It was in a Soviet school

On April 18, the early exam period ended. Experts state that there are no fundamental violations. But will well-established control over tests affect the knowledge of schoolchildren who Soviet era were there any doubts? Let's try to figure out this problem.

Russian self-knowledge

Article No. 7 of the “Law on Education” prescribes the introduction of Federal State Standards, according to which the current education system abandons the traditional format of education “in the form of knowledge, skills and abilities.” Now the so-called universal learning activities (UAL) are taken as a basis, which are understood as “general educational skills”, “ general methods activities", "supra-subject actions" and so on. If you try to understand these phraseological units, their meaning boils down to the fact that the specifics of knowledge give way to cognition and self-development.

Instead of forcing students to cram and meticulously test their knowledge, the teacher encourages children to figure out topics on their own. In the end, federal state standards are loyal to negative results, in other words, to twos. In particular, the standards say that “failure to achieve these requirements by a graduate cannot serve as an obstacle to his transfer to the next level of education.” By the way, in the USSR poor students were kept for the second year.

Teenagers in Italian

The compilers of the new Russian education system, according to many experts, copied the format of most Western schools, the main postulate of which is: “if you want to learn, study.” Meanwhile, teachers are sounding the alarm about the lack of high school students' sense of responsibility, which was typical of Soviet graduates.

Many young people who have graduated modern school, the psychology of teenagers is observed. Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics Ekaterina Hakim noted that two-thirds of young girls in Europe categorically do not want to work, putting main goal have a successful marriage in your life. In Russia there are already half of them.

About how the “self-cognitive” educational system adopted in the West influences adult life, can be observed in EU countries. According to statistics, 80% of thirty-year-old Poles, Italians and Greeks live with their mothers and fathers, and in England, half of all young people regularly demand money from their parents for living expenses. Advisor to the director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies Igor Beloborodov speaks about this problem: “Widespread post-adolescence is not a personal choice of Italians or Japanese, it is a deep deformation, the crisis is already in an advanced stage.”

Calligraphy: punishment or necessity?

The Western approach fundamentally contradicts Russian ethnopedagogy. For example, penmanship required children to persevere and concentrate. Calligraphy was the only subject inherited by the Soviet educational system from the royal primary school. “In the memoirs of those who remembered pre-reform penmanship lessons (before 1969), the latter are very often depicted as punishment and a curse for a small person,” explains philologist, leading researcher at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences Konstantin Bogdanov. - Marshall McLuhan (an outstanding theorist of the 20th century in the field of culture and communications), and after them other specialists in the field of media anthropology and theory of mass communications wrote a lot about the dependence of the meaning of information on the nature of its media transmission.

The educational role of penmanship seems to be more significant than just the role of the initial stage in mastering the alphabet, writing and literacy.”

“The degree of generational continuity among children of pre-revolutionary and Soviet times in this regard is higher than among children who went through Soviet school and those who are studying at school now,” states Konstantin Bogdanov. “In the latter case, the boundary between generations lies where, figuratively speaking, the ink blots end.” The school traditions of the Russian and then Soviet schools have been completely supplanted from the current way of life and replaced by the standards of Western entertainment culture.

This concerns, first of all, the oblivion of the moral code of a young man that took place in the USSR. This is especially evident now – in the era of the Internet. Despite all the technical advantages, the lack of self-censorship on the World Wide Web leads to the degradation of children's personality. “Uncontrolled Internet cripples a child’s soul,” teachers are sure, “schoolgirls organize selfie sessions, trying to shock the public. Boys become aggressive and cynical. They flaunt cruelty." According to the general opinion of educators, children suffer from Internet addiction. Such teenagers will never change social media and computer games for textbooks.

Horizon

The lack of requirements for system knowledge immediately led to a reduction in subjects. As a result, everything that contributed to the development of one’s horizons in Soviet times was removed. Children, for example, are not taught astronomy, citing the fact that in America this subject is not included in the school curriculum, “but the GDP is several times greater than ours.” In addition, drawing has been removed from Russian schools, as they now design using CAD (computer-aided design). Meanwhile, according to many mathematicians, it is drawing that develops geometric and spatial thinking.

Sport

Everyone knows that Soviet schoolchildren and schoolgirls went in for sports on a large scale. For example, but according to the GTO standards, in order to receive the silver “Brave and Dexterous” badge, students (boys) of grades 1-4 had to run 60 meters in 10.8 seconds, and a thousand meters in 5 minutes, and, of course, stretch on a high bar - 3 times.

Tenth-graders were presented with demands that most young men today cannot meet. To again receive “silver” in the third age level “Strength and Courage”, it was necessary to run three thousand meters in thirteen and a half minutes, and swim a “fifty-meter race” in fifty seconds. In addition, it was necessary to do nine pull-ups on the bar. Other tasks were also set: to throw a grenade weighing 700 g at 32 m (for young men); perform a shooting exercise from a small-caliber rifle (distance 25 m, 5 shots) with the result: from a rifle of the TOZ-8 type - 30 points, from a rifle of the TOZ-12 type - 33 points. According to statistics, there were more than 58 million people in the USSR in 1972-1975. passed the GTO standards, including the majority of schoolchildren.

The current GTO standards are clearly inferior to the Soviet ones. For example, a 17-year-old boy needs to run three kilometers in 14 minutes and 40 seconds to get silver, and just swim the fifty-meter race.

Unified State Exam and gold medal

The Soviet school gold medal was highly valued. “After the 10th grade, we passed 8 (!) compulsory exams (algebra test, oral geometry, essay, oral literature, physics, chemistry, history, foreign language), recalls Anna Ostrovskaya, a medalist at school No. 51 in Minsk (graduated in 1986). ). - Moreover written works medalists - essay and algebra - were checked by several commissions, both school and district. I remember we waited a very long time for this confirmation of grades. By the way, my classmate, an excellent student, was not given a medal in the end, but he entered the Moscow Medical Institute without it.”

According to the rules available at that time, medalists entered universities, having advantages over other applicants. They only had to pass a specialized exam. Gold medals became “thieves” already during the period of perestroika, with the advent of the first cooperatives, recalls history teacher Maria Isaeva, but I want to note that if university teachers had doubts about the medalist, serious checks and the strictest conclusions followed. When the feedback stopped working, then the school “gold” turned out to be fake.” As for the Unified State Exam, the entire history of this state exam is riddled with scandals and dramas, including those related to schoolchildren’s suicides. At the same time, university teachers have repeatedly expressed doubts about the reliability of these tests.

“Of course, the current school education system needs reform,” says professor and science theorist Sergei Georgievich Kara-Murza. – Unfortunately, we do not see world-class scientific discoveries made by graduates of Russian schools, although a lot of time has passed since 1992, which is reasonable to take as a starting point. We have to admit a sharp deterioration in the quality of knowledge of modern children.”

“SP”: - What is the reason for this state of affairs?

Here it is logical to recall the background in order to assess the level of the problem. Before the Great Bourgeois Revolution, there were religious schools in France, the graduates of which, receiving a holistic view of the world, became individuals in the high sense of the word. The method of teaching had a university basis. After the bourgeois revolution, some children began to be taught according to the same university system, but on a scientific picture of the world. As a result, graduates of these elite lyceums had a systematic view of the order of things. The bulk of them studied at the school of the so-called second corridor, receiving a mosaic view of the world. The same problem became acute in Russia in the last third of the 19th century, when mass schools appeared. Our Russian intelligentsia, brought up on classical literature, rejected the division into “two corridors” - the elite and the masses.

The best minds in Russia believed that the school should reproduce a people united by a common culture. The intensity of passions around this problem can be judged by the participation of the tsar and military ministers in this discussion. After the October Revolution in 1918, the first All-Russian Congress of Teachers was convened, which decided that the school should be a unified and general education, university type. Now the unified approach to university-type education has been lost. This is, of course, a huge minus.

“SP”: - Was the Soviet Union the first country to introduce this system?

Yes, our country was the first to begin teaching children according to a single standard, without dividing children into the elite and the masses. Moreover, many specific points appeared. For example, children were not expelled for poor studies, but were placed under the patronage of excellent students, who gave them additional tutoring. I went through all this, and I will say this: by helping a friend, you begin to truly understand the subject. Most of our leading scientists and designers also went through the system of mutual assistance to their lagging schoolmates. I had to think about how to explain it to the poor student so that he would understand. Here it is also wise to remember penmanship. It turns out that the human brain has a special feedback connection with the fingertips. It is noted that in the process of penmanship, the mechanism of thinking develops. The Chinese have not abolished this subject, although their hieroglyphs are more complex than our Cyrillic alphabet. In general, the Soviet school had many positive features, which collectively educated the individual.

“SP”: - What about the Internet?

The Internet is a given of our time, and to deny it or, moreover, to prohibit it is stupidity. At the same time, it is necessary to develop effective mechanisms that would neutralize the negative impacts of the World Wide Web on children. This is very difficult work which definitely needs to be done.

“SP”: - How do you see the future of our school?

I am sure that sooner or later the state will return to the positive experience of the Soviet school, which, in fact, we are seeing in some places. We simply have no other way, otherwise Russia will not survive in this brutally competitive world.

Alexander Sitnikov

A school from the middle of the last century... A school from Soviet times...

Probably, children were more obedient and naive then than they are now, and teachers were more principled. Probably, Soviet ideology left its mark on the way of thinking of both, on the process of training and education. Now some people idealize the Soviet school, finding in it much of what the current school lacks.

Well... Word to a student of a Soviet school in the 60sXXcentury.

Start

My school life began back in 1959 in a small village. It was a long time ago, but many moments remained in my memory forever.

I will never forget my first teacher. Her name was Polina Semyonovna. She was an interesting woman. Just imagine: he takes out cutlets or lard right in class and starts eating. Or he opens a tin can, uses a knife to take out fish after fish from it - and into his mouth. At the same time, the lesson continues: as if nothing had happened, we write something in our notebooks. And after lunch, Polina Semyonovna felt sleepy... The student answers at the blackboard - and she closes her eyes and dozes off. She said that it was more convenient for her to listen.

The adults probably thought she was strange. To us, first-graders, it seemed simply funny. I think that Polina Semyonovna, despite everything, was an excellent teacher. By the fourth grade, our handwriting became calligraphic, and we cracked the most complex arithmetic problems like nuts. Polina Semyonovna also taught us to sing and dance. She managed to get hold of special paper and colorful ribbons somewhere, and she herself made wreaths for us, in which we danced Russian and Ukrainian dances.

