Now there is a lot of debate about what modern education should be like. What if you look back?

It was

Experimental Demonstration School-Commune named after K. Liebknecht under the leadership of Vsevolod Fedorovich Lubentsov, later an honored teacher of Uzbekistan.

Many people know about the Makarenko labor colony, since books have been written and films have been made on this topic.
And the school under the leadership of V.F. Lubentsova turned out to be undeservedly forgotten. There is very little material on it.

Here are published the memoirs of one of the students of this school, Vladimir Sergeevich Nesterov.
Unfortunately, he did not finish his memories, but even what is there is of great interest. In addition, here are letters from V.S. Nesterov, in which we are talking about school.

Also, all these perceptions were published in a book, mainly devoted to work in the field of archeology, which V.S. Nesterov worked after retiring.
But this book was published in a very small edition and was distributed among local historians of Obninsk and Kaluga. (Obninsk local historian Vladimir Sergeevich Nesterov. Memoirs. Collection of works. Moscow 2009 Compiled by Nesterov A.V., Danilova M.A.)

1. SCHOOL YEARS.
V.S. NESTEROV

To the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the Experimental Demonstration Plant
Skoda-Commune named after K. Liebknecht

I was sent to primary school at the age of seven. The next year, at the insistence of my mother, I took the exam and was accepted into the Real School. This meant transferring across the class, because Real's preparatory class corresponded to the third grade of elementary school. Therefore, in the future I was always the youngest in age and one of the smallest in height in the class. Nevertheless, I studied well, and although I was not “first,” I was usually one of the best in the class.
The revolution found the parents' family in Tashkent. I completely omit the description of revolutionary events here, because... I don’t want to distract from the main theme of the story. In the childhood of 1917, I heard from the guys that at the hippodrome, where I often ran to watch the flights of the antediluvian Farmans and Newpars, some kind of student team was organized for drying vegetables. They seem to welcome everyone there, feed them, the guys live in tents and in the open air. The next day, grabbing a blanket, I was there. Everything turned out exactly as described. I was put on some kind of list and half an hour later, together with other guys, I diligently began to lay out freshly chopped vegetables on plywood boards laid out right on the ground under the hot Central Asian sun. The matter turned out to be not difficult, entertaining, and for me, accustomed to school boredom and books, completely unusual. The guys, both boys and girls, worked willingly. The only rule there was: “If you want to work, you’re welcome, if you don’t want to, good riddance!”
On the very first day I had to witness such a scene. The drying center was a barracks where vegetables were brought. There were also shredders - machines for cutting vegetables, like large meat grinders. 15-17 year old boys and girls worked for them. And then some kind of commotion arose in their crowd, screams were heard, many were running with buckets and dousing each other. The girls, as expected, squealed, but tried to keep up with the guys. Among this crowd was a rather stout, mustachioed man in a wet, unbuttoned shirt, who laughed infectiously and took an active part in the merry melee.
This is how my first acquaintance with Vsevolod Fedorovich LUBENTSOV, later the head of our school, and currently one of the professors at Tashkent University, took place. Before the revolution, he was a literature teacher in the senior classes of the Tashkent Real School. But I didn’t know him there and, apparently, didn’t even meet him.
The 1917-1918 academic year was the last year of my stay in Real. In the spring of 1918, I graduated from the third grade of the Real School, which corresponds to the sixth grade of a modern school. I was 12 years old at that time.
In the summer of 1918, my mother sent me to the mountains. There, also consisting of students, but only adults, an artel for cultivating the land was organized. To feed me during the summer, my mother gave me a five-pound sack of flour, and in addition - a blanket, two changes of linen, a bar of soap so that I could do my own laundry, and a pack of paper for writing letters home.
I have thousands of new impressions from this summer. For the first time I had to ride on an Uzbek cart for more than a hundred kilometers. We were traveling together, me and one of the members of the artel, Volodya Panfilov, a strong guy about 18 years old. A year later, he died in Fergana during a battle with the Basmachi. Night driving, daytime rest in villages, stories about mudflows - mud flows of incredible power, rolling down from the mountains after heavy rains, rock layers, rocks, mountain ranges and stormy rivers bent by the powerful forces of nature - all this still lives in my memory.
The following was found in place. In the tiny Uzbek village of Shchungak, located one hundred kilometers from Tashkent in the valley of the Chatkal River, an artel of 15-20 young men aged 16-18 settled on a plot of land of about 10 hectares. The organizer of the artel was the same V.F. Lubentsov. Here I got to know him much better. Since I was the smallest, I was only involved in light field work, but herding bulls became my main occupation. For two summer months I turned into a shepherd. Near Shchungak, the Chatkal valley is about 3 kilometers wide. It is surrounded on all sides by mountains. A significant part of the valley is cultivated. In the middle of it, Chatkal dug a real canyon with vertical walls 50 meters deep and there he rushes and roars. You will drive the bulls beyond the cultivated fields to Chatkal, lie down among the drying grass and admire the perspective of the pointed mountains. The sun rolls across the bottomless, cloudless dark blue sky, cicadas ring in different voices and a soft, gentle wind blows. While the bulls were grazing, he was busy catching cicadas and planting them in matchboxes, then he went to a slope completely occupied by an impenetrable mass of wild roses, picked and chewed their various berries, then wandered in another neighboring place, where mountain cherries grew in abundance (a small shrub 5 in height 40 centimeters) and picked up full handfuls of its slightly astringent berries. Often, when I went out to pasture, I would take Rostand or Molière with me and, sitting down in the shade of the stones, I would read them.
