongue of children from smaller language
communities (in most of the country’s non-Russian ethnic regions, schools
providing education in native languages are few and far between or virtually
non-existent). This process is exacerbated by a lack of native-language content
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