In our village there was only a primary school, and then I had to study in a neighboring village. My friends and I went there, of course, on foot: three kilometers to school and the same distance back. And in any weather. There used to be a snowstorm and frost outside, but in the morning you wake up and go to study. There was no talk about skipping classes.

I will probably remember fifth grade for the rest of my life. I remember it with an insult that I still can’t forget.

History (my favorite subject, by the way) was taught by our school director. For some reason, he disliked me, although I prepared for the lessons thoroughly and could answer any question from the teacher. At the very beginning of the quarter, the director called me to the board and gave me a “C” for an excellent, complete answer - without any explanation.

For me, an excellent student, it was a real shock. Moreover, on the same day, my friend received an “A” in history for an answer much worse than mine. Then I didn’t know that her father was some kind of boss, I didn’t suspect that an adult was capable of meanness towards a child. But she firmly believed: the teacher is always right. These were exactly the words my parents repeated to me: they didn’t even want to listen about some kind of childhood resentment. But for me it was a tragedy...

I spent the entire quarter cramming history - but they didn’t ask me! The director called me to the board only on the last day of the quarter - and assessed an excellent (I know this for sure!) answer as “good.” In the quarter there was a “troika”. The teacher set it and forgot it. For me, the matter ended with a nervous breakdown and treatment in the neurological department of the local hospital...

And it also happened...

My husband often talked about how he studied in primary school. He talked and laughed.

His first teacher had a specific (especially for the post-war years) name - Adolf Fedorovich. But it's not about the name. He, too, apparently, was a special person.

The husband's father worked in a store, which means he was, by village standards, a respected man. And that’s probably why his son was the first student. Adolf Fedorovich would come to the store and start praising his son to his dad. “Look,” he says, “Mikhail Nikolaevich, your Yurka got an A today!” And my son is sitting under the counter - he’s surprised: they didn’t even ask him today! But dad is happy - and he pours flour, cereals, and sugar for the teacher.

This is how Yura studied through all four primary grades. Then he moved to another school and immediately stayed for the second year. Thanks to Adolf Fedorovich...

Antonina Ivanovna Chumakova

Photos - from personal archive

From the magazine “Star”, No. 12, 2008.

Derviz T. Next to Big History. Essays on honest life of the mid-20th century.

How we studied.