Subsequently, I had the opportunity to visit the mountains many times and see beautiful places, compared with which Shungak is a pitiful hole. But in those days, “all the impressions of existence were new to me,” and to this day they remain the same in my memory. Here I learned that Vsevolod Fedorovich is a man of strong waves, unbreakable and following his own paths. His entire adult life was filled with endless searches, organizational hassles and experiments. The Hippodrome and Shungak, as well as his other undertakings, were preparatory steps for setting up experiments to develop general and private methods of educating truly “new” people. To what extent he managed to implement these plans, I will try to describe below.
In the fall of 1918, my mother said that I would no longer study at Real, but would move to another school. Indeed, after some time, she took my sister Lena and me for a medical examination in the premises of the former Cadet Corps, located on the outskirts of the city. The doctor found that I had heart failure, and at first, for this reason, they did not agree to admit me, but then after a while everything was settled, and on October 1, 1918, I became a student in the senior 7th grade at a new school called "Trudovoy" ".
In our everyday life, the name “Labor” school and “Trudoviki” - the students of the school, are firmly rooted and continue to be preserved to this day by all persons associated with the school. However, when all the schools became “Labor”, subsequently the official name of our school gradually changed, became more complicated and was finally established in a rather long form: “Experimental Demonstration School - Karl Liebknecht Commune”. Every word in this title had a deep meaning. The school, indeed, was “Experimental” - all its activities were a continuous chain of experiments, it became “Demonstrative” - it was known and constantly visited by teachers from all over Central Asia, as well as many employees of the Center. It became a real "Commune". Finally, she honorably bore the name of a courageous man, the only parliamentarian in the world who openly raised his hand against the war. This bold act in the name of humanism was, as it were, a symbol of true humanism inscribed on the ideological Banner of the school. In Tashkent, this was one of the first schools re-organized after the revolution. Its initiator was the same tireless Vsevolod Fedorovich LUBENTSOV.
The first contingent of students was recruited from orphans, who were accepted for full support and permanent residence until graduation. The reason for this was not any sentimental or philanthropic considerations, but the fact that such students could devote themselves entirely to school, while the school was spared possible interference from parents, which could harm the cause when conducting pedagogical experiments. In the future, this principle of replenishing the school continued to be preserved. Exceptions were made only for children of school employees. My mother was first closely associated with the main group of teachers, and then from 1919 she went to work in the school. Therefore, my sisters and I, although we were not orphans, also went to school. Of the former realists, I was the only one who got into school, and, it seems, none of the high school students. Several former cadets - orphans, who remained to live after the liquidation of the Cadet Corps in its premises allocated for our school, were included in its composition. Thus, Anatoly and Kirill Kochnev, Seryozha Borisov and some others came to us, among them Anatoly Kochnev, my classmate, who died two years later from pneumonia, in 1919/20. played a big role in the formation of student organizations. I don’t know from which educational institutions the remaining students of the first cohort were taken. In subsequent years, homeless children poured in alone and in small groups; their influx intensified in 1921, when a mass of refugees from the Volga region poured into Central Asia. However, once they found themselves in a well-formed student group, street children quickly assimilated and lost their specific “spirit.” There was no need to resort to any particularly “strong” methods to re-educate them.
At first, the beautiful building of the former Cadet Corps was allocated for Skoda. Part of the cadet uniform went to the school workshop, and for three years we wore good quality uniforms and boots. Therefore, the first years of the “Trudoviks” could always be recognized from a distance by their unique uniform, which differed from the cadet uniform in the absence of shoulder straps, frayed edges, and buttons sewn up with black cloth. Girls also wore boots, uniforms and overcoats.
Three months later, the huge building of the former Cadet Corps was given over to a hospital, and the school was moved to the unfinished premises of the former Junkers School. I remember well how we had to carry school property through terrible slush and rain. It was the beginning of winter, which turned out to be very harsh in 1918/19. The snow did not melt for three months, which is rare for Tashkent. In January 1919, the Esser uprising broke out and the city turned into a battlefield. During this difficult winter, the school received almost no supplies, had no fuel, and the heroic efforts of its organizers were aimed primarily at getting bread and cereals for several hundred hungry mouths. The guys were desperately cold, slept in boots and overcoats, and those who managed to get an extra mattress piled it on top of the blanket. Almost everyone walked around with frostbitten fingers and faces, because... in the bedroom the temperature dropped to -10°C.
