Teachers in Russia: State, community and profession

Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies and Prospects

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 197-220

  Eklof, Ben ^a   Seregny, Scott ^b  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79957338173     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203318676     Document Type: Chapter

References (73)

1. OECD, Reviews of National Policies for Education: Russian Federation (Paris, 1998), p. 131.
2. Some works drawn from include Larry Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917-1933 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991);
3. Ben Eklof (ed.), School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia (London, Macmillan, 1993);
4. idem, Russian Peasant Schools, 1861-1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986);
5. Scott J. Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995);
6. E. Thomas Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism: Policy, Practice and Power in Soviet Schools of the 1930s (New York: P. Lang, 2002);
7. Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1861-1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994);
8. Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1973);
9. F.G. Panachin, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie v Rossii (Moscow, 1979).
10. References to works in Russian can be found in E.D. Dneprov, Sovetskaia literatura po istorii shkoly i pedagogiki dorevoliutsion-noi Rossii, 1918-1977: bibliograficheskii ukazatel' (Moscow, 1979) and
11. Ocherki istorii shkoly i pedagogicheskoi mysli narodov SSSR: vtoraia polovina XIX veka (Moscow, 1976).
12. Very useful were the weekly teachers' newspapers, Uchitel'skaia gazeta and Pervoe sentiabria, as well as the Ministry of Education's web page (www.informika.ru) which makes available on a daily basis articles in Russian from the press, both capital city and provincial.
13. James C. Albisetti, 'The Feminization of Teaching in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective', History of Education 22 (1993), pp. 253-63;
14. Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford, 1989);
15. Anthony LaVopa. 'Status and Ideology: Rural Schoolteachers in Pre-March and Revolutionary Prussia', Journal of Social History (Spring 1979), pp. 430-56.
16. Karl A. Schleunes, Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria, 1750-1900 (Oxford: Berg, 1989).
17. Peter V. Meyers, 'Primary Schoolteachers in Nineteenth-Century France: A Study in Professionalization through Conflict', History of Education Quarterly 1-2 (1985), pp. 21-40.
18. Peter V. Meyers, 'Professionalization and Societal Change: Rural Teachers in Nineteenth Century France', Journal of Social History 9 (1976), pp. 542-58.
19. On this see Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism, and Larry Holmes, Stalin's School: Moscow's Model School No. 25, 1931-1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
20. For example, see the excellent study by Susan Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)
21. for classroom atmosphere, and Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), pp. 196-227
22. for a description of a parent-teacher meeting. For the observations of an insider who taught in the Soviet school system in the post-Stalin era, see Dora Shturman, The Soviet Secondary School (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1988).
23. For a stimulating discussion of vocational and specialized education and the dilemmas of Soviet policy in the 1980s, see Dennis Soltys, Education for Decline: Soviet Vocational and Technical Schooling from Khrushchev to Gorbachev (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
24. William B. Husband, 'Secondary School History Texts in the USSR: Revising the Soviet Past, 1985-1989', Russian Review 4 (1991), pp. 458-80, esp. pp. 474-5;
25. R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).
26. For these reforms, see Edward Dneprov, with Ben Eklof, Democracy in the Russian School: The Reform Movement in Russian Education Since 1984 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993);
27. E.D. Dneprov, Shkol'naia reforma mezhdu 'vchera' i 'zavtra' (Moscow, 1996); and
28. the excellent monograph by participant-observer Isak D. Frumin, Vvedenie v teoriiu i praktiku demokraticheskogo obrazovaniia (Kras-noiarsk, 1998).
29. By far the best look into the impact of perestroika on Soviet schools is the work by James Muckle, Portrait of a Soviet School under Glasnost (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990).
30. This lethal combination was reminiscent of the NEP period, when in 1921, in the aftermath of revolution and a bloody civil war, the new Soviet state decentralized education and handed over responsibility for funding schools to the localities. For this period, see also Jeanne Sutherland, Schooling in the New Russia: Innovation and Change, 1984-1995 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1995).