Before school, no one taught me anything specifically, except, of course, the necessary life skills - how to wash, how to brush your teeth, and the like. The main person in the house was my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She managed the house, but besides this, she was an excellent painter, embroiderer, and generally a craftswoman. She never told me: “Move away, don’t bother me, it’s not your time.” Vice versa. All attempts to imitate her were welcomed. Moreover, she was not afraid to give me, five years old, a needle, scissors, and even a knife in the kitchen. Therefore, during the evacuation, at the age of seven, I freely lit the stove; no one hid matches from me, because I firmly knew that matches were not a toy, and I knew how to use them.
“How is it that I can’t? - said the grandmother. - And you learn!” And I tried. The worst assessments from the grandmother’s lips were: white-handed or muslin young lady, sissy. And she, having finished some difficult work for herself, said: “Well, if a woman wants, she will put on a samovar!” - and in response to my usual “why?” explained that setting a samovar is traditionally a man’s job. “But know,” she often said when I was older, “a woman should be able to do everything!”
I remember well the moment when I learned to read, again thanks to my grandmother. I knew the letters, I had cubes with letters. Before the war, my grandmother read aloud to me quite a lot, but during the evacuation she had no free time at all: she had to cook, and she also had to trim, repair, and wash everyone. My brother was five years older, but he refused to read to me, saying that children’s books were boring for him. And then one day in response to my pleas: “Well, grandma, read it!” - she suddenly said to me: “You see, I sew, but you’d better read to me yourself!” - "I can't!" - “And you learn! Take “Why” and read it!”
I meant my favorite “What I Saw” by Boris Zhitkov. It was read to me so often that I remembered many parts by heart, especially the beginning. This certainly helped. I opened the book, and my grandmother asked: “What is the first letter?” - "TO!" - “What next?” - "ABOUT!" - "And then?" - "G! D! A!" - “And together?” Honestly, I remember that moment—the word “when” formed itself! “When, grandma, when!!” “You see, I’ve learned,” she said casually. “Read on.” I won’t lie, at first I didn’t move quickly, but every day it got easier and easier. Then my grandmother told me to read in a whisper. I tried it and it worked. Then new advice: “Now - repeat to yourself and try not to move your lips!” And so it went. By the time I started school, I was reading everything I could get my hands on. The grandmother explained unfamiliar words and punctuation marks. But I learned to write correctly at school.
I went to school in 1943, in a small village in the Yaroslavl region. Never, until graduation, did I see a better school and a better teacher. And this is not an exaggeration.
The brick school building was occupied by a hospital, so the school returned to its old, pre-revolutionary, large log house. It was a seven-year school (“junior high school”), but in total there were not many children. Therefore, there were only three teachers and two assistants, students of the pedagogical college, Nina and Valya. The teachers were: Nikolai Mikhailovich Golovin, who is also the director, taught from the 4th to the 7th grade, his wife Yulia Fedorovna, taught from the 1st to the 3rd grade, and the one-armed military commander Nikolai Pavlovich in a tunic and overcoat without insignia , taught physical education, military affairs and conducted political conversations about the situation at the front. There were also “technician” Aunt Pasha and her husband Uncle Vanya. In addition to firing the stoves and cleaning, they also rang the bell (hand bell).
The Golovins were teachers of pre-revolutionary training. Already in those years, a book about them was even published - “The People's Teacher” (unfortunately, I don’t remember the author). I read it with great interest and learned that Yulia Fedorovna graduated from college just before the revolution and went to teach children in the village. Nikolai Mikhailovich was from the locals and studied with her as an adult. Then they got married. Like all teachers, they were given a government-owned apartment in the village and, surprisingly, they were not taken away or crowded after the revolution. Their furnishings were completely literary, from the end of the 19th century: a narrow mirror in the wall, a curved sofa and armchairs, a round table under a tablecloth with bombs, a harmonium, a hanging kerosene lamp with a lampshade above the table, a special narrow table with a samovar. It seems they didn’t have children, but, however, at that time I was not interested in this as I was young.
They knew all the inhabitants of the neighboring villages. The sons and even grandchildren of their first students already studied with them. Almost every morning in class began with Yulia Fedorovna inquiring from one of the children about the health of their mother or grandmother; all of their fathers were at the front.
On September 1, I went to school with other hospital children, that is, I simply crossed a large yard, more like a lawn, overgrown with short grass. None of the parents would have even thought of “seeing off” their children to first grade, and they couldn’t—they were working. All the children gathered at the porch. Nikolai Mikhailovich said something briefly, after which Aunt Pasha came out of the door and, raising the bell above her head, rang. Everyone went inside.
The old building was a bit cramped. In one room there were desks in four rows. Two rows - first class, two - second. This was inconvenient, and soon we began to study in two shifts - the first week, the second week.
I don’t know whether the school equipment remains from the old days or whether the Golovins themselves ordered it somewhere. I have never seen anything like it even in Leningrad. I will list what happened in our class.
A huge board, light brown, starting low above the floor, convenient for the little ones. Near it there are drawers for chalk, white and colored. A wooden grid ruler to draw a straight or oblique square on the board. A real hare's foot to carefully sweep chalk from the board from top to bottom into a special groove (and not carry it with a dirty wet rag, as was the case everywhere later). I remember how once Yu. F. told one boy that his paw was completely worn out, let his father send a new one. A wooden ruler moved up and down along the board, into which cardboards with letters could be inserted. The letters themselves were kept in the closet.
The desks, black on top, smooth and shiny, with recesses for inkwells and pens, were of different sizes, and we were seated according to height. The teacher had a desk with cabinets and drawers. There was a glass cabinet against the wall. It contained a lot of things: primers (by the way, the authors were the Golovins), notebooks for writing in class, watercolor paints with brushes and glass cups for water, many color lithographs famous paintings, a cage box for all the inkwells, a lot of scissors and colored paper, probably and something else.
On the wall next to the board hung a large map of the USSR and Europe, on which the front line was marked with flags every day.
There was a long row of hooks along the wall - they undressed in the classroom. Almost everyone wore shoes with galoshes, which they took off and remained in felt boots, fur coats, or even thick socks. There was a stove in the corner, already heated for the start of classes.
It was bad with notebooks, so at home we wrote in homemade ones from random paper, and in class we wrote in real ones. Everyone had a primer, but they did not take it home. Everyone was given a pen with a yellow nib, No. 86, to take home; in class they wrote with other pens. Blotters were also only in the classroom. Every morning, the attendant placed inkwells on the desks, and Yu. F. herself poured ink into them. During recess, we were allowed outside, we could run and play as we pleased, but I don’t remember any violent fights.
The first appearance of Yulia Fedorovna made a stunning impression on me. She was short, with a high gray hairstyle, like in her grandmother's old photographs. At the same time, a long, ankle-length black skirt, a white blouse with a high collar pinned with a brooch, and high-heeled shoes high heels. She took off her coat somewhere outside the classroom, but the hat, a real flirty hat, took out a long pin, took it off in the classroom and placed it on the closet. In winter she wore a large woolen scarf over her shoulders. Often during recess she would draw someone under her scarf, as if under a wing, and quietly talk to him about something.
Yu. F. knew how to teach each and everyone individually. Let’s say that I and two or three other people could read. Don't leave us idle! My weak point was writing. This means that while others were putting words on the board, I was given the task of writing an extra line. And if they were studying arithmetic, then she, walking between the desks, immediately gave the one who solved the example a new one to solve.
Such an amazing incident happened. A nurse from the hospital begged Yu.F. to take her five-year-old daughter to class, simply because there was no one to leave her with at home! And this Lucy was given a place on the side on the front desk, and she quietly drew something there, and played with us during breaks. Yu. F. sometimes came up to her and showed her something separately. To everyone’s surprise, Lyusya graduated from the first grade with performance no worse than others and in less than six years received the right to move to the second.
And it was at that time that I learned simple, useful tricks and rules: how to sit without curving your back; how to exercise your eyes: on the board - in a notebook, on the board - in a notebook, 10 times; how to hold the pen correctly so that your hand does not get tired; how to stand at the board when pointing with a pointer, and much more.
I actually encountered such a pedagogical technique as calling parents to school only in Leningrad. And this despite the fact that not everyone found learning easy; there were even repeaters. Yulia Feodorovna herself carried out the trial and reprisal. “Shut up, you idiot!” - this is when someone was chatting in class. “Sit on the last desk, cool down” - this is already stronger, because it equated to repeaters who, according to an unwritten rule, sat on the last desks. “I don’t even want to ask you today!” - so much that it sometimes ended in tears.
She never praised or scolded anyone “in front of the whole class,” and thereby did not humiliate anyone. And I remember how one day Yulia Fedorovna stopped next to one boy and said: “Tell your mother that I am pleased with you. “I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this phrase, but I remember exactly what happened next.” “So tell me that Yulia Fedorovna is happy.” He blushed so much that his ears turned scarlet, and Yu. F. walked further down the aisle.
By the way, it was her style to walk between desks. So she could casually straighten or even braid someone’s loose braid, run her hand through her hair, or she could also knock on the crown of her head with her knuckles, seeing the blots in the notebook, and sometimes saying: “Look, you’re shitting, you unfortunate shit carrier!” She spoke in local language, cursing heavily.
This word in the village was not a curse. But, of course, there was swearing. But it was considered the last thing to swear in front of girls. And this was observed in our children's environment.
Like all good things, the first class ended, and we went further west, to Rechitsa, to Belarus.
In the simplicity of my soul, I thought that all schools would be the same. Not so. The building, however, was large, stone, two-story. When I entered my second class, I saw the following: huge foreheads were running around the desks and throwing different objects, including non-spill inkwells, the splashes of which were on the walls and clothes. Everyone was screaming heart-rendingly and swearing. The girls huddled against the walls, because it was impossible to sit at their desks. Everyone was wearing coats and hats. Later I realized that some of the boys were in German military uniforms without shoulder straps, but with the hated black buttonholes on the collar. (Rechitsa was liberated relatively recently.)
When the public saw the new girl, and even with a briefcase (she got it from the eldest daughter of the owner), a real sabbath began. They immediately took away the briefcase, shook everything out and began throwing it at him, while stealing a wooden pencil case. Everyone in the village school had one of these. They were made by the villagers themselves, they were unpainted, but smooth, and each person burned a drawing or inscription on the lid. They pulled my pigtails, one of them came undone, and the ribbon also disappeared. I felt sorry for her even more than the pencil case; it was a birthday present from my former girlfriend. Out of surprise, I didn’t even cry and continued to stand at the door until the teacher came.
The bells, as it turned out, did not work, no one rang the bell, teacher Anna Konstantinovna came and tried to start the lesson. It turned out bad. I think that she, perhaps, was afraid herself, she had such a timid and tortured look in some kind of tattered coat and a headscarf pulled back onto her neck (and this after the fit Yulia Fedorovna!). With her appearance, the girls rushed to her and, apparently, began to complain, pointing at the boys. They returned my briefcase with the torn “Native Speech” and the notorious sippy cup and the red beret, which I treasured very much (my mother’s!), and assigned me some place that, as it turned out, was not permanent. Whoever wanted to sit there.
Having dealt with me, the teacher began to loudly shout out some words I didn’t understand: “pytsunik, barba, bedulya” and suddenly: “Vasilyeva” - it turned out that these were surnames. But she couldn’t shout above the general din and dropped the roll call. Then she undertook a stunning maneuver: she seized the moment, tore the hat off the hefty brute and threw it into the corridor. The measure was obviously tested. All the main characters, led by the owner of the hat, poured out into the corridor, she closed the doors, and the lesson began.
I was called to the board and told to write something to check. The board was black, rough and covered with swear words. I looked in horror at the disgusting dirty lump of rag, not daring to pick it up. However, I had to. What about chalk?! After all, Yu. F. taught us to wrap the chalk in paper so as not to get our hands dirty, but here it was completely saturated with ink. But the tests themselves were successful, and I was officially left in the second grade, although due to all sorts of moves I came to school at the end of the second quarter. That's what a margin of safety the rural school gave me!
Two lessons passed, and at the big break in the class they began to give everyone two pieces of bread and two pieces of sugar. The teacher, thanks to her, made sure that this was not taken away from me, since the class hooligans immediately burst into the classroom to get bread and did not stay for other lessons.
When I later read “The Shkid Republic,” the deeds of the street children did not make an impression on me - I had already seen worse.
And the daily hard labor began for me. All hospital families were settled in different parts small town. I didn't have a single friend in the class. And in the whole school there were only two acquaintances who were much older than me. One soon had his nose broken, and my mother treated him.
I took a long, roundabout route to school, learning from other girls to sneak out the back door to avoid the boys. These were by no means harmless pranks. Anything happened on the street, including attempted rape.
The second grade consisted of children aged 12-14 who had missed school because of the war and had gone through their hard school of life. They earned their livelihood by theft and even robbery. As a result, at the first opportunity, I tried not to go to school, fortunately no certificates were required, you can say: I was sick - and that’s it! And only when the two main bandits disappeared somewhere, it became easier and it turned out that there were much more people in the class. It’s just that many, like me, tried not to show up.
The teacher also perked up. So much so that she began to teach us the Belarusian language. That's how it was supposed to be according to the program. There was a textbook, they wrote dictations, and learned the poems of Yakub Kolas and Yanka Kupala. Local children, not to mention me, did not learn the “real” Belarusian language well. The people around spoke a language that was absolutely understandable to me and without studying, since it was Russian with the inclusion of Ukrainian and a small number of Belarusian proper - in fact, slightly modified Ukrainian or Russian - words.
The torment began when writing. The one who created the Belarusian written language was a great liberal, because the basic rule of grammar says: “as it is heard, so it is written.” For example, “posta”, but “pashtovoe”. On the one hand, there is freedom, and on the other, you first need to know how to pronounce it literary correctly. Moreover, Russian here gets confused with its unstressed vowels and prefixes “pri” and “pre”! As a result, no one received more than a three for dictation in either Russian or Belarusian. And for a long time in Leningrad I made mistakes that no one else in the class made.
Actually, nothing else remains in my memory from that school. My universities in Rechitsa were the neighborhood kids, especially the owners’ youngest daughter Tomka, and the radio. Firstly, from Tomka I quickly adopted the local speech and thereby ceased to stand out among the guys, and they “accepted” me. Secondly, in me, 12-year-old Tomka acquired an extremely inquisitive student. I did her fair share of housework with her. Therefore, I learned to carry water on a rocker from the Dnieper, wash, rinse on a walkway, put and remove cast iron in a Russian stove, mix swill for a calf, feed chickens, wash a cow’s udder before milking (neither Tomka nor I was allowed to milk, so as not to spoil cow”), sweep the street in front of the house (required!), weed the garden, hill up the potatoes, beat out rugs without dust (you need to put them in the corner of the yard on the grass and beat them, then dust won’t fly around). And much more.
Late autumn In 1945 we returned to Leningrad. I went to the third grade of a girls' school, where I studied until graduation.
And even this school could not stand comparison with the rural one, but I was lenient. The only difference was that already in 1946 everyone wrote in real notebooks, everyone had textbooks, and pens and ink were not in short supply. A new institution also appeared - a diary. Marks were put in it and comments were written. (After Yulia Feodorovna, this was wild for me. In my first school, all relationships were built on absolute trust.) By the way, until the tenth grade, notebooks and textbooks were issued at school for a negligible fee. In the rarest of cases, there was a textbook for two, but soon this too passed.
Probably because it was a girls’ school, at first there was a kind of “cult of beauty” in it, which was actively supported by some teachers. Each notebook was supplied with a blotter, because they wrote with ink. She constantly got lost, which created inconvenience for the teacher when checking notebooks - there was nothing to blot her own notes with. Therefore, the blotter had to be glued to the cover of the notebook using a small ribbon. So, it was considered “good form” not just to glue it, but to decorate the place where it was glued with a color picture. Some have flowers, some have dogs and cats. It was not easy to get pictures, and there was no trace of those various stickers that modern children use to decorate their lives. As we grew older, fashion passed. In boys' schools there were no pictures.
Writing carefully with iron pens, dipping them into an inkwell, was not an easy task. By the way, there were also handles of the most varied types, or, as they were supposedly called only in Leningrad, inserts. Thick, thin, decorated with drawings, wooden, plastic, bone. Feathers came in a wide variety of styles. They were even collected. Large, yellow metal No. 86. With its help they learned to write. The rest were steel. They also had numbers, but had simpler names. A duck - with a curved nose, a wide and short frog, a straight rondeau, a tiny drawing one, and there were some others. Everyone chose what they liked. For some reason, only the rondo was not welcomed by the teachers.
The fact is that back then they were still trying to teach children not just to write, but to write in good handwriting. In the first grade there was a subject called “penmanship”. I had to learn to write “with pressure”: when the pen goes down, you press harder, and the line turns out bolder; when it goes up, you release it, and the line turns out thinner. No. 86 was perfect for this.
Iron feathers required cleaning. There were such touching products made from a stack of colored rag circles with a diameter of 3-4 cm, fastened in the center. I think it's not as funny as it might seem. Training from childhood on coordination and fine motor skills of the fingers is necessary for full development. It is not for nothing that it was once believed that iron feathers, in comparison with goose feathers, “spoil the hand and character.” After all, there would be no graphology if handwriting meant nothing.
In each class there were several people who had beautiful handwriting. They were envied. Asked to write greeting cards, were instructed to rewrite notes for the wall newspaper. Of course, in a boys' school they paid less attention to handwriting, but if a boy with the appropriate abilities was found there, then it was something outstanding. I know a man who made his calligraphic handwriting a source of good income.
At school they liked to ban everything. It was impossible to write with eternal pens, although they had similar nibs. The first balls were strictly punished. They were allowed in schools only in the 1960s.
After the war technical support The school was getting better pretty quickly. By the end of the third grade, the plywood in the windows was replaced by glass. They began to heat things better, and a wardrobe with numbers appeared. If you lose it, wait until the last student leaves, then the remaining coat is yours. Instead of one dim light bulb, they hung three frosted lampshades per classroom. In Leningrad, bread, sugar and tea were also given free of charge. Without the boys there was, at first glance, peace and grace, but the girls also showed their worth.
There probably weren’t enough schools, because we studied in two shifts for several years, but I liked not getting up early. The school building was good, spacious, with an assembly and physical education hall (former gymnasium), there were textbooks, there were real notebooks, but still it was a government institution, and not a home, like Yulia Fedorovna’s. And I felt it right away.
The influence of the Belarusian language immediately manifested itself, and for the first dictation I received a unit. The teacher, handing out notebooks, said, as it seemed to me, even with some pleasure: “And worse than this,” she unfolded the notebook and showed a page dotted with red ink with a huge bold one at the bottom, “no one wrote.” Everyone laughed. “You need to be transferred back to second grade, tell your mom to come to school.”
I immediately hated the teacher, especially since I felt injustice. She wrote, I hope, competently, but this middle-aged, fat, not very neatly dressed woman spoke with some kind of wild accent, not at all like a teacher.
When I walked home, what worried me most was how could my mother come to school if she was in the hospital all day, and I knew for sure that I couldn’t leave the wounded. The very proposal to return to second grade, apparently, was so wild for me that it was not taken seriously.
She came and told her grandmother. “What nonsense! - she said. “You’ll take more dictations at home and everything will improve.” I believed my grandmother unconditionally and immediately calmed down. In the evening they told my mother. It turned out that she had an operating day tomorrow, then she would be on duty, and would only go on Monday. And then my mother acted unpedagogically, obviously to calm me down, she remembered how she herself was expelled from the “16th Soviet Labor School” for a week for an excessively large (they said “unproletarian”) bow at the base of her braid.
After my mother’s visit to school, where the teacher strongly advised me to take a tutor (wasn’t she offering herself?), I was “conditionally left” until the end of the quarter, because I was good at arithmetic. But everything turned out like grandma’s: several dictations greatly improved matters and the issue was dropped. At the same time, the grandmother solved the problem in a big way. She did not dictate to me various primitive texts from the textbook, but immediately revealed Turgenev. And then Pushkin’s “Dubrovsky” finished off the remains of the Belarusian charter. All other years I was an excellent student.
In the fourth grade, we had other teachers, and this one, the first one, disappeared from the school altogether. In general, I remember most of my teachers well (in the fifth grade there was the only male historian, he talked about the ancient world - you can listen to him, now I think that I sat through difficult times at school, he stood out too much for his level of knowledge). They treated us well and honestly tried to teach us something.
Naturally, we didn’t miss the slightest mistake; we laughed and imitated to our heart’s content. And how can you not laugh! One said: “The NEP policy begins on page 32 and continues on pages 33 and 34.” This teacher taught the story, almost without looking up from the open textbook on the table. Physical education teacher: “Lift your pelvis step by step!” And the botany teacher: “Everything in the world is based on stamens and pistils!” Of course we had fun. This last phrase was a catchphrase in our class until the end of school.
And yet, the average level of education was, I dare say, much higher than it is now. Not a month passed (for 8 years!) without us being taken to museums, and more than once! In Zoological, Arctic, Ethnographic, even Artillery and Naval. Most often, of course, to the Hermitage and the Russian Museum. And we knew the apartments of Pushkin and Nekrasov as if they were our own.
Chemistry and physics lessons in high school were accompanied by excursions to “production”. And even the girls (including me) were very interested in them. We saw how glass is made, how a turbine for a hydroelectric power station is processed, how galoshes and rubber toys are made, how liquid metal is poured into molds, how wire is wound around a huge transformer, and how chocolate and candies are made. I don’t remember anyone skipping such hikes. And all this was due to our humble teachers.
They also took us to theatres, and a ticket to the Youth Theater was so cheap that it was available to everyone, and the Mariinsky (then Kirovsky) and other adult theaters made huge discounts for schoolchildren’s cultural outings.
This does not mean that our school was anything special. Excursions and cultural trips for schoolchildren were business as usual, and this could not but influence our frivolous brains.