Academic work was falling apart; during the January uprising, classes were interrupted and resumed only a month and a half later. The workshops, they were organized immediately after the opening of the school, also almost did not work. Some of the students could have gone to some relatives - they left, and many never returned to Skoda. Among those who remained, who had nowhere to go, moral decay quickly began, which was expressed primarily in the catastrophically increasing theft and plunder of school property. It seemed that the whole idea with the “new” school would disintegrate under the influence of these factors. And yet, the school survived, and the desperate winter it endured ultimately brought benefits, because... brought to life such forms of school organization that turned out to be suitable for overcoming current difficulties and ensured the successful development of the school for many years in the future.
When it became clear that the school was on the verge of complete collapse, a meeting of the two senior classes - our seventh and sixth - was convened at the end of February or beginning of March 1919. No teachers were present and there was no official agenda. I don’t even remember whether a chairman and secretary were chosen and whether minutes were kept. This meeting was opened by Shchurka Tsygankov, my classmate, a handsome black-haired guy. At first, he played a prominent role at school, but then two years later, together with another Shurka - Shaporenko, left school, volunteered for the Red Army and laid down his head under Basmach bullets in Eastern Bukhara. The bodies of him and his dead comrades were thrown by the Basmachi from the cliff into the stormy waves of the Amu Darya.
The speech Tsygankov made at the opening of this historic meeting was short and simple. Here is its approximate content:
“It’s very difficult to live in a school. However, if the school collapses and we disperse, then many of us will die completely. If the school remains intact, we will survive. What are we doing to support the school? - Nothing! On the contrary, we are stealing it. Everyone is doing it. , including me. I myself stole an overcoat, two towels and a sheet. And everyone who has the courage will say the same about themselves. I want to ask everyone - what should we do? Can we figure out how to save the school and ourselves?"
Later it became clear to me that this meeting, and Tsygankov’s speech, and the subsequent speeches of several of the oldest students
were subtly inspired by educators who placed their last priority on the appeal to conscience. However, relying on the psychological effect of an honest confession turned out to be immeasurably more effective than the police measures usually used in such cases.
Following Tsygankov, Volodya Poshlyakov, Anatoly Kochnov, Guriy Muzhichenko made similar confessions, and off and on... An endless stream of confessions began, and ones that the most experienced investigator would not have been able to extract. In short, everyone was indeed guilty of the theft of school property. Including me. True, I had some small change - a Finnish knife stolen from a carpenter's workshop, and a handful of eight-inch nails from the same place, which attracted my attention with their rare size. But it still happened. And everyone had enough “courage to speak about themselves.”
This meeting continued for two days until late at night and ended with the creation of the first student organization, called the "Senior Council", which took upon itself the leadership of all internal school life. It was decided that stolen and unsold items would be returned to school, other things that the boys confessed to stealing would no longer be mentioned, but if in the future anyone is caught stealing, then he will be expelled from school by a resolution of the student organization. The first student government was elected - the Executive Committee and after some time the Charter of the Senior School Council was developed.
After this meeting, thefts stopped and subsequently became an extremely rare occurrence. I only remember two incidents that happened a few years later. In one of them (the theft of a microscope from a biological laboratory), the suspect’s guilt was not proven. But the analysis of this case excited the entire school, and disputes at several general student meetings, which also performed judicial functions, clearly showed what the attitude of the student masses was to this kind of action. In another case, when the culprit was caught with a master key at the crime scene, by decision of the general student meeting he was sent to a colony for juvenile delinquents. Finally, the third case - the theft of a gun from a preparation workshop was not solved. A few years later, when I was no longer in school, I quite accidentally had to pick up the trail of the culprit. This crime was organized by a former student who had nothing to do with the school at the time of the theft.
Returning to the first meeting and the first steps of the student organization, I must note two significant results that changed the entire tone of school life. Firstly, the moral atmosphere at school immediately cleared; by “repenting” and confessing to each other, it was as if everyone had breathed in clean air. Secondly, the children awakened a sense of community, they became closer to each other and felt like members of a “team”, and not a random gathering seated at desks.
The new organization immediately got to work. All her strength was felt later, when the school moved out of town. In the spring of 1919, I don’t remember exactly, it seems in April, first a small group of schoolchildren, and then the whole school, moved to the building of a former orphanage, located four kilometers from Tashkent in the vicinity of the village of Nikolskoye, later renamed the village of Lunacharskoye.
This move was not made out of necessity, but completely deliberately, because... It was here, in rural conditions, that experiments with “labor” education were supposed to be carried out. At first, the school did not set itself the goal of training agricultural specialists (it came to this a few years later, and this will be discussed below), and the school needed “labor” from two points of view. Firstly, as a strong educational factor that shapes and prepares the future person for any activity - intellectual and physical. And, secondly, from a purely economic side, as a factor ensuring the normal existence of the school. Looking ahead a little, I can say that in the first years of its existence the school received less than 15% of its budget from public funds. More than 85% were obtained by the school through its own productive labor. Do not forget that all the students were completely supported by the school, and therefore, the maintenance of the school cost the state many times less than the maintenance of any orphanage or modern vocational school with an equal number of pupils.
