At the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, a presidential aide held up a freshly printed social studies textbook for ninth-graders. Vladimir Medinsky declared the previous edition “unsuccessful”; the new one, he said, was better, edited by Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council. Irina Yarovaya, deputy speaker of the Duma, told the audience she had read it “with great professional interest and human pleasure.” The volume, examined by reporters, contains five sections, including “Russia on the Path to the Future,” and paragraphs devoted to traditional values, criticism of Western elites, and the concepts of disinformation and fake news.

The textbook is the centrepiece of a sweeping reform that cuts social studies teaching from 136 hours to 68, beginning only in ninth grade, while history hours expand by 40 per cent. A mandatory oral history exam will be introduced for ninth-graders by 2028, and the unified state exam in social studies will be altered in two years’ time. Russian officials describe the changes as building a “sovereign education system” and a “worldview turn” in students’ minds, a response to what they call Western challenges. Teachers have voiced concern that the compressed course may leave pupils underprepared for the popular elective exam. In parallel, the government announced that Arabic language instruction will be permitted in schools from September 2026, with a standardised exam possible by 2033, a move driven both by business ties with the Gulf and, according to officials, by a desire to counter extremist propaganda through state-supervised teaching.

Elsewhere, the machinery of examinations is being recalibrated for different reasons. In the United Arab Emirates, end-of-year electronic tests for grades five to twelve began on Wednesday, with the education ministry urging parents to provide calm homes and warning that teachers who facilitate cheating will face disciplinary action. In Bangladesh, half-yearly and pre-selection exams were abruptly rescheduled from late June to early July due to what the secondary education directorate called “unavoidable reasons.” In Iran, Shahid Beheshti University postponed its end-of-semester exams by two weeks, citing a national funeral for a “mujahid leader of the Islamic Revolution” and a scheduling clash with the national master’s entrance test. In Brazil, the Ministry of Education released school-by-school performance data from the 2025 Enem exam, allowing families to search results by neighbourhood and compare public and private institutions.

Viewed together, these adjustments reveal how states are using the exam hall and the textbook as instruments of priority-setting. Russia’s new social studies primer explicitly encodes a patriotic, anti-Western narrative; the UAE’s electronic exams emphasise technical control and parental partnership; Iran’s postponement subordinates the academic calendar to national ritual; Bangladesh’s date shift hints at the administrative fragility of mass testing; and Brazil’s data release turns exam results into a tool of public accountability. In a Dubai classroom, a student clicks through a digital test; in a Moscow school, a teacher will soon open a textbook chapter on “information war”; and in Tehran, a university exam hall sits empty for an extra fortnight, waiting for a nation to bury its dead.