Andrey Ivanovich Savin,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of History 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.
General Education School in the RSFSR in the 1930s: From the Experiment of “Polytechnization” to Traditional Training
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2025-1-3
The article analyzes the system of school education in Soviet Russia in the 1930s as the main source of student recruitment. Based on a wide range of sources, the author analyzed the radical transformations of school education during the “cultural revolution” of the early 1930s. First of all, it provoked the liquidation of schools of the 2nd level, as well as the so-called “polytechnization” of the educational process. These transformations were caused by the leftist ideas of leading figures of the People’s Commissariat of Education, headed by N. Krupskaya and A. Bubnov. They stated the need to make the secondary school “proletarian”, transform it into an element of industrial production and the collective farm system, as well as the need to replace the “semi-bourgeois” school of the 2nd level with working faculties, technical colleges and schools of factory apprenticeship. Revolutionary transformations in the school education system were designed to complement the radical transformation of higher education aimed at the maximum simplification and acceleration of the process of training specialists. The article concludes that these innovations literally called into question the very existence of the school as an effective educational institution capable of directly providing trained personnel for vocational and higher education and indirectly − for the national economy and management. This is clearly proved by the actions of the top Party-Soviet leadership, which quickly realized the need to choose between the “pluses” of polytechnization of school education in the form of making schoolchildren “labor force” and the “minuses” of the failure of general education theoretical training, and, as a consequence, the failure of the entire system of vocational and higher education. As a result, in 1932 the classical classroom-lesson system of education was restored, the last vestige of polytechnic school − labor education − was cancelled as an independent subject in March 1937. The main task of general education school was declared to be the quality of training, in parallel to the normalization and unification of the educational process.
Publishing: 24/02/2025
The article has been received by the editor on 01/02/2025
How to cite: Savin A.I. General Education School in the RSFSR in the 1930s: From the Experiment of “Polytechnization” to Traditional Training // Historical Courier, 2025, No. 1 (39), pp. 35–48. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2025/ISTKURIER-2025-1-03.pdf]
The article was completed within the framework of the topic of the state assignment of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation “Society and Power in Russia in the 20th − Early 21st Centuries: Political Participation, Communication, Identity of Actors” (FWZM-2024-0008).
Links: Issue 1 2025
Keywords: RSFSR; general education school; 2nd level school; People’s Commissariat of Education; “cultural revolution”; polytechnization; students