Острова утопии - [211]

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

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.