The first attempts to create a base for labor education were made at the very beginning, when the school was located in the city. At this time, carpentry, shoemaking, sewing and basket workshops were organized at the school. At first it was assumed that each student should work in all workshops in turn, but then quite soon this was abandoned and specialization began. I wanted to work in a carpentry shop, but... I was short and weak, so they offered me to choose any of the others. I chose a shoe shop and worked there for four years. How many pairs of shoes did I have to repair and sew again during this time? About 300 people moved to Lunacharskoye, and when I left in 1923 the number of students exceeded 500. No one had fathers or mothers, the cadet inheritance had long been shattered, and yet no one walked barefoot. The same thing happened with clothes. All repairs, all the sewing of new clothes and shoes were done by the hands of teenagers like I was in those years. In order not to return once again to the workshops, I will say that later additional workshops were organized at the school: cartoning, metalworking, blacksmithing, and preparation. The carpentry shop was first mechanized with a horse-drawn drive, and then it was equipped with two internal combustion engines that powered a whole series of saws and woodworking machines. Finally, the school started its own brick factory, where bricks were made and fired for the construction of new buildings. I personally later had to work a little in a carpentry workshop, making lasts for a shoe shop, then in a basket shop, which was of great importance at school, because... a lot of baskets were required to harvest vegetables and fruits. During my last year at school, I worked in a dissection room making stuffed animals and skeletons.
Even before moving outside the city, Vsevolod Fedorovich and other teachers secured the allocation of a large plot of land for the school. At this time, in accordance with the nationalization decree, all private land holdings with an area of ​​more than 8 hectares were taken away. The school received five such plots, adjacent to each other and with a total area of ​​slightly more than 50 hectares. Of these, more than half were occupied by gardens. In addition, 12 kilometers from the main school site, two more land plots were received near the village of Kibray, 70 hectares each. During the first years, this land was fully cultivated and served as a great help. Later, when the school was firmly on its feet, it abandoned the Kibray plots and was left with only the main land area, in Lunacharsky. The land was cultivated and the gardens were maintained in exemplary order. Agricultural work was carried out by students. Teachers, senior students, and about five Uzbeks - Kayum, Sharip-Khoja and others - worked as instructors. The school had fully mastered the complex system of irrigated agriculture. After putting the gardens in order, the school began to receive fruit harvests of up to 15,000 pounds annually. The trees were regularly pruned, hilled, watered, whitewashed, banded and sprayed. Outdated areas of the gardens had to be uprooted and planted with new trees. So, I myself had to take part in planting about four hectares of peaches and apple trees at the Sobennikovskaya dacha, and two hectares of an apricot orchard at the Kryukovskaya dacha. The harvest in the orchards was collected, most of it was dried, and the best varieties of apples and pears were put into winter storage. Drying fruit was a very labor-intensive job, which was performed mainly5 by elementary school students. Cutting and drying fruits was done using shredders and plywood boards that I knew from working at the hippodrome. Fresh fruit was preserved until spring and all students received fresh fruit every day during the winter, right up to the May Day holidays. After the end of the civil war, when railway communication with central Russia was established, Skoda began annually sending several wagons of fruit to Orenburg, Samara and Moscow for sale.
The school fields were also maintained in exemplary order, where almost all garden and field crops were cultivated: cabbage, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, melons, watermelons, onions, cucumbers, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, millet, etc.
Agricultural work in Central Asia requires a lot of time, effort, attention and specific knowledge - when and how to care for which crop. These works are completely different from either Russian or Ukrainian gardening. But with skillful and conscientious care, the land in Central Asia rewards the labor expended a hundredfold.
Under the conditions of Central Asian irrigated agriculture, all crops, except alfalfa and cereals, are planted in beds. All work, with the exception of plowing, harrowing and cultivation of some crops using horse cultivation at school, was done manually, using the so-called. "Ketmeney". Ketmen is a widespread Central Asian tool that replaces both a shovel and a hoe. It is similar in shape to the latter, but much larger, heavier and more regular in shape. When working, the ketmen has to be lifted over the shoulder, and then, making a chopping motion, it must be struck with a swing into the ground. The tool is beautiful, much more advanced than an ordinary shovel. Ketmen is used to dig up the ground, make beds, carry out numerous hillings and other work. Ketmen is absolutely necessary when watering because with its help, the access of water into the complex system of grooves between the beds is opened and closed. Ketmen in Central Asia dig ditches tens and hundreds of kilometers long, dig multi-meter wells, etc. and so on.
Plowing was usually done by Sharip-Khoja or one of the other Uzbeks, grinding - crushing drying lumps of earth, with the help of a "mola" - a heavy log that is pulled by oxen and on which one of the senior students becomes a worker. Subsequently, starting in 1923, when the school started its own Fordson, plowing was carried out by senior students on a tractor, and grinding was replaced by harrowing using a disc harrow.
All other work - cutting the beds, hilling, planting, watering and harvesting - was carried out by the students themselves.

