The Early Soviet Model of Marxist Pedagogy and Socialist Education

This study deals with the complex process of forming the model of Marxist pedagogy and a Socialist educational system in the post-revolutionary specific conditions of the Soviet Union in the twenties. It deals in greater detail whit the problem of values and the criteria of evaluation, the relationships of revolution relating education, politics and pedagogy, the antithesis of Marx—Tolstoy—Dewey and the dynamics of the new educational reality. The problems of the antithesis and the synthesis of revolution and evolution, historical continuity and discontinuity, the forward movement and the necessary stabilization in the field of schools, education and pedagogy, too, were then fully unveiled in one sixth of the world in an unrepeatable revolutionary ethos. Blonskij, together with Krupskaya, was the first theoretician of Soviet Marxist pedagogy. In 1919, proceeding from the antithesis Marx—Tolstoy—Dewey, he tried to construct the image of a uniform working school, in which the tradition of domestic protest against the traditional European school was linked whit the model of the modern American school and from the very first post-revolutionary months represented feverish efforts to create the external and Internal model of a school in keeping with Marx’s ideals. This model was verified in an atmosphere of violent dynamics of educational and classroom practice, in which there was a tension between the quantity, an unprecedented external growth of educational institutions, the rate of this growth, and the quality of results achieved by the educational work of the school, between the far-reaching democratization of educational values and a certain levelling of education which accompanies great social upheavals, between the introduction of a state school system and the human individual in a country where besides the tradition of a democratic and revolutionary movement there was also a strong tradition of nihilism, anarchism and independent education. The study presents a number of problems which will have to be solved on a broader basis of comparative studies and in co-operation with historians of pedagogy and educationalists not only in the socialist countries but also in the capitalist countries.