This article describes and analyses the present-day handling of questions concerning the theory of the content of education in the USSR and its researches, it is pointed out that significant prerequisites for constituting the present-day general didactic theory of the content of education were the formation of methodological fundamentals of general didactics and the conception of the content of education understood as generalized social experience. A comprehensive approach, orientation on practice-related problems, and respect for the school reality are the common features of present-day researches.
Some conceptions are analysed, especially V. V. Krayevsky’s theory of the creation of the content of education, which is of methodological significance, and then Yu. K. Babansky’s conception of optimizing the content of education, which defines the criteria for selecting the content of education. The authors of this article also mention concrete researches into the content of education linked with the creation of documents. They represent the most modern and non-traditional ways of syllabus-making, the works quoted being those by V. M. Monakhov and N. A. Loshkaryova. Researches appraised as very intensive are the researches into education in school textbooks which are being carried out and coordinated by a research team of the Prosveshcheniye publishing house, whose authors include primarily D. D. Zuyev, Ya. A. Mikk and L P. Doblayev.