Inside the state school.

In a few hours the lovely visitors will head back to Bishkek, but today I took advantage of their presence to visit the local state school.  As you can see it looks very pleasant if very Soviet era, but everything is actually Kyrgys.  Education in the country has changed in rather complicated ways since the end of the Soviet era.  The country wants understandably to reinforce its identity and language, but quality education especially at University level still tends to be in Russian.  So Kygys speakers can find themselves at a disadvantage if they do not know Russian.  Apparently the area where I live used to fairly recently have a Russian name and a fairly large Russian population but now most of these families have left and the area is predominantly ethnic Kyrgyz.  The picture shows my colleague and his friend going over the Kyrgyz alphabet. The state school has about 350 children from primary to secondary school age.  Each room is used for a specific topic and has pictures of inspirational people from the field, I for example recognised James Cook and Marco Polo in the Geography room. But there was very little work up by the children and in the primary school the flooring was very rickety and the playground very basic. The children at our school pay because they want their children to have English and Russia and IT skills, but finding the fees can be quite a challenge for some. Apparently most rural schools in the country struggle to find teachers.