Traditionally, the main result of studying literature at school is considered to be the mastery of books included in the so-called national literary canon. Whose names and works should be there? Each writer has his own lobby in academic and pedagogical circles; the same authors who during their lifetime claim to be classics can personally take part in the struggle for the right to appear in a textbook. Even the concept of a “school canon” arose - this is also a list, hierarchically organized and derived from the national literary canon. But if a large national canon is formed by the very mechanisms of culture, then the list of compulsory reading for schoolchildren is compiled differently. Thus, the selection of a specific work for the school canon, in addition to its generally recognized artistic and cultural-historical value, is influenced by:

• the age of the reader, that is, to whom it is addressed (the school canon is divided into reading groups - academic classes);
• the clarity of the embodiment of literary or social phenomena that are studied at school (at the same time, average, straightforward works can be much more convenient than masterpieces);
• educational potential (how the values, ideas, even its artistic features can have a beneficial effect on the student’s consciousness).

In the USSR, the school canon strived for immutability and at the same time was constantly changing. Literature programs of different years - 1921, 1938, 1960 and 1984 - reflected all the changes taking place in the country, as well as processes in literature itself and the education system.

Attention to the student and the absence of strict regulations

War communism gradually ended and the NEP era began. The new government considered education one of the priority areas of its activity, but the crisis that began after the revolution did not allow a radical restructuring of the pre-revolutionary education system. The regulation “On the Unified Labor School of the RSFSR,” which guaranteed everyone the right to free, joint, non-class and secular education, was issued back in October 1918, and only in 1921 the first stabilized program appeared. It was made for a nine-year school, but due to the lack of money in the country for education and general devastation, education had to be reduced to seven years and divided into two stages: the third and fourth years of the second stage correspond to the last two graduating classes of the school.

Program composition
The list of books basically repeats the pre-revolutionary gymnasium programs

Number of hours
Not regulated

III year of the second stage 3rd year 2nd stage

• Oral poetry: lyrics, antiquities, fairy tales, spiritual poems
• Ancient Russian writing: “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “The Tale of Juliania Lazarevskaya”; stories about Ersha Ershovich, about Misfortune-Grief, about Savva Grudtsyn, about Frol Skobeev
• Mikhail Lomonosov. Lyrics
• Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
• Gavrila Derzhavin. “Felitsa”, “God”, “Monument”, “Eugene. Life Zvanskaya"
• Nikolai Karamzin. " Poor Lisa", "What does the author need?"
• Vasily Zhukovsky. "Theon and Aeschines", "Camoens", "Svetlana", "The Unspeakable"
• Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, poems, “Eugene Onegin”, “Boris Godunov”, “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “Belkin’s Tales”
• Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, “Mtsyri”, “Demon”, “Hero of Our Time”, “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov”
• Nikolai Gogol. “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Taras Bulba”, “Old World Landowners”, “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”, “Overcoat”, “Portrait”, “Inspector General”, “ Dead Souls»
• Alexey Koltsov, Evgeny Baratynsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Nikolay Nekrasov. Selected Lyric Poems

IV year of the second stage 4th year 2nd stage

• Alexander Herzen. “The Past and Thoughts” (excerpts)
• Ivan Turgenev. “Notes of a Hunter”, “Rudin”, “ Noble nest", "On the Eve", "Fathers and Sons", "New", "Prose Poems"
• Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov"
• Alexander Ostrovsky. “We will count our own people” or “Poverty is not a vice”, “ Plum", "Thunderstorm", "Snow Maiden"
• Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Fairy tales (three or four at the teacher’s choice), “Poshekhon Antiquity”
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Poor People", "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Crime and Punishment"
• Leo Tolstoy. “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, “War and Peace”, “Hadji Murat”, “Confession”, “Alyosha Gorshok”
• Gleb Uspensky. “Morals of Rasteryaeva Street”, “Power of the Earth”
• Vsevolod Garshin. "Artists", "Red Flower"
• Vladimir Korolenko. “Makar’s Dream”, “The Blind Musician”, “The River Is Playing”, “The Forest is Noisy”
• Anton Chekhov. “Steppe”, “Men”, “The Cherry Orchard”
• Maxim Gorky. “Chelkash”, “Song about the Falcon”, “ Former people", "Song about the Petrel", "At the Bottom", "Mother", "Childhood"
• Leonid Andreev. “Once upon a time,” “Silence,” “Human Life”
• Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok. Selected Poems
• Peasant and proletarian poets of our time

In 1921, the State Academic Council of the People's Commissariat of Education presented the first stable list after the confusion of post-revolutionary lists in the “Programs for the I and II stages of the seven-year unified labor school.” The work on creating a program in literature was led by literary critic and linguist Pavel Sakulin, and it clearly shows the ideas discussed in the pedagogical environment shortly before the revolution, in particular in 1916-1917 at the First All-Russian Congress of Russian Language Teachers and literature. Sakulin reproduced in his program many of the principles formulated at this congress: variability in teaching (four program options instead of one with four corresponding lists of works), attention to the interests and needs of not only teachers, but also students. The program was based mainly on Russian literary classics of the 19th century, while the literature of previous centuries, as well as the nascent Soviet literature, occupied a rather modest place in it.

Literature lesson at the school at the Krasny Bogatyr plant. Early 1930s Getty Images

The task of overcoming this list in its entirety was not set—for the compilers of the program, the students’ emotional perception and independent comprehension of what they read were much more important.

“Students’ attention, of course, is always fixed on the text of the works themselves. Classes are conducted using the inductive method. Let students first learn about Rudin and Lavretsky, and then about the philosophical sentiments of the Russian intelligentsia, about Slavophilism and Westernism; Let them first get used to the image of Bazarov, and then hear about the thinking realists of the sixties. Even the writer’s biography should not precede students’ direct acquaintance with the works. In a second-level school there is no opportunity to strive for an exhaustive study of historical and literary trends. If necessary, let the teacher exclude from the list proposed below certain works, even of this or that writer. Once again: non multa, sed multum  “Many, but not much” is a Latin proverb meaning “many in meaning, not in quantity.”. And most importantly, the works of art themselves are in the center.”  Programs for the I and II stages of the seven-year unified labor school. M., 1921..

Literary education, closely related to the pre-revolutionary one, could hardly suit the ideologists of the party state, in which literature, along with other types of art, should serve the propaganda of the ruling ideology. In addition, the program initially had a limited scope of distribution - both because there were few second-level schools in the country (most of the first-level graduates joined the ranks of the proletariat or peasantry), and because many regions had their own educational programs. Within a few years, it lost the power of a regulatory document, remaining a monument to Russian humanitarian and pedagogical thought.

The teacher and the textbook are the only sources of knowledge

Between the programs of 1921 and 1938 there lies the same gulf as between the revolution and the last pre-war years. The bold searches of the 1920s in various fields of science, culture and education gradually faded away. Now the task of science, culture and education has become the construction of a super-industrial and militarized totalitarian state. As a result of purges and political repression, the composition of those who led changes in education and culture changed dramatically.