Sunday, October 10, 1948.
I just returned from the cinema, I watched “Valery Chkalov”. The role of Stalin in this film is played by Mdivani. Our Vsevolod Fedorovich looked very similar to this artist. And before, I have repeatedly noted the similarities between Stalin and Lubentsov. This similarity is especially noticeable in several simpler photographs, where Stalin is depicted not as an emphatically strong-willed statesman, but in a calmer manner or smiling. Compared to Mdivani, Vsevolod Fedorovich was a little fuller and “heavier.” In addition, he had a higher forehead, bluish-gray eyes and a slightly bushier mustache. The nose, chin, and general oval of the face were extremely similar. To top off the similarity , he also wore a semi-military uniform: a cap and a gray, well-fitting overcoat of soldier's cloth. The similarity was completely accidental, and in the summer there could be no question of any imitation. However, in the summer all the Trudoviks of both sexes wore panamas. There was no similarity in his behavior and speech, during which Mdivani seemed to be collecting his thoughts, but flowed freely and very consistently. treated as equals, but highest degree seriously, incl. No one ever had any inclination to become familiar, although many were on first-name terms with him. In moments of relaxation he was cheerful and knew how to laugh sincerely and contagiously. Vsevolod Fedorovich’s energy, efficiency and erudition would be more than enough for a good dozen ordinary directors of ordinary scales. He enjoyed very great personal authority in the eyes of students, teachers and all school employees, and not as a “head”, but simply as “Vsevolod” (that’s what former teachers and students called him behind his back and still calls him that). Many people entered into disputes on business and principled grounds with him more than once; this was not forbidden, was not persecuted, and did not undermine his authority. In the entire team, he was simply the smartest and most far-sighted member of this team, and therefore his
a natural leader, not an appointed administrator.
Back to the continuation of the story.....
(The story, unfortunately, was not finished)

