Острова утопии. Педагогическое и социальное проектирование послевоенной школы (1940—1980-е)
Шрифт:
Jana Bacevic (Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark), “Vocationalizing unrest: education, conflict, and class reproduction in Socialist Yugoslavia”
Using discourse analysis, Bacevi'c 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 20th 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'aroli G'asp'ar 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.