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s2smodern

Of course, the last eighteen months mean a lot of changes for people all over the world. In a special way, the pandemic has affected schools, universities, and other educational institutions. Thus, in March 2020, within five days, the St. Thomas Institute in Moscow had to close its gates to students gathering physically and to shift to online courses. But with the help of devoted co-workers and students who love growing in knowledge, we were able to do this. Until Summer of 2020, we had contact with our students only online. After that, we had another year of only online teaching, but every now and then, students would come and visit the institute building for consultation or in order to use the library.

Finally, on Sept 4, 2021, the St. Thomas Institute started a year of hybrid teaching. It has turned out that more people than before participate in our courses. Still, the number of students in our classrooms is limited, there are about 5-6, while the maximum, according to the restrictions, would be eight. But many people take part online, out of whom some live in Moscow but prefer staying at home for safety reasons, whereas others live in other places. Thus, our course on “Faith and Dialogue”, which takes one year with eight classes each Saturday, has 21 participants, some of whom live hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow.

Every Tuesday evening, we also teach Latin, predominantly online. We started this three years ago and were happy that there were about 30 participants. But we thought this is a one-time occasion, nobody has ever offered this to adults in Russian, so, it is worth repeating only in around five years. Yet, we tried once more, and there were still many students. Now, we started again, and there are now 19 participants. This shows that classical erudition is worth offering, even more so if we look at the results: after learning the language throughout one semester, there was a group of 8-10 students who read Ambrosius of Milan or Descartes together.

Of course, coming together in a classroom is still a very precious part of education, if it is to be more than just sharing information but also an experience of growing together. Yet, the experience of living in different places but learning together is also something precious and important.

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s2smodern