Summary

Summary

This volume examines Soviet schools of the 1940s – 80s in a broad comparative context, in order to highlight both their specifically Soviet properties, as well as those features conditioned by general social processes at work in parallel in the “first” and “second” worlds – on both sides of the “Iron Curtain.” Our preliminary hypothesis was that the strong points of late Soviet education, strange though it may seem, resulted from its hidden diversity. The diversification of education was gradual, not openly declared and not subject to public discussion. It reached its zenith toward the end of the 1980s.

The 1950s – 60s saw the privatization of the state utopian vision of the man and the society of the future: the state ceased to be perceived as an absolute monopolist and the only such body that could be trusted with this kind of work. Despite the widespread belief in all-encompassing state control over all areas of Soviet society, many of the educational initiatives investigated in this volume existed, as it were, in the shadow of the Party and bureaucratic apparatus, sometimes taking on a quasi-legal “partisan” character. In the USSR and “second-world” countries, educational experiments represented one of the few available opportunities for social action, which allowed for the formation of “uniquely designed” models of the future. Some of the educational and social models created in the USSR and second-world countries during the Cold War have maintained their creative potential to the present day.

On the whole, we can trace two conflicting, competing trends in 1950s – 80s Soviet school policy: a movement toward diversity and a tendency to unification (the latter was expressed in dogged attempts to create a single scale for evaluating educational activity, identical for all teachers and educational institutions). The striving toward ideologically motivated uniformity continues to exert a negative influence on educational policy in Russia today, while diversification represents a potentially fruitful experiment that should be taken into account and studied further.

For first– and second-world countries alike, the 1950s – 60s were a time when, after a hiatus of three decades, utopian projects began to be produced once again with wild enthusiasm. This coincidence was precipitated by the crisis of modern societies and their transition toward a new postindustrial state. This volume correlates some of these projects, undertaken in various countries, with the methods and forms of their partial realization. These utopias constitute the legacy not only of Russia and other post-Soviet states, but of European educational culture overall.

From the school to the child

Maria Mayofis (Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow), “Foretokens of the ‘Thaw’ in late Stalinist Soviet school policy”

This chapter demonstrates how the pedagogical and administrative concept of the “individual approach” took shape and, with great difficulty, forged its way in the USSR; this approach remotely but not accidentally resembles the theory of “child-oriented pedagogy” developed by educational specialists in the US. The changes in school policy initiated by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1944 – 1949 are investigated here for the first time. Under the influence of the Stalin-era totalitarian educational policy and the social consequences of the Second World War, the USSR faced an acute crisis of its educational system. Given the severe deficit of resources and the impossibility of shortening school programs for the improvement of the quality of school education, the ministry had only one option: to encourage as much as possible those teachers who seriously studied each child and sought to understand him/her.

This study shows that the rather less than successful efforts to reform schools in the late 1940s brought fruit only toward the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s; in even longer view, they led to the emergence of a broad-based innovative pedagogical movement in the 1970s – 80s. The results of the study allow us to question the customary periodicization of the history of Soviet pedagogy and educational policy, which has been based on the overall political periodicization, wherein Stalinism is followed by the “Thaw.”

Maria Cristina Galmarini (James Madison University, Virginia, USA), “Morally Defective, Delinquent, or Psychically Sick?: Child Behavioral Deviations and Soviet Disciplinary Practices (1935 – 1957)”

This chapter explores how, in the years between 1935 and 1957, a pathologizing but also rehabilitative and integrating understanding of behaviorally anomalous children existed side by side with criminalizing, punitive, carcerial, and violent methods of correction. The author argues that defectological – i.e. medico-pedagogical – ideas and practices were sustained by a group of child psychiatrists who used the construct of trauma to represent misbehaving children as suffering victims of the war, deserving help in state-run care facilities rather than punishment in labor colonies for minors. Although mostly articulated in specialized journals and in the advocacy of a few committed activists, this counter-discourse nonetheless heralded the emergence, under Khrushchev, of child-centered pedagogies and more humane institutional approaches to “difficult” children.

