In schools across Russia’s Krasnodar region, high school students are being taught a course called “Moral Foundations of Family Life” as part of extracurricular “Family Studies” classes. According to a report by iStories, teachers encourage teenagers to build families according to the 16th-century Domostroy model: the man as head of the household, and the woman as a “helper” and “keeper of the home.”
One section of the course is titled “Female Emancipation as Rebellion Against God.” Girls are effectively discouraged from pursuing careers, while gender equality is described as a Western concept allegedly contradicting “women’s nature.” The authors of the course also claim that successful women supposedly “scare off potential husbands.”
The curriculum also includes the concept of “telegony” — a pseudoscientific theory claiming that children can inherit genes from their mother’s previous sexual partners. Cohabitation before marriage is described as fornication, hormonal contraception is equated with abortion, and abortions themselves are portrayed as murder and a threat to the state.
The textbook “Moral Foundations of Family Life” was written by Archpriest Dmitry Moiseyev and nun Nina Krygina. During one seminar for educators, Moiseyev stated that society is “living among the ruins of family life” and that modern high school students “have no understanding of what a family should be.” According to him, the goal of the course is to teach students a “harmonious family structure, preferably with many children.”
❗️Project «NeNorma» identified at least 20 publications in its Archive documenting such lessons being held in educational institutions during the last school year. In these classes, teachers and priests instruct teenagers on how to build relationships properly, why large families are important, and why modern youth are allegedly experiencing a “spiritual crisis.”
“In our time, without spiritual education it is difficult to protect children from mistakes. Already during the first lessons, the students met with a priest and discussed the importance of family, respect for elders, support, and helping others,” — one parent committee representative said after a meeting between students and clergy.
Another major emphasis of the classes is self-sacrifice in relationships. In one lesson, students were told that “only by sacrificing one’s own interests for another person can someone become truly happy.” In another school, a priest explaining marriage to children drew a diagram on the board distinguishing infatuation from love, claiming that “there is no such thing as a marriage based on love,” and that love means self-sacrifice.
The course “Moral Foundations of Family Life” has been incorporated into the elective subject “Family Studies,” which began pilot implementation in 42 Russian regions in 2024. In the future, Russia’s Ministry of Education plans to introduce the subject in schools nationwide.
