Carlson’s interview was described as ‘mass propaganda’
Pupils in Russia are watching extracts of President Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson in lessons, according to posts by numerous schools on social media.
Putin began the two-hour interview in February by lecturing Carlson for about half an hour on the history of Russia from the year 862, arguing that Ukraine had no tradition of independent statehood – a notion rejected by Kyiv as false and self-serving.
In posts on Russian social media platform VK, schools described the quiz as an “intellectual game” that helped children understand “the stages of development of the Russian state”, and said it was both entertaining and instructive.
In some cases, it appeared that children as young as six or seven had taken part. A school in Rostov, southern Russia, said pupils in classes one through 11 had watched parts of the interview and then answered questions appropriate to their age.
The Domodedovskaya grammar school posted that children had been tasked after the 11-round quiz with thinking of questions to send to Putin. It said that since it was a nationwide event, “unfortunately not everyone will receive answers from the president, but we’re still hopeful!”
The quiz was first reported by “Ne Norma”, a volunteer association that tracks the ways in which the world view underpinning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is being instilled in Russian children.
Dmitry Tsibiryov, a spokesperson for the project, said it was no surprise that the Carlson interview was being shown to children, given the “mass propaganda coverage” it had generated in state media.
It was not clear which clips had been used in the quiz.
Carlson was criticised and ridiculed after the interview for failing to push the Kremlin leader hard enough, and even Putin said he would have liked tougher questions.
The multiple-choice quiz questions were designed to reinforce points that Putin had made. Children were expected, for example, to know that the word “Ukrainian” in the 13th century could denote a border guard or someone who lived in the borderlands, but not an inhabitant of a country called Ukraine.
Tsibiryov said the quiz was just one example of a wider transformation of the curriculum since the start of the war, including the introduction of special lessons called “Important Conversations” that were often devoted to patriotic themes. Such lessons sometimes took the form of visits to schools by soldiers and veterans.
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/tucker-carlson-putin-russian-school-b2516539.html