Students at the small Moscow State Education College were recently handed a questionnaire with six simple, increasingly bizarre questions. The first question simply asked individuals to identify themselves as a grade schooler, a college student, or a teacher. The next question was a bit more personal: “What’s your ethnicity?” And then: “How do you feel about persons of other ethnicities?”
Things started to go off the rails a bit with the fourth question: “How do you feel about the Jews who live in Moscow?” The final two questions were even stranger: “How willing are you to talk to them [Moscow’s Jews]?” and most shockingly “Are Jews involved in the nation’s current crisis?”
When news of these questions leaked to the public, those expecting to find a vicious anti-Semite behind the quiz were soon surprised to discover that the teacher responsible is Jewish herself. According to college administrators, she designed the questionnaire as part of her class curriculum in ecological studies, where one of the research focuses is ethnography. The teacher decided to put her own ethnicity at the center of a classroom exercise, distributing the questions to a room of 16-year-olds.
The college’s vice principal says the school is holding a faculty meeting today to discuss how to reprimand the instructor for the inappropriate questionnaire, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported on Monday.
There is no word about how the students actually answered the questions.
Translated into English, this is the full text of the controversial quiz:
1) Who are you?
A. grade schooler
B. college student
C. instructor
2) What’s your ethnicity?
3) What feelings do you experience toward people of other
ethnicities?
A. respect
B. dislike
C. indifference
4) How do you feel about the Jews who live in Moscow?
A. respect
B. dislike
C. indifference
5) How willing are you to interact with these people?
A. conversation during the process of my education
B. friendly relations
C. dear friends
D. I’m ready for life-long ties
E. I don’t want to talk to them
6) Are Jews involved in the nation’s current crisis?
A. yes
B. no
C. don’t know