31. See the article by Scott Seregny, 'Teachers', in Encyclopedia of European Social History (ed. Peter Stearns, 2000), vol. 5, pp. 365-77.
32. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), pp. 303-38.
33. For the following, see, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). and
34. idem, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
35. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
36. Frumin, Vvedenie v teoriiu praktiku demokraticheskogo obrazovaniia, pp. 234-46.
37. For a different perspective, see Ruane, Gender, Class and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, pp. 30-1 and 185-98.
38. Delbert H. Long and Roberta A. Long, Education of Teachers in Russia (Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 66.
39. See also Stephen Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), esp.chapters 5, 6 and 8.
40. See the chapter by Isak Froumin in this volume.
41. Frumin, Vvedenie v teoriiu i praktiku demokraticheskogo obrazovaniia, p. 221.
42. Sutherland, Schooling in the New Russia, pp. 160,162, 165,169,172.
43. Argumenty i Fakty 15 (2000).
44. 'Prognoz', Uchitel'skaia gazeta 1 (2002). The year 2003 was to have been one of maximum maturation of foreign debts, and of onset of population decline.
45. For the text of the Modernization Programme, see www.informika.ru/text/goscom/curdoc.393.html#1; for an English language summary, see Khronika: Chronicle of Russian and Eurasian Education, vol. 9, nos 1-2 (2002): http://www.indiana.edu/~isre.
46. Uchitel'skaia gazeta 38 (2002).
47. See Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, pp. 138-9 for refinements and categories of this system.
48. Vremia novostei 7 (17 January 2002).
49. Poisk, 24 February 2003.
50. Uchitel'skaia gazeta 15 (2002), p. 7.
51. www.edu.ru/portal/school_statistic.
52. Frants Sheregi, Sotsiologiia obrazovaniia: prikladnye issledovaniia (Moscow, 2001), pp. 424-40. I am grateful to Ms Anna Smolentseva for identifying and obtaining this book for me.
53. Uchitel'skaia gazeta 6 (2002).
54. A thorough and nuanced discussion of topics such as income inequality and child poverty, health, access and opportunity in education, foster care and institutionalized children from a comparative perspective can be found in A Decade of Transition (Unicef: The MONEE Project, Regional Monitoring Report no. 8. Florence, Italy, 2001).
55. Throughout the Gorbachev era, Russia's burgeoning middle class expressed its aspirations to achieve living standards resembling those they believed prevailed in the west as a quest for a 'normal' life. This reflected a fundamental shift in mindset away from a point of reference in the past to one located outside the Soviet Union. This shift was first identified by John Bushnell in a seminal article, 'The New Soviet Man Turns Pessimist', in Stephen Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch and Robert Sharlet (eds), The Soviet Union since Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 179-99.
56. 'Na edu khavtaet, na sapogi net', Uchitel'skaia gazeta 15 (2002), p. 7.
57. One estimate puts the figure at 15-20 per cent: 'Uchitel'v avtoritete''\, Uchitel'skaia gazeta 11 (2002).
58. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, pp. 126-7.
59. 'Luchshee iz. .. khudshego', Uchitel'skaia gazeta 48 (2002), p. 19.
60. Sheregi, Sotsiologiia obrazovaniia, p. 425. Since only one-tenth of all teachers are men, the sharp decline in the proportion of young men scarcely affects the average age of all teachers.
61. The situation is different in higher education and scholarship, where almost half (47.4 per cent) are over 50 years old, only 10.6 per cent are under 29, the average age is 49 and one in every five scholars is over 60 years old. 'Khronika raspada', Poisk, 19 March 2003.
62. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, pp. 84-8.
63. Sheregi, Sotsiologiia obrazovaniia, p. 428.
64. 'Luchshee iz. ... khudshego', p. 19.
65. Sheregi, Sotsiologiia obrazovaniia, p. 427.
66. 'Luchshee iz. ... khudshego', p. 19.
67. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, pp. 92-3, 97-8.
68. 'Programma modernizatsii pedagogicheskogo obrazovaniia', www.ed.gov.ru/news 17/03/2003. The draft was sent out to fifty regional education offices, and the public response was extensive. Two complaints frequently mentioned were the inadequate training for teaching in small rural schools, and the inadequacy of teacher internships or practicums. Poisk, 27 February 2003.
69. In a much-cited example, the educator Edward Nikitin noted cases of teachers gathering cranberries (Tver'), harvesting tobacco (Tambov) and tending hens (Rostov) in order to pay for their continuing studies: 'Ne tol'ko o kliukve', Poisk, 27 February 2003.
70. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, citing M. Fullan, p. 111.
71. Sheregi, Sotsiologiia obrazovaniia, pp. 438-40.
72. Uchitel'skaia gazeta 38 (2002).
73. Uchitel'skaia gazeta 11 (2002).