Острова утопии. Педагогическое и социальное проектирование послевоенной школы (1940—1980-е)

Евгений Ямбург – педагог, публицист, общественный деятель. Доктор педагогических наук, член-корреспондент Российской академии образования, директор московского Центра образования № 109, известного также как Школа Ямбурга. Инициатор издания и главный редактор серии книг и хрестоматий «Антология выстаивания и преображения. Век XX» – произведений литературы, мемуаристики и публицистики, авторы которых (представители разных стран мира, национальностей, вероисповеданий) в XX в. прошли опыт противостояния государственному насилию и борьбы за свободу. Разработчик и автор адаптивной модели школы– разноуровневой и многопрофильной общеобразовательной массовой школы с набором классов различной направленности. Автор книг «Педагогический ансамбль школы» (1987), «Воспитание историей» (1988), «Школа для всех. Адаптивная модель (Теоретические основы и практическая реализация)» (1996, в 1997 признана лучшей книгой года по педагогике в России), «Школа на пути к свободе: Культурно-историческая педагогика» (2000), «Управление развитием адаптивной школы» (2004), «Педагогический Декамерон» (2008), «Основополагающие документы школы. Стратегия и тактика развития современной школы: методическое пособие» (2010), «Школа и ее окрестности» (2011).

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”