Irina Aleksandrovna Krayneva,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Academician Andrey Ershov: “From Students’ Computer Literacy to the Information Culture of Society”
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2025-1-16
The Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences gave birth to a number of educational initiatives. The most prominent among them include the School of Physics and Mathematics and Summer School of Young Programmers, which are focused on the development of the national scientific and engineering clusters. The article dwells on the cultural and socio-political context, which dictated the adoption of appropriate decisions at the government level in the field of social engineering, and on the implementation of these decisions in the USSR. From the outset, the Soviet regime was concerned with the social problem of creating a “new” person. This was an ideal type of a conscious, organized and happy personality − the builder of a communist society. Education was given great importance in achieving this goal. Let us recall Lenin’s “study, study, and study”. In general, education was supposed to solve not only the problems of cognitive development, but also meet the political, ideological and economical demands of the authorities. If the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism (1961) focused on the moral principles in the life of society, in the late Soviet period the challenges of the emerging post-industrial society it came to the fore. During perestroika, there was a need to reform Soviet education based on computerization. The inspirer and executor of the reform, Academician A.P. Ershov firmly believed that the socialist USSR would successfully cope with the school reform. He saw the renewed Soviet society as an information society. Ershov proposed the concept of the infosphere − a global infrastructure of electronic means of storing, processing and transmitting information. The concept of an “information society person” is expressed by A.P. Ershov’s thesis “Programming is the second literacy”. It has been found that, similarly to other countries, the initiative came from the bottom up, but the informatization of education, like other forms of its development, took the form of a national program with the support of the authorities. The national program for education informatization was implemented in 1984−1988 basing on experimental work with schoolchildren and its theoretical generalization carried out by the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Publishing: 24/02/2025
The article has been received by the editor on 05/09/2024
How to cite: Krayneva I.A. Academician Andrey Ershov: “From Students’ Computer Literacy to the Information Culture of Society” // Historical Courier, 2025, No. 1 (39), pp. 233−249. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2025/ISTKURIER-2025-1-16.pdf]
Links: Issue 1 2025
Keywords: academician A.P. Ershov; computer literacy; national program of education informatization; infosphere; history of science and education