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The American Individual vs. The Russian Collective

By squeakyrobot

It was emphasized from the beginning that the Russian approach to academia is startlingly different from the American approach. If we decided to study in Russia, they preached, it’d be the source of a great and thorough culture shock.

I’ve found that yes, it’s different, but the Russian way is nothing a student can’t get used to.

I’ll frame the idea like this: the American and Russian styles mimic the respective societal traditions of individualism and collectivism. An individualist society (America, Western Europe) operates in a way that propels the individual to behave and think independently, like a mini autonomy. Contrarily, the fabric of collectivist society is in the group, in co-dependence of individual members who work towards one common goal (pretty much everywhere else in the world, Russia included).

The supremacy of the individual leads to an academic environment of competition. Students are expected to work hard and earn good marks via independent thought and honest means (cheating and plagiarism are probably the most horrific events of academia), and they’re all taught that competition is healthy. I'd say it’s healthy until it gets serious: the medical students of the University of Chicago have been known to rip pages out of library books to give themselves an edge.

So it’s from the individualist approach that I come to Russia, a changing but still very much collective society. The Russians value friendship more than anything else. If you cheat during an exam in America, you’re on your own. If you cheat during an exam in Russia, it would taboo for your friends not to help you. If you, for some reason, decided not to help a friend out, you would subsequently be made the outcast, the loser; the competitive individual mindset simply doesn’t exist in Russia.

And then there’s the teaching style. In American schools and universities, it’s generally agreed upon that an open dialogue between teachers and students is conducive to a thriving academic environment. At university level especially, relationships between students and teachers are often casual to the point where students sometimes refer to their professors by their first name.

This would never happen in Russia, and I’m not ready to try it out to see what would happen.  The dynamic is much more formal: teachers have degrees and credentials, which entitles them to the last and final say. They could be spewing the most erroneous information, but protest from a student would prove futile. Because they’re the teacher and you’re the students and you simply must submit to their knowledge and experience and pieces of paper. I know this has been a point of contention with some American students after they were asked to discuss some aspect of the US, their hometowns specifically, only to be negated by their Russian professor, a man who has never stepped on American soil.

Personally, the whole thing hasn’t been difficult to adjust to.  It helps to be extremely culturally relative, knowing that cultures aren’t inherently better or worse but simply different. If Americans claim the Russian style is worse, I like to remind them that they're in Russia, so it really doesn't matter what they think.