Ilya Kukulin (National Research University – Higher School of Economics; Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow), “ ‘Training the will’ in Soviet psychology and children’s literature of the late 1940s-early 1950s”

This chapter focuses on the pedagogical and psychological context of a story by the Soviet children’s writer Vitali Gubarev, “The kingdom of crooked mirrors” (1951) – a fantastical adventure story that remains popular to this day in Russia. Until 1951, Gubarev was known as the author of propagandistic texts, and his turn to the fantastical seems unexpected. Kukulin shows that in his story, Gubarev attempted to use literature to illustrate the ideological campaign unfolding in Soviet pedagogy and psychology in the late 1940s. This campaign was devoted to “training the will.” Works published by contemporary psychologists assumed that school-age children would start to train themselves, and would with the help of will-power become model citizens of the Soviet state. The demand that children behave like literary protagonists was declared to be the primary pedagogical tool in this effort.

However, training the will required autonomous personalities and psychological reflection; both of these psychological practices were undesirable in the USSR. In these circumstances, the image of the “child studying its own personality” was carried over from practical pedagogical discussions into children’s literature. But in literature, too, the attempt to flesh this out led unexpectedly to the erosion of socialist realism: in order to show reflection in a form that children could grasp, Gubarev made use of the tradition – very far from sotsrealism – of play with doubles, in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Thus, the hidden crisis of didactic thought in the late 1940s-early 1950s aided in the development of new aesthetic principles in children’s literature.

The social contexts of educational reforms

Piotr Safronov (National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “The polytechnic idea in national school policy: preparations for the 1958 reforms and the crisis of egalitarian ideology”

Using archives from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and the Communist Party Central Committee apparatus, Safronov investigates the development of school policy in the 1950s USSR. He demonstrates that the discussions around the polytechnic school, which grew more prominent during this period, were one of the manifestations of a deepening crisis of the egalitarian foundations of Soviet social politics. The consolidation of social inequality through the differentiated formation of educational trajectories on the part of representatives of various social groups provoked, in turn, the fragmentation of the educational system. This chapter methodically reconstructs the stages of this process over the course of one decade.

Jana Ba?evi? (Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark), “Vocationalizing unrest: education, conflict, and class reproduction in Socialist Yugoslavia”

Using discourse analysis, Ba?evi? examines the causes, course of implementation and results of the reform of Yugoslavia’s educational system in the 1970s. The incorporation of universal professional training in middle and high schools is seen as evidence for the profound contradictions in the societal structure of the socialist state. These contradictions were first and foremost connected with the role of educational institutions in the intensification of inequality between representatives of various social and professional groups. The discovery and concealment of this equality in the process of political struggle is revealed through materials from Yugoslav periodicals, Party documents and archival data.

Maria Mayofis, Ilya Kukulin, “Mathematics schools in the USSR: the genesis of an institution and a typology of utopias”

This chapter analyzes the social, scientific and institutional premises behind the emergence of a system of schools and boarding schools for mathematically gifted children in the USSR. This system was created in 1961 – 63, regardless the very strong egalitarian tendency in Soviet educational policy and public opinion: to create schools for children with remarkable intellectual talents (rather than musical or ballet-related) was considered a manifestation of “dangerous” elitism. Classes in the mathematics schools were taught by the top mathematicians and physicists of the USSR.

Mayofis and Kukulin show that a unique combination of historical conditions contributed to the emergence of mathematics schools: the special character of the development of Russian mathematics in the 20^th century; the successful work of mathematics study-groups and Olympiads for schoolchildren organized in the mid – 1930s; Soviet leaders’ acknowledgement of the significance of mathematics for the success of the USSR in its military-technological rivalry with the US during the Cold War; the rapid development of cybernetics and computer technology in the 1950s USSR; and the 1958 reforms of Soviet school education. Mathematics schools became the center of an infrastructure for the support, development and intercommunication of mathematically gifted children and their teachers. Although it has seen some changes, this infrastructure continues to function to this day.

