Perestroika - Education After Perestroika

Education After Perestroika

In the prevalent 70 years of Perestroika, Russian individuals were categorized by scientific and cultural approaches. It was believed that the thought process of a person was strictly designated toward one particular social class. In reality, there were two different classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. This categorization system did not affect everyone, of course, but the general population belonged to one set of minds aside from others.

This approach was used due to its simplicity and ease of enforcement. The task of differentiating a friend from a foe was a remarkably easy thing to do, only in accordance to the “touchstone of class affiliation”. The only way to take out this battle between the two minds sets, was the liquidation of the opposing power – hidden undertones of the term liquidation were exile, confinement in a labour camp or physical extermination were the. According to Stalin, peasants at the time have been liquidated.

At the same time, civilians of Russia didn’t just see deaths as just the physical take on, they saw it as a death of an idea or a new ideology. This destruction of ideas lead to the belief that achievements, artworks or unpublished writings were all intellectual significances that were simply deleted from the face of the earth. This death penalty was a result of refusal to conform to the stated ideal of proletarian culture, science, painting and education along with many other factors. This resulted in an overload of ideologies by the end of the 1920’s in the areas of science and education in the Soviet educational system. Russian individuals came up with rather new ideologies: “Everything that was progressive, was considered to be a proletariat way of thinking, and everything “reactionary” were deemed as capitalist ideas and were in need of re-instatement, or even worse, deletion.” At the time, there was no such idea that belonged to the general human value that rose above class boundaries. It was as simple as a community being “our people” or “our enemies”; same goes for individuals.

Before teachers were trained for the job, they were taught the history of ideas from both “progressive” and “reactionary” thinker’s points of view. The information that was learned by these teachers was believed to be the “most progressive” and “scientifically based”. But of course there is also a less successful side to this type of educational teaching: a turn on the situation occurred with the introduction of computers. By this time, any ideas that were present during the perestroika were shaved down. That lead to the beginning of self- criticism of Soviet education by educationalists, which further lead to newspaper articles and journals describing: “never had there been a worse thing than Soviet education.”