Острова утопии. Педагогическое и социальное проектирование послевоенной школы (1940—1980-е)
Шрифт:
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"ulermitverantwortung or Sch"ulermitverwaltung) 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).