Reinterpreting collectivism

Alexander Dmitriev (National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “A word from the heart and the ‘republican level’: Soviet and Ukrainian contexts for the work of Vasili Sukhomlinsky”

Dmitriev investigates the basic motifs in the work of the well-known Ukrainian educational specialist Vasili Sukhomlinsky (1918 – 1970) in the ideological contexts (from literary to political) of the Ukrainian “Thaw,” analyzing the specific features of Sukhomlinsky’s approach to education and the reasons for his popularity in the late Soviet period. Toward the late 1970s, Sukhomlinsky’s views began to be perceived as an alternative to official pedagogy and the canonized legacy of Anton Makarenko (many of whose positions Sukhomlinsky openly declared to be authoritarian and essentially Stalinist). The polemics around Sukhomlinsky’s ideas – which began during his lifetime, in the late 1960s, and involved Boris Likhachev, Simon Soloveichik and others – turned the Ukrainian educational specialist into an augur of the “pedagogy of cooperation” of the perestroika period.

Daria Dimke (European University at St. Petersburg; Center for Independent Social Research and Education, Irkutsk, Russia), “Young communards, or the Children’s crusade: between declared utopia and real utopia”

Soviet social space had one astonishing quality: while the utopian ideology concealed entirely “earthbound,” often essentially cynical social practices, the world bound by these social practices remained open to the possibility of a utopian project coming to fruition. Dimke examines one case of a realized utopia: the Commune of Young Frunzenists, organized in Leningrad in 1959.

As a rule, realized utopias in Soviet conditions usually ended in conflict. The semiotic structure of this conflict is extraordinarily important, since it helps us to see the specific features of both the world of Soviet life in general, and these realized utopias in particular. The breaking points reveal the essence of the social order and allow us to distinguish the clusters of meanings and practices that bind it together. This article focuses on one of these breaking points, which also sheds light on particulars of Soviet schools and the specific features of the behavior of schoolchildren who in one way or another came into contact with utopian communities. Using the metaphor of diglossia, Dimke looks at Soviet social reality as a world in which everyone ceased to be surprised by the functional non-correspondence and even contradiction between words as a part of public ritual and acts in everyday personal life: for the majority of Soviet citizens, these phenomena belonged to separate planes, which co-existed without intersecting. This metaphor helps both to describe the specific features of 1960s – 70s Soviet social reality and to explain the particulars of the conflict between utopian communities and Soviet society as a whole.

Eszter Neumann (King’s College, London), Melinda Kovai (K?roli G?sp?r University of Reformed Church, Budapest), “The Memory of a Summer Vacation: Jewish Identity Strategies and Elite Socialization in State Socialist Hungary”

Based on a qualitative research project, this chapter explores the collective memory of a private summer resort in State-Socialist Hungary. The authors argue that the biographical narratives of the participants convey a more general message about the social functions of informal social enclaves and the elite socialization processes in State-Socialist Hungary. The analysis specifically explores the connotations of Jewishness in State-Socialist Hungary and the identity construction strategies of Jewish generations raised after the Holocaust, and also discusses the participants’ reflections about the cultural and social position of their families in the context of their “privileged” access to this exclusive pedagogic space.

The struggle for autonomy

Dmitry Kozlov (Nickolai Karamzin fellow, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow), “Unofficial groups of Soviet schoolchildren in the 1940s – 60s. Typology, ideology and practices”

The chapter deals with the unofficial teenagers’ “organizations” which appeared in the USSR in the 1940s – 60s. Kozlov analyses how adolescent psychology, Soviet culture (Russian history teaching, fiction and cinema) and official political bodies (Communist Party, Komsomol) influenced the discursive and pragmatic appearance of young people’s political protests. The article also addresses the transformation of official Soviet discourse on adolescents. The conception of the value of puberty dismissed the taboo on it in the early 1960s (C. Kelly). This took shape not only in new initiatives of Soviet educational specialists, but also in the Soviet judicial system. Adolescents were primarily subject to punitive measures other than imprisonment, although for decades before this, they had been treated as adults by the law.