Program composition
80% Russian classics, 20% Soviet literature

Number of hours
474 (since 1949 - 452)

8th grade

• Oral folk poetry (folklore)
• Russian epics
• "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
• Mikhail Lomonosov. “Ode on the day of the accession to the throne of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna”, “Conversation with Anacreon”
• Gavrila Derzhavin. "Felitsa", "Invitation to Dinner", "Monument"
• Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
• Alexander Radishchev. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (excerpts)
• Nikolai Karamzin. "Poor Lisa"
• Vasily Zhukovsky. “Svetlana”, “Theon and Aeschines”, “The Forest King”, “Sea”, “I used to be a young muse...”
• Kondraty Ryleev. “To a temporary worker”, “Citizen”, “Oh, I’m sick of…”
• Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
• Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, odes, “Gypsies”, “Eugene Onegin”
• Vissarion Belinsky. "Works of Alexander Pushkin"
• George Gordon Byron. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (excerpts)
• Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, "Hero of Our Time"

9th grade

• Nikolai Gogol. "Dead Souls", vol. 1
• Vissarion Belinsky. “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls,” letter to Gogol, July 3, 1847
• Alexander Herzen. "Past and Thoughts"
• Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov"
• Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
• Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
• Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. "Messrs. Golovlevs"
• Leo Tolstoy. "Anna Karenina"
• Vladimir Lenin. “Leo Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian revolution”, “L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labor movement", "L. N. Tolstoy and his era"

10th grade

• Anton Chekhov. "Gooseberry", "Cherry Orchard"
• Maxim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “Konovalov”, “At the Bottom”, “The Artamonov Case”
• Vladimir Lenin about Maxim Gorky
• Vyacheslav Molotov. "In memory of A. M. Gorky"
• Alexander Serafimovich. "Iron Stream"
• Alexander Fadeev. "Devastation"
• Vladimir Mayakovsky. Poems
• Songs of the peoples of the USSR

By 1923-1925, literature as a subject disappeared from curricula, dissolving in social science. Now literary works were used as illustrations for the study of socio-political processes and phenomena in order to educate the younger generation in the communist spirit. However, in the second half of the 1920s, literature returned to the grid of subjects - significantly updated. For the next fifteen years, the program will be polished, adding works of Soviet literature.

By 1927, the GUS released a set of stabilized programs, that is, unchanged for the next four years. The teacher has less and less rights to replace some works with others. More and more attention is being paid to “social ideologies” - primarily revolutionary ideas and their reflection in the literature of the past and present. Half of the ninth, graduating class of the nine-year school was devoted to young Soviet literature, which had just celebrated its tenth anniversary: ​​next to Gorky, Blok and Mayakovsky the names of Konstantin Fedin, Vladimir Lidin, Leonid Leonov, Alexander Neverov, Lydia Seifullina, Vsevolod Ivanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Malyshkin, Dmitry Furmanov, Alexander Fadeev, most of whom are known today only to the older generation and specialists. The program outlined in detail how to interpret and from what angle to consider this or that work, sending for correct opinion to Marxist criticism.

In 1931, a draft of another stabilized program, even more ideologically verified, was prepared. However, the thirties themselves, with their upheavals and constant rush, the purge of elites and the restructuring of all the principles on which both the state and society rested, did not allow the programs to settle: during this time, as many as three generations of school textbooks were replaced. Stability came only in 1938-1939, when a program was finally prepared, which lasted without any special changes until the Khrushchev Thaw, and in its core - until today. The approval of this program was accompanied by the suppression of any attempts to experiment with the organization of the educational process: after the experiments with the introduction of the American method, which were considered unsuccessful, when the teacher had to not so much give new knowledge as organize independent activity students for their extraction and application in practice, the system returned to the traditional classroom-lesson form, known since pre-revolutionary times, where the teacher and textbook are the main sources of knowledge. Consolidation of this knowledge was carried out using a textbook - the same for all students. The textbook had to be read and taken down, and the knowledge gained should be reproduced as closely as possible to the text. The program strictly regulated even the number of hours allocated to a particular topic, and this time did not involve detailed work with the text, but the acquisition, memorization and reproduction of ready-made knowledge about the text without much reflection on what was read. The most important importance in the program was attached to memorizing works of art and their fragments, the list of which was also strictly defined.

At a meeting on the teaching of literature in high school, on March 2, 1940, the famous educator and literature teacher Semyon Gurevich expressed great concerns about the new approach:

“First of all, one big problem we have in teaching literature is that teaching has become a stencil... The stencil is incredible. If you throw out the last name and start talking about Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Nekrasov, etc., then they are all people’s people, they are all good and humane. The word “defacement” of literature, coined by someone, has occupied the same place in the teaching of literature as these sociological definitions occupied several years ago... If a few years ago children left school with the opinion that Nekrasov - this is a repentant nobleman, Tolstoy is a philosophizing liberal, etc., then now all writers are such amazing people, with crystalline characters, with wonderful works, who only dreamed of a social revolution.” 

At the end of the 1930s, the general list of the literature course coincided by more than two-thirds with the list of 1921  According to the calculations of the German researcher Erna Malygina.. They were still based on the works of Russian classics, but the main task of these works was rethought: they were ordered to tell about the “leaden abominations of life” under tsarism and the maturation of revolutionary sentiments in society. Young Soviet literature told about what these sentiments led to and what the successes were in building a new state of workers and peasants.

Literature lesson in 5th grade. At the blackboard — future Young Guard member Oleg Koshevoy. Ukrainian SSR, Rzhishchev, January 1941 TASS photo chronicle

The selection of works was determined not only by their unconditional artistic merits, but also by their ability to fit into the logic of the Soviet concept of literary development of the New and Contemporary times, reflecting the country’s progressive movement towards revolution, the construction of socialism and communism. In 1934, school education became ten years and the historical and literary course took three years instead of two. The works of folklore, Russian and Soviet literature faced another important educational task - to provide examples of genuine heroism, combat or labor, which young readers could look up to.

“To show the greatness of Russian classical literature, which educated many generations of revolutionary fighters, is enormous fundamental difference and the moral and political height of Soviet literature, to teach students to understand the main stages of literary development without simplification, without schematism - this is the historical and literary task of the course in grades VIII-X of secondary school.”  From the secondary school literature program for grades VIII-X, 1938.

Reducing hours and expanding the list: the collapse of hopes for updating the subject

After the devastation of the war and the first post-war years, there came a time of harsh ideological pressure and campaigns: entire branches of science became objects of repression, facts were distorted for the sake of ideology (for example, the superiority of Russian science and its primacy in most branches of scientific knowledge and technology was extolled). Under these conditions, the teacher turned into a conductor of the official line in education, and the school became a place where the student was subjected to ideological pressure. Humanities education is increasingly losing its humanistic character. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent thaw were accompanied by hope for changes in the country, including in the field of education. It seemed that the school would pay attention to the student and his interests, and the teacher would receive more freedom in organizing the educational process and selecting educational material.

Number of hours
429

8th grade

• "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
• Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
• Alexander Radishchev. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (selected chapters)
• Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
• Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, "Gypsies", "Eugene Onegin", "The Captain's Daughter"
• Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, "Mtsyri", "Hero of Our Time"
• Nikolai Gogol. “The Inspector General”, “Dead Souls”, vol. 1

9th grade

• Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov" (selected chapters)
• Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
• Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
• Nikolai Chernyshevsky. "What to do?" (selected chapters)
• Nikolay Nekrasov. Lyrics, “Who lives well in Rus'”
• Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. “The Tale of How One Man Fed Two Generals”, “Horse”, “The Wise Minnow”
• Leo Tolstoy. "War and Peace"
• William Shakespeare. "Hamlet"
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe. "Faust", part 1

10th grade

• Maxim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “At the Bottom”, “Mother”, “V. I. Lenin" (abbreviated)
• Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Left March”, “The Satisfied”, “To Comrade Nette - the Ship and the Man”, “Poems about the Soviet Passport”, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”, “Good!”, introduction to the poem “At the top of my voice”
• Nikolai Ostrovsky. "How the steel was tempered"
• Mikhail Sholokhov. "Virgin Soil Upturned"
• Alexander Fadeev. "Young Guard"

As already mentioned, the Soviet school canon that had developed by the end of the 1930s subsequently changed little. There was still no place in it for the “dubious” Dostoevsky and Yesenin, the melodramatic “Anna Karenina” with its “family thought” was replaced by the patriotic “War and Peace” with its “people’s thought” during the war years, and the modernist the currents of the turn of the century were squeezed into six hours at the very end of the ninth grade. The tenth, graduation, class was completely devoted to Soviet literature.

Schoolgirls in the Pushkin Museum-Reserve “Boldino”. 1965 Zhiganov Nikolay / TASS Photo Chronicle

During this period, the quadriga of Russian classics was determined, imprinted on the pediments of typical five-story school buildings of the 1950s: two great poets - the Russian pre-revolutionary genius Pushkin and the Soviet Mayakovsky - and two great prose writers - the pre-revolutionary Leo Tolstoy and the Soviet Gorky   At one time, instead of Tolstoy, Lomonosov was sculpted on the pediments, but his figure violated the geometric harmony of the quadrangular pyramid of the school canon, crowned by the first authors of his era (two poets - two prose writers, two pre-revolutionary - two Soviet authors).. The compilers of the program devoted especially much time to the study of Pushkin: in 1938 - 25 hours, in 1949 - already 37. The rest of the classics had to have their hours cut, since they simply did not fit into the ever-expanding time, primarily due to Soviet classics, school canon.

It was possible to talk not only about updating the composition of the school canon, but also about approaches to its formation and content, as well as the principles of organizing literary education in general, only in the second half of the 1950s, when it became clear that the country has set a course for some softening of the ideological regime. A publication for teachers, the magazine “Literature at School,” published transcripts of discussions of the draft of a new program in literature, as well as letters from ordinary teachers, school and university methodologists and librarians. There have been proposals to study the literature of the 20th century not just for one year, but for the last two years, or to include it in the course for grades 8-10. There were even brave souls who argued that War and Peace should definitely be studied in in full: According to teachers, most of their students were unable to master the text.

