The Future of Education

The Old Church Slavonic is the first written language of Slavic
peoples, an artificial erudite construction of a IX cent. created on
translating from Bizantyne Greek the books most important for the
ecclesiastical life of the newly baptized peoples (initially in the
South Balkans, some 100 years after in the Eastern Slavic lands). The
term "Church Slavonic", instead, is used for the variety of forms the
Old Church Slavonic assumed in his diffusion on the whole Slavic
territory and evolution, from the first written documents preserved (X
cent.) until now. It is still used in the Orthodox countries as a
language for the ecclesiastical offices and prayers, aside to the
local Slavic languages.
The final aim of its study is far away from the communication purposes
(neither the ecclesiastical communication uses Church Slavonic as it
was - and in some rare cases is - for Latin or as we can see it on the
much larger scale for the Arabic). That explains why the teaching of
the Old Church Slavonic absorbs very few from the rapid development of
the teaching approaches for the modern languages. The textbooks are
limited to the activities that favour the reading comprehension
skills; some of the textbooks printed in Russia offer also the
exercises on grammar, but none of those printed in Italy do.
In our presentation we will introduce some examples of learning
activities that we have been offered to the students in the last three
years during the Slavic Philology classes at the University of Urbino
(Italy). This classes are attended by the 1 year Barchelor students,
who usually lack the preparation in modern Russian and in classic
languages. That is why the approaches used for the modern languages
are applied on working out the exercises. Differently from the
textbooks that put the learning of the Church Slavonic on the base of
the modern Russian, this activities don't presume any knowledge of
Russian, not even the Cirillic alphabet.