Joakim Landahl (University of Stockholm), “Two utopias: the history of Swedish schoolchildren’s councils”

In this chapter, Landahl investigates the history of schoolchildren’s councils in Sweden in connection with the history of the movement for self-government in high schools. He identifies three basic phases of the movement. During the first phase (1928 – 1952), the predominant function of schoolchildren’s councils was disciplinary. The second phase (1952 – early 1980s) was connected with the revival of various forms of local activity on the part of students and the struggle for their rights at the national level. Finally, the third phase (mid – 1980s – the present day) constitutes a period of steady decline in the political influence and significance of schoolchildren’s councils. Using archival materials, Landahl examines the activity of the schoolchildren’s council at a specific high school during the first phase of the movement; for the second phase, he employs periodicals to elucidate the activity of a nationwide schoolchildren’s organization.

Evgenii Kazakov (University of Bremen), “The schoolchildren’s movement and school self-government in Western Germany”

The historiography of the West German youth protest movement of the 1960s has traditionally focused on the activities of university student groups. But schoolchildren also played an important role in these events. This chapter is about the political work of West German schoolchildren in relation to educational policy questions, in particular, the question of the creation of self-governing bodies in schools. The sources are archival materials of various student groups and political self-government bodies, contemporary media reports and interviews with former activists who participated in the movement between 1950 and the 2000s. There have been some very widely publicized studies of the history of the student movement in the 1960s – 70s; the later decades remain largely unexplored.

After the Second World War, the Western Allies insisted on the creation of self-government at the level of individual schools, which was hoped to lead to a “democratic transformation” of German youth. By choosing class representatives, students would learn democratic processes in practice. However, the object of the class representatives in the postwar years was first and foremost to steal coal for heating the classrooms. Essentially, however, the joint responsibility or co-administration of the pupils (SMV, Sch?lermitverantwortung or Sch?lermitverwaltung) was seen as a bonus for schoolchildren, rather than a representation of their interests. The elections had to be confirmed by the school principal, and all attempts to link SMV-structures across schools were suppressed. In the 1960s, the old SMV conception, based on the idea of “non-conflicting partnership” between teachers and students, was being increasingly criticized by education experts. Around 1966 – 67, there was an explosion of uncontrolled student activities, initially sparked by the issue of censorship of the student press.

Representations

Vadim Mikhailin (Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia), Galina Belyaeva (Saratov State Alexander Radishchev Art Museum), “Soviet ‘school film’: birth of a genre”

This chapter is the first part of a bigger work entitled “Soviet ‘school film’: between the Communist project and the late Soviet utopia of privacy,” which has yet to be published. We propose that the “school-film” genre appeared in the course of updating and refurbishing the stock of ideologically-pointed means by which Soviet elites constructed a set of projective realities acceptable for their primary audiences and exploitable in their managing practices – as a part of the last full-scale Soviet mobilization project known as “the Thaw.” At its birth, the genre was aimed mainly at inculcating the already customary collectivist models of behavior into the audience, as well as at discrediting (no less customary) of any off-public micro-group contexts. In this context, however, these actions were performed using somewhat finer strategies, relying on attempts to build personally oriented empathic ties: “sincerity” (which was to become a legendary shibboleth not only for school films but for all of Thaw culture) basically lay in imitating private empathy regimes. The primary audience of school films was, naturally, teenagers, who were seen as the most appropriate social stratum to be targeted by the new mobilization strategies. The article traces the preconditions that gave rise to school film, as well as the main stages of its early (1960s) development.

This collection is concluded with the afterword written by a well-known Russian pedagogue, educational theorist and journalist, Dr. Evgeny Yamburg (The Russian Academy of Education and Educational Centre # 109, Moscow).

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