Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and…

The political changes in the USSR and Russia almost coincided with the beginning of an unprecedented leap in the development of information technologies in the country (and to a certain extent spurred it). Gradually, many different initiatives emerged to apply these technologies in education in general, and in mathematics education. In the paper,…

In this creative article, the reader is invited into an a/r/tographic chronotope, through which the author remembers her learning and schooling experiences in the Ukrainian USSR. The purpose of remembering is to render an elusive meaning of dialogic pedagogy in the soviet compulsory schooling with a focus on the child's lived experience of…

The purpose of this article is to outline the evolution of biology education in Soviet schools in the 1920s and 1930s. After some introductory consideration of the ideological changes taking place in the field of genetics that impacted on the teaching of science and led to botany being favoured over biology in schools, the first part outlines the…

Based on oral and written testimony of pupils and teachers, this essay examines the lived educational experience of the school-age cohort of children in Stalin's Russia from 1931 to 1945. The state alone determined the structure and curricula of the nation's schools. However, Soviet youngsters, their parents, and teachers responded to the center's…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

This article proposes a framework within which the question as to the purposes of open universities should be examined. It argues that the question has become submerged over time through the establishment of so many open universities that have become natural elements in a higher education landscape rather than remaining radical and innovative…

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 displaced the autocracy of the Romanov royal family and aimed to establish a liberal republican Russia. The Bolsheviks, who came to power a few months later in the revolution of October 1917, announced that their new policy in education "had no analogy in history." Their reforms sought to establish…

This paper seeks to provide a starting point for a broader discussion on the development of a critical research agenda in the field of "Education and Conflict Studies." We begin the paper with a brief overview of the field of Education and Conflict drawing on a series of recent "overviews" of the field and locate this within…

Since the post-Soviet context is not particularly well known to the majority of readers, the author uses this introduction to provide a general background against which developments in particular post-Soviet countries can be better understood. The author begins by placing these developments in the sociohistoric context of language policies of the…

In the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s saw a remarkable rate of educational expansion, as state schools enrolled millions of pupils in higher proportions and for longer periods of time than ever before. Much of this expansion occurred in the "non-Russian" regions, where the native language of children and thus the primary language…

The war and the postwar years were an important and generally underestimated phase in the history of the Soviet educational system, since the school system created during this period continued to the end of the regime with some modifications. Although many of the reforms were discussed and planned during the 1930s, the war proved an ideal time for…

Being a "student" has been and remains a highly desirable status for young people and their families in Kyrgyzstan. "Giving their children education" (dat detyam obrazovaniye)--meaning "higher education"--has become an imperative for many parents, even in a time of serious economic and social decline. The numbers of…

Examining early Soviet educational policy, Lauglo analyzes the initial expression of Marxist humanist values, popular participation, and the value of productive work for general education. Discusses the routinization into a Stalinist pattern of bureaucratically controlled utilitarianism and comments briefly on recent indications of change in…

The author analyzes three basic periods in the development of the level of education of the population of Russia over the span of a hundred years. The first period runs from 1897, when a nationwide census was carried out for the first time, to 1917. The second period, the Soviet era, runs from 1917 to the late 1980s. The third period started with…