Literature lesson in 10th grade. A student reads a poem by Alexander Blok. Leningrad, 1980 Belinsky Yuri / TASS Photo Chronicle

However, the long-awaited program, released in 1960, was a big disappointment for everyone who was hoping for change. A larger volume had to be squeezed into an even smaller number of hours - the creators of the program suggested that teachers solve the problem themselves and somehow manage to complete everything prescribed without compromising the depth of comprehension.

Neither the study of some works in an abbreviated form, nor the reduction of hours on foreign literature helped. In the study of literature, the principles of systematicity and historicism were proclaimed: the living literary process fit into the Leninist concept of “three stages of the revolutionary liberation movement in Russia”  The periodization of the pre-revolutionary literary process in post-war programs and textbooks was based on the three stages of the revolutionary liberation movement in Russia, highlighted by Lenin in the article “In Memory of Herzen” (1912). The noble, razno-chinsky and proletarian stages in the history of literature corresponded to the first and second halves of the 19th century and the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. After this, the history of Russian literature ended, giving way to Soviet literature.. The material was still simply required to be memorized as presented by the teacher and/or textbook.

“It is necessary to warn teachers against an overly detailed analysis of a work, as well as against simplified interpretations of literary phenomena, as a result of which the study of fiction may lose its figurative and emotional essence.”  From the high school program for the 1960/61 academic year.

Educating feelings instead of ideology

After the thaw, the whole country lined up for the shortage - and not only for Yugoslav boots or domestic televisions, but also for good literature, shelves with which it became fashionable to decorate the interiors of apartments. The flourishing of the book market, including the underground, mass cinema, Soviet literary and illustrated magazines, television, and for some, became serious competition for the dull Soviet school subject “literature”, which could only be saved individual ascetics and teachers. To replace ideology in school literature the education of feelings comes: their spiritual qualities begin to be especially valued in heroes, and poetry in works.

Program composition
The list is gradually expanding, on the one hand, due to previously not recommended works of Russian classics (Dostoevsky), on the other, due to works of Soviet literature recent years, which should have been read independently followed by discussion in class

Number of hours
340

8th grade

• "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
• Jean-Baptiste Moliere. "A tradesman among the nobility"
• Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
• Alexander Pushkin. “To Chaadaev” (“Love, hope, quiet glory...”), “To the sea”, “I remember a wonderful moment...”, “Prophet”, “Autumn”, “On the hills of Georgia”, “I loved you...”, “Again I visited...”, “I erected a monument to myself...”, “Eugene Onegin”
• George Gordon Byron. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (Cantos I and II), "My Soul Is Gloomy"
• Mikhail Lermontov. “Death of a Poet”, “Poet”, “Duma”, “How often, surrounded by a motley crowd...”, “I go out alone on the road”, “Motherland”, “Hero of our time”
• Nikolai Gogol. "Dead Souls"
• Vissarion Belinsky. Literary critical activity

• Anatoly Aleksin. “Meanwhile, somewhere...”, “In the rear as in the rear”
• Chingiz Aitmatov. "Jamila", "The First Teacher"
• Vasil Bykov. "Alpine Ballad", "Until Dawn"
• Oles Gonchar. "Man and Weapon"
• Savva Dangulov. "Trail"
• Nodar Dumbadze. "I see the sun"
• Maksud Ibragimbekov. “For everything good - death!”
• “The names are verified. Poems of soldiers who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War»
• Vadim Kozhevnikov. "Towards the Dawn"
• Maria Prilezhaeva. “An Amazing Year”, “Three Weeks of Peace”
• Johan Smuul. "Ice Book"
• Vladislav Titov. "To Spite All Deaths"
• Mikhail Dudin, Mikhail Lukonin, Sergei Orlov. Selected Poems

9th grade

• Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
• Nikolai Dobrolyubov. "A Ray of Light in a Dark Kingdom"
• Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
• Nikolai Chernyshevsky. "What to do?"
• Nikolay Nekrasov. “Poet and Citizen” (excerpt), “In Memory of Dobrolyubov”, “Elegy” (“Let changing fashion tell us...”), “Who Lives Well in Rus'”
• Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. "The Wise Minnow", "The Wild Landowner"
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Crime and Punishment"
• Leo Tolstoy. "War and Peace"
• Anton Chekhov. “Ionych”, “The Cherry Orchard”
• William Shakespeare. Hamlet (review)
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe. "Faust": "Prologue in Heaven", scene 2 - "At the City Gate", scenes 3 and 4 - "Faust's Study", scene 12 - "Garden", scene 19 - "Night. The street in front of Gretchen's house", scene 25 - "Prison"; Faust's last monologue from Part II (review)
• Honore de Balzac. "Gobsek"

For discussions on Soviet literature

• Ales Adamovich. "Partisans"
• Sergey Antonov. "Alenka", "Rains"
• Mukhtar Auezov. "Abai"
• Vasil Bykov. "Obelisk"
• Boris Vasiliev. “And the dawns here are quiet...”
• Ion Druta. "Steppe Ballads"
• Afanasy Koptelov. “The Big Beginning”, “The Flame Will Kindle”
• Vilis Latsis. "To a new shore"
• Valentin Rasputin. "French Lessons"
• Robert Rozhdestvensky. "Requiem", "Letter to the 20th Century"
• Konstantin Simonov. "The Living and the Dead"
• Konstantin Fedin. “First Joys”, “An Extraordinary Summer”
• Vasily Shukshin. Selected stories

10th grade

• Maxim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “At the Bottom”, “Mother”, “V. I. Lenin"
• Alexander Blok. “Stranger”, “Factory”, “Oh, spring without end and without edge...”, “Russia”, “About valor, about exploits, about glory...”, “On the railway”, “Twelve”
• Sergei Yesenin. “Soviet Rus'”, “Letter to Mother”, “Uncomfortable liquid moonlight...”, “Bless every work, good luck!”, “To Kachalov’s dog”, “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...", "I'm walking through the valley. On the back of the cap...", "The golden grove dissuaded me...", "I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry..."
• Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Left March”, “Seated”, “About rubbish”, “Black and White”, “To Comrade Netta - the ship and the man”, “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love”, “Conversation with the financial inspector about poetry”, “Poems about the Soviet passport", "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin", "Good!", "At the top of my voice" (first introduction to the poem)
• Alexander Fadeev. "Devastation"
• Nikolai Ostrovsky. "How the steel was tempered"
• Mikhail Sholokhov. "Virgin Soil Upturned", "The Fate of Man"
• Alexander Tvardovsky. “I was killed near Rzhev”, “Two forges”, “On the Angara” (from the poem “Beyond the distance - the distance”)

Schoolchildren write an essay for the final exam. June 1, 1984 Kavashkin Boris / TASS Photo Chronicle

The number of hours allocated to literature in grades 8-10 continues to decline: in 1970 it was only 350 hours, in 1976 and for the next four decades - 340. The school curriculum is mainly replenished with works that are especially close to conservatives: in place of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel “The Golovlevs,” which was too critical of the traditional way of life, in the early 1970s the program included the novel “Crime and Punishment,” which contrasted the rebellion against existing order, the idea of ​​personal salvation. Next to the “urbanist” Mayakovsky stands the “peasant” Yesenin. The block is mainly represented by poems about the Motherland. "Mosfilm", "KinoPoisk"

Still from Sergei Solovyov's film " Stationmaster" 1972"Mosfilm", Kinomania.ru

Still from Vyacheslav Nikiforov’s film “The Noble Robber Vladimir Dubrovsky.” 1988"Belarusfilm", "KinoKopilka"

Still from Eldar Ryazanov’s film “ Cruel romance" 1984"Mosfilm", "KinoPoisk"

In the 1960-70s, films were made based on many works of the school canon, which immediately gained wide popularity: they solved the problems of both non-reading and adaptation of complex or historically distant meanings of classical works to their perception by the broad masses, shifting the emphasis from ideological issues to the plot, the feelings of the characters and their fates. The idea that classics is universal is becoming more and more firmly established: it seems to combine the accessibility of mass literature with the highly artistic quality of timeless masterpieces (in contrast to unrealistic works, especially “modernist” ones, addressed mainly to individual groups "aesthetes")

“Classical literature is literature that has reached the highest degree of perfection and has stood the test of time, preserving the meaning of the immortal creative example for all subsequent writers."  S. M. Florinsky. Russian literature. Textbook for 8th grade of secondary school. M., 1970.

Works about the revolution, the Civil War and collectivization are included in abbreviated or overview study (four hours on “How the Steel Was Tempered”) or in extracurricular reading  Concept extracurricular reading existed in gymnasiums, but in the 1930s it became regulated: it was proposed to choose from approved lists., the volume of which is increasing. But there are more and more works about the Great Patriotic War: eight hours, previously allotted for studying Sholokhov’s “Virgin Soil Upturned,” are now divided between this epic and the story “The Fate of a Man.” Literature last decades is read independently at home, after which one of four topics is discussed in class: the October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, the image of Lenin, the image of our contemporary in the works of modern authors. From 30 pro-statory works Soviet writers, offered to choose from for discussion in grades 8-9, ten books are devoted to wartime, three to the revolution and the Civil War, five to the life and work of Lenin. Nine of the 24 writers represent national literatures USSR. However, the very appearance of the section “For conversations on Soviet literature” became a sign of the approach of new times in domestic education, including literary education: from a lecture followed by a survey, a lesson at least sometimes turns into a conversation; At least some variability appears in the mandatory list, albeit only in the selection of works of the current literary process. And yet, despite these concessions, the literary education of the late Soviet era offered a falsified, ideologically and censorship-mangled history of Russian literature, in which there was no place for much. The authors of the 1976 program, the text of which migrated almost unchanged to the 1984 program, did not hide this:

“One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to show students what unites Soviet literature with the advanced heritage of the past, how it continues and develops the best traditions of classical literature, and at the same time to reveal the qualitatively new character of the literature of socialist realism, which is a step forward in artistic development humanity, the class basis of its universal communist ideal, the diversity and aesthetic richness of Soviet literature.”

Tenth graders before a Russian literature lesson. Kazakh SSR, 1989 Pavsky Alexander / TASS Photo Chronicle

In just a few years, another state will emerge in place of the USSR, and in place of the bloated mandatory list, an even more voluminous advisory state, finally, again, as in the early 1920s, entrusting the teacher with the right to choose from the proposed list. names and works, taking into account the interests and level of students. But this will be the history of the post-Soviet school canon, no less dramatic, in which the parent community, the teaching community, and even the country’s top leadership will take an active part.

