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

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