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

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 Bačevič (Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark), “Vocationalizing unrest: education, conflict, and class reproduction in Socialist Yugoslavia”

Using discourse analysis, Bačević 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”