2. The school and its students after 1935

School reform. New requirements for students in the field of knowledge and discipline. Relationships between students and teachers. Community service. The role of the Komsomol. Student interests and political sentiments

At this time, when reforms were carried out at the school, which I have already mentioned in passing, I studied at a pedagogical institute and did not directly observe the restructuring of the school’s work. I went to school again in 1935 after graduating from the Pedagogical Institute. Moreover, I began my teaching career not in high school, but in a technical school.

My observations dating back to the period when I taught at the technical school are also of great interest. Those who completed seven years of school went to technical schools. They rented entrance examination in a number of subjects, including Russian language and literature. Thus, I could get a fairly clear picture of the situation at the school, and I could imagine the knowledge with which seven-year students graduate.

True, I taught for two years at an agricultural technical school, where students came mainly from rural schools. In rural schools, as a rule, student literacy was lower. Therefore, in order to imagine the situation in urban schools, some adjustments need to be made to the information regarding rural schools.

The exam for those entering the technical school was not very strict. A dictation was given, several questions on grammar and two or three questions on literature. In dictations, examinees made from 2 to 40 errors. We also had to accept those who made 10-15 mistakes. My notes contain information that in 1938 (student admission took place in mid-August, there were 250 candidates for 120 places) a Komsomol member who made 40 syntactic and spelling errors was accepted into the first year of the technical school. They accepted her at the insistence of the party organization of the technical school: she had some recommendations along the party line.

I can’t help but tell you about some curious answers from literature, which were also preserved in my notes.

The examinee tells the biography of Nekrasov and says the following: “Nekrasov’s father wanted to enlist in the White Guards, but Nekrasov did not want to join the army”...

The examinee analyzes Chekhov's story “The Intruder.” Wrinkles.

The teacher asks him:

“Well, was the peasant convicted?”

The examinee, after thinking, answers:

“Yes, he was given forced labor.”

The examinee talks about Furmanov’s story “Chapaev”. It also wrinkles. He speaks quietly, incoherently.

The teacher asks him:

“Who was the commissar in Chapaev’s division?”

The examinee hesitates and answers:

“This, what’s his name, Kolchak.”

The first two answers, as we see, are a consequence of Soviet upbringing, a consequence of the impact on the consciousness of students environment, Soviet reality. Forced labor, White Guards - words and concepts of the Soviet period, perceived uncritically, refracted in the student’s mind into a historical past that was different in both form and content.

These answers, which at first only cause a smile, should be thought about, and then we will see much more. We will see that some of our youth do not know the past of Russia, its history, do not know, first of all, what is good in this past, cannot compare it with the present, with Soviet reality. Ignorance of Russia's past, ignorance of the Western world deprives our youth, perhaps not all, but a significant part of them, of the criterion with which they could approach Soviet reality.

Thus, these answers, curious at first glance, contain a deep meaning and indicate the processes that are taking place in the minds of young people.

The third answer of the examinee, about Kolchak, is apparently explained by ignorance of literature in general, low educational level, and ignorance, in particular, of history Civil War. Oddly enough, the history of the Civil War was not studied in schools.

The examples of answers given are not absolute exceptions. I knew about similar answers from the stories of familiar teachers.

However, based on these answers, one should not draw a conclusion about the low development and low educational level of all students and all school graduates. Along with the examples given, I could give examples that testify to the exceptionally high level of development of students even in rural schools, to their great erudition. As a rule, a high level of development was achieved not so much in the process of studying at school, but in the process of self-education, in the process of reading.

And one more thing should be noted. Already in political terms. Also, as a rule, brilliant students (I'm talking about those who came to technical schools from rural schools) were the children of dispossessed peasants, often orphans whose parents died in exile. I do not want to say by this that our people have gifted and untalented strata, although wealthy peasants were, of course, distinguished by great abilities and great hard work. But still, I would not like to select any layer. The phenomenon I am talking about was explained, in my opinion, by slightly different reasons. For several years, children of the dispossessed were denied access not only to higher educational institutions, but also to secondary ones, such as technical schools. And even to high schools. There were areas where the children of the dispossessed were not given the opportunity to study even in high school. As I already said, the children of the dispossessed, like everyone else whom the Bolsheviks did not give the opportunity to study, bypassed the barriers established by the authorities: they left their homes, obtained forged documents, and studied. But, of course, not everyone, not everyone managed to break through the slingshots of Bolshevik laws.

In October or November 1934 last page Izvestia and Pravda published a short article in the chronicle department, which reported that the Council of People's Commissars had made a decision lifting restrictions on the admission of socially alien children to higher educational institutions.

The next year, thousands of young men and women, whose social background had not yet given them the opportunity to study, came to universities, institutes, and technical schools. Those who had just graduated from school came, as well as those who graduated from school a year, two, three, four years ago. This whole mass of young people, having supplemented their knowledge by self-education, passionately desired to learn, easily paved their way through competitive exams to higher educational institutions and technical schools. It is also quite natural that these young people studied well.

It is no coincidence that I dwelled on this question. After all, it has a purely specific character, inherent only to the Soviet school, the Soviet country. No other country has anything like it. There is only one thing: obstacles of a material nature, which, by the way, have always existed in the USSR, although to a much lesser extent. Since 1940, since the introduction of tuition fees in grades 8-10, the obstacle of a material nature in the USSR is as great as in capitalist countries. If we take into account the low standard of living in the USSR, the insecurity of such sections of the population as workers and peasants, then it can be argued that the material obstacles to studying in the USSR are more significant than in many capitalist countries. It is just as difficult for a poor family in the USSR to educate their children as in the most backward country. And maybe even more difficult.

Let me now return to the main issue of this part of my work: school after 1935.

In 1936, I came to the school as a teacher of Russian language and literature. In the six years since I last set foot in the school, significant changes have occurred. But much remains the same.

The changes that took place at the school concerned, first of all, the organization of teaching. The laboratory, team method was canceled as not justified. I would add to this: as having crippled several generations. Complete system teaching was replaced by subject teaching. A lesson was introduced as the only compulsory form of education. Exams were introduced, which at first were called tests, a marking system from “very bad” to “excellent”, and then a digital system - from one to five. Students were now subject to significantly higher demands than before, both in the field of knowledge and in the field of discipline.

Training began using textbooks. One after another, standard textbooks appeared in all subjects.

These reforms undoubtedly produced positive changes: every year the general educational level of students began to increase, their development increased, discipline was raised through indoctrination and, mainly, repressive measures. Students who committed gross violations of discipline or systematically failed were even expelled from school. Exception, however, was considered a last resort measure. In 1939-40, school principals generally stopped expelling discipline violators and underachievers, since all responsibility for student misconduct and poor performance was placed on teachers and school principals. They were accused of “failing to influence students.”

As I have already indicated, as a result of the reforms carried out, the level of knowledge increased and, say, in 1940, ten-year secondary schools (the reform introduced ten-year education instead of nine years) produced quite literate people.

But the same cannot be said about discipline; it cannot be said that discipline has improved significantly. It would be worthwhile to understand the reasons for this phenomenon. Soon after the main reforms were carried out, the law on universal education (universal education), on universal seven-year education, was issued. Parents were now required to send their children to school. Teachers were obliged to use measures of suggestion, measures of persuasion to attract all children to study at school.

Now those children have come to school who, for various reasons, primarily due to the financial insecurity of their families, did not attend it. Some of these children worked, others did nothing at all. The so-called neglected, half-orphans also came to school; some of them had no mothers, others had no fathers. Street children came to school, with appropriate behavior, of course. They immediately shook discipline at school, and then it was very difficult to cope with them. They skipped classes and violated discipline in class. It was literally the scourge of teachers and school administration.

The second reason for the decline in discipline was the events of 1937, mass arrests in the country. Many families were left without fathers, their financial situation was shaken, and children stopped attending school. Anti-Bolshevik sentiments intensified in the school itself. Protest against the regime was sometimes expressed among children in the form of violation of school discipline.

Finally, the third reason for the decline in discipline was determined by the introduction of tuition fees. Students no longer look at studying at school as a benefit that the state does to them. The students began to behave somewhat defiantly. At the same time, studying became no worse, but better, because excellent students were exempted from tuition fees. Just as in higher education, excellent academic performance ensured the right to receive a scholarship.

The introduction of the lesson system and all other changes in the school increased the role of the teacher and at the same time increased his responsibility. I will talk about this later. Now I will note only one thing that is directly related to students. The teacher began to enjoy great respect and love from the students. Of course, there were still favorite and unloved teachers, the unloved were still assigned nicknames, trouble was caused, etc., but the teacher’s personality itself began to enjoy, undoubtedly, greater respect and authority. The more knowledge the teacher showed of his subject, the more interesting his lessons were, the more respect the students had for him. The teacher, on the one hand, rose in the eyes of students as an authority, as a person passing on his knowledge to them, on the other hand, he approached them as an educator, as a senior comrade, as a moral authority.

The role of social work in the life of the school has clearly decreased. He still sat as a teacher, OSOAVIAHIM and MOPR still existed, but when moving from class to class, when assessing the success of students, only their knowledge was taken into account, while before social work also played a role: a student who had bad grades but who actively worked as a social activist could count on being transferred to the next class precisely as a social activist. Student committees still sent their representatives to meetings of pedagogical councils, but these representatives did not have the decisive vote as before.

The role of the Komsomol remained the same, perhaps even increased. The Komsomol organization could not, say, interfere with great success in determining a student’s performance, but it intervened from the other side, it looked for political motives for certain actions of teachers that seemed to it non-Bolshevik. Approaching from this side, the Komsomol organization interfered directly with the work of the teacher.

At closed Komsomol meetings, certain actions of teachers were discussed, the teacher’s work and teaching were criticized. They were looking for a teacher in teaching, if this was needed along the way, who was non-Soviet, inconsonant with the era, as they say there. The Komsomol organization could, along its Komsomol-party line, begin persecution against a teacher it did not like. This especially applies to the years of Yezhovshchina. I will say below about the party organization, which included mainly teachers.

Now about the interests and political sentiments of students. First of all, it must be said that the interests of students in our school are much broader and deeper than the interests of students in Western schools. I mean, first of all, the German school, which I know a little. In this comparison, I would not like to touch upon the education system itself. This is the business of every people. From our point of view, teaching in an American school, for example, is unsatisfactory. From the American point of view, perhaps such an education system is in the interests of the nation. I repeat - I do not touch on this issue. But we can talk about the breadth of interests of students in our school and in the West. At the same time, I would not like the reader to attribute the good things that exist in our school, among our youth, to the influence of the Bolshevik regime. No, not thanks to, but in spite of the Bolshevik regime, our youth acquired the good things they have. Both her interests and her demands are not from Bolshevism, but from the eternal features of our Russian character. The desire for knowledge, for deep knowledge, the desire for continuous expansion of the circle of knowledge and interests, passion for issues of philosophy, history, literature has always been characteristic of Russian youth. Our youth have always received, so to speak, a double education: one in an educational institution, on the student and student bench, the other in libraries, in museums, in theaters, at their home desk. After all, only in our country the term self-education has such a broad and deep meaning.

The Bolsheviks tried to lead young people away from science, from literature into the area of ​​specific politics and the public, which set only one goal: maintaining and strengthening the regime. In the late twenties and early thirties, some young people became interested in social and political work, at the expense of knowledge and success in the sciences. Since the mid-thirties, one could observe a sharp decline in interest in public work. The interests of young people switched to science, to learning, to the work of various circles - literary, historical, physical, etc., to self-education. Interest in the book has increased. According to the testimony of library workers, mainly to classical literature, Russian and Western. Interest in the theater increased, and performances were attended mainly with classical things. If in the late twenties and early thirties students showed interest in technical circles, before the war it was replaced by interest in the humanities.

In making the above comparison of our school with the West, our youth with youth in the West, I did not want to say that all youth in the West are deprived of spiritual and scientific needs. To say so is to make a grave mistake. But it still seems to me that the layer of young people who are not devoid of such requests is much wider in our country. We have a larger percentage of young people with interests that go beyond the basketball court.

By the way, about sports. We are also fond of sports, we love sports, but not to the detriment of other interests, not to the detriment of learning.

It is most difficult to talk about the political sentiments of young people. Here we take on great responsibility. But let’s not be afraid of it, because this, from my point of view, is one of the main issues in the problem of characterizing the Soviet school.

What, in the end, did the Bolsheviks achieve? Did they achieve the results they sought? Does the school educate citizens truly devoted to the cause of Lenin-Stalin or not? Does it educate ideological supporters of communism or not? Answers to these questions must be given. The general short answer is yes, our school educates ideological communists or no, our youth are anti-communist, this answer cannot be limited to, such an answer cannot be given. The question is too complicated. The only short answer is this: no, the Bolsheviks did not achieve the results they were striving for and counting on. We can say: our youth, like our entire people, won, they did not submit to the Bolsheviks, did not break, did not allow themselves to be made into an obedient instrument of Bolshevik politics.

The heroes of A. Fadeev’s documentary novel “The Young Guard,” Oleg Koshevoy and his comrades, students of the Soviet school, died in the fight against the Germans during the war. They organized an underground that fought against the Germans, fought together with the ideological Bolsheviks, defending the Bolshevik regime. That's true. But the real driving force in this struggle was not Soviet, but Russian patriotism. Love for the Motherland – Russia – is what motivated the young underground fighters. In the oath that the underground fighters of Krasnodon, like the underground fighters of our other cities, took, there was not a word about Bolshevism or Stalin. Only about the Motherland. A significant phenomenon!

The tragedy of Russian youth is that in the last war, while defending Russia, they also defended Bolshevism and covered it with their breasts. We can say with confidence that throughout the thirties, anti-Bolshevik sentiment grew and expanded among young people. What explains this? Where are the reasons for this phenomenon?

Firstly, this is explained by the general growth of anti-Bolshevik sentiment among the people. Secondly, the disappointment of young people.

If at the end of the twenties some young people were captivated by the prospects of the expanding industrialization of the country, captured - there is no need to hide this - by the pathos of construction, then at the end of the thirties not a trace remained of this pathos. Instead of the wide distances that the Bolsheviks so beautifully and temptingly painted, young man or the girl has nothing left but the end - in the very best case scenario– university and work on the outskirts of the country or in the rural wilderness. Knowing about the true sentiments of young people, the Bolsheviks at that time began to talk a lot about their duty to the people and the country, which, according to them, consisted in precisely such ordinary work. To work where the “party and government” sends, to do your own, perhaps small, but very important thing, important in the general course of “building socialism.” A positive hero has appeared in literature - a student graduating from higher education. educational institution and dreaming of his future work as an agronomist in the Kuban village or a forester in the Siberian taiga. I remember one of E. Krieger’s talented essays in Izvestia about a small accountant of some collective farm in the Vologda region, who finally understood the meaning of the mission he was performing. The pathos of small affairs could not, naturally, captivate the youth, before whom only yesterday wide vistas were opening up. Communist, but still given, which beckoned with their apparent grandeur and apparent nobility of purpose. In the pathos of those distant years, strings of internationalism sounded not only destructive: “We study and work not only for ourselves, but also for all humanity.”

Disappointment in the ideas of communism set in long before the Bolsheviks turned all their propaganda towards patriotism. With the idea of ​​Soviet patriotism, the Bolsheviks hastened to fill the gap that was formed in the consciousness of young people as a result of the collapse of the ideas of communism. The first crushing, truly crushing blow to communist ideas, and in general to the passion of young people for “building communism,” was dealt by collectivization. The second final blow is Yezhovshchina. In the spring of 1940, I gave a lecture at an agricultural technical school. During the lecture, I quoted the words of V.G. Belinsky, written by him in 1840 about how he envies his descendants who will see Russia in 1940, blooming, beautiful. When I read this quote, there was laughter in the audience. I pretended that nothing had happened. But that's not the point. The reaction of the students itself is important; the reaction of many is completely instinctive. After all, this was not an organized demonstration. No, laughter burst out against their will: the words of the great critic seemed so wild to them, who envied them, who saw the devastation of the village during collectivization, and the famine that followed collectivization, who saw poverty and tyranny all around.

“I was jealous,” one of the students burst out, and his intelligent eyes flashed with such indescribable sarcasm that I still remember them. The example, in my opinion, is quite vivid and convincing, proving that young people understood what was happening around them, were aware of where the Bolsheviks had led the country and people.

Another example is no less convincing. A teacher from Simferopol told me that in the tenth grade of one of the city’s high schools there was not a single Komsomol member. Unfortunately, my notes did not contain the school number. No matter how much the Komsomol organization of the school (by the way, very insignificant) tried to involve tenth grade students in the Komsomol, it could not do anything. Students, citing their workload with classes and homework, avoided submitting applications to the Komsomol. Moreover, they did not behave defiantly, realizing that in this way everything could be ruined.

However, based on the above facts, one should not draw conclusions about the anti-Bolshevik sentiments of all young people, without any exception. A certain part of it, primarily the Komsomol activists and some of the non-party people, continue to follow the Bolsheviks. It is very difficult to determine this part of young people in some numbers. We can only say one thing: this is an insignificant part, but it still exists.

Some part of the youth actively participates in the life of the country, at least in the same construction, because a person has an ineradicable desire for creativity, for applying his strength in a task, the results of which a person could see. And now he sees the factories he is building, the hospitals whose designs he is drawing. It takes a lot of willpower to realize that behind all this is the black specter of Bolshevism, whose goals are contrary to the interests of the people. People are realizing, people are seeing this ghost more and more clearly - anti-Bolshevik sentiment is growing and deepening both among the entire people and among young people. They grow and deepen, despite the propaganda that permeates all life, despite the many years of influence of the school, which is placed at the service of Bolshevism.

What can be said about the results of communist education in Soviet schools? It is safe to say that this result is many times less than the efforts expended by the Bolsheviks. This result is also insignificant because the youth themselves, seeing the discrepancy between propaganda and reality, successfully resisted the Bolsheviks’ attempts to completely subjugate the younger generation. Our teacher largely contributes to this resistance among young people.

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c) The second main department of the MGB after 1970 The consequences of the construction of the Berlin Wall required not only the BND to develop a new strategy for operational work. The Ministry of State Security also had to respond to changing conditions. Although at first

From the book Diary of a Former Communist [Life in Four Countries of the World] author Kowalski Ludwik

Esoteric school after Westcott's death It must be emphasized that the very term “Esoteric school” is a recent invention and describes a scientific style that has never before been formalized and brought together into a single coherent system by certain specific people.

From the book Cathedral Courtyard author Shchipkov Alexander Vladimirovich

School of Hate. School of Love The academic year in Donetsk began on October 1, a month late. First-graders went to school to the sounds of festive songs, volleys of Grad rocket launchers, in an atmosphere of daily tragedy. Ukrainian military holding the front line in

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2.4. Two years after I fell in love. Today I went to a meeting of the district committee of the ZMP [Union of Polish Youth]. It was dedicated to cooperation with the L13 factory [Later it became the Rosa Luxemburg factory]. Our task was to help them organize a discussion

From the book The Word and “Deed” by Osip Mandelstam. Book of denunciations, interrogations and indictments author Nerler Pavel

From Litvinenko's book. Investigation [Report on the death of Alexander Litvinenko] author Owen Sir Robert

1. The school and its students until 1936. Two periods in the life of the school. The first - until the mid-1930s. Laboratory method of training. Lack of textbooks. The role of social work in school life. The role of the Komsomol. Insufficient education. Resistance of teachers. In order to have sufficient

From the book Mortal Confrontation of Nazi Leaders. Behind the scenes of the Third Reich author Emelyanov Yuri Vasilievich

‹1› Certificate of the GUGB NKVD No. 23 dated July 2, 1935 with a description of the poems of O.E. Mandelstam “Cold Spring...” and “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” “APPROVED” Head of the USO GUGB NKVD (GENKIN) Zubkin July 2, 1935 REFERENCE No. 23 About the poem “Cold” spring" and

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‹11› Dactogram O.E. Mandelstam, filmed in the transit camp after his death, December 27, 1938 POL M. 13 83495 ‹Surname Mandelstam D‹acto-›form‹s› 17 73565 ‹Name› Osip ‹Patronymic› Emilievich Place of birth died 27/XII– 38 Year of birth› 1891 ‹Prints follow

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Careers of Kovtun and Lugovoy after 2006 9.179 Professor Service said about the fate of Lugovoy and Kovtun in Russia after the death of Litvinenko: “A protective wall was built around Lugovoy and Kovtun. Although Kovtun did not, in essence, avoid public attention, he gave

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Chapter 16. After May 1, 1945 The fact that the Dönitz government began to increase the efforts hitherto made by Himmler and his people to improve relations with the Western allies was evidenced by the activities of Schellenberg himself, who, at the insistence of the SS chief, was