From the photo archive of Nesterov V.S.

All preserved photographs can be viewed here:

How did the system of elite school education develop in our country?

The division of schools into “best” and “worst” has almost always existed. Before 1913, in Russia there were several types of educational institutions for children from different segments of the population - public schools, commercial schools, gymnasiums (they cannot be compared, because the education in them was different). It is known that the teaching profession was considered very highly. In 1912, the minimum salary for a teacher in Russia was 1,600 rubles per year, or at the current exchange rate 25 thousand dollars.

The 20s in the USSR were a time of unification, the school became the “Unified Labor School,” although even then it was allowed to teach children using different methods. The best schools were not singled out.

In 1931, “model schools” appeared. They were created in every city and regional center. In such schools there were Better conditions compared to conventional ones - financing, equipment supply, teaching aids, qualified teachers. The children of party and government leaders - Svetlana and Vasily Stalin, daughters of Molotov, granddaughters of Gorky, sons of Beria, Bulganin, Mikoyan, Tupolev - studied at the Moscow model school No. 25 (now No. 175). In another, No. 110, the oldest school in Moscow in Merzlyakovsky Lane, the children of Bukharin, Budyonny, Kaganovich, Radek, and the younger children of Khrushchev studied...

But in those days, when people were not yet grouped into residential and prestigious areas, all the children studied together, and both the leader’s son and the cook’s daughter could sit at the same desk. There are many memories of people who studied with Svetlana Alliluyeva.

In 1938, “model schools” were formally liquidated, but, of course, they did not go away. In 1956, their name was returned - “exemplary”. And later special schools with in-depth study appeared foreign languages. Molotov’s grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov studied at the first Moscow special school No. 1 (now No. 1282). Stas Namin, Mikoyan's grandson, is in special school No. 74.

In the 50s and 60s, other schools for the elite appeared. For example, N 20 (now N 1239). It received the status of a "UNESCO Associated School". Financial and material support, of course, was at the highest, virtually world level. The school was shown to Queen Elizabeth II of England and Prince Philip. Children of the creative intelligentsia (for example, Nikita Mikhalkov), grandchildren of the country's leaders and children from the neighborhood studied there. They say that the USSR KGB sent teachers to this school.

Until now, the curricula in all schools, even elite ones, were the same, and, as experts say, they were designed for weak students. But in special schools the programs were already different from the mass ones. And you didn't have to pay for it. The path from such schools led to MGIMO and Moscow State University.

Knowledge of languages ​​provided many graduates successful careers in the early 90s - to those who managed to get a job in foreign or joint companies. During these years, the stratification of schools closely followed the stratification of society. The mass school, which remained dogmatically Soviet for a long time, did not suit the new elite; these people were guided by American and European models. Oligarchs and high-ranking officials sent their children to study in Europe, America, and Australia. Many people still have them there. But someone wanted to leave their children in Russia. Private schools tried to satisfy the demand for “non-Soviet” education. There were even “Cambridge” and “Anglo-American-Russian School” in Moscow, schools with the International Baccalaureate - they gave the right to enter the best foreign universities straight after the Russian school. In such schools, English was taught by “native speakers”, mathematics and literature were taught by university professors.

The freedom did not last long. The time has come for government educational standards, mandatory for everyone. Private schools began to lose their advantages, the Soviet model of education was taken as a model, and the public school became the ideal carrier.

Secondary school No. 204 named after. A.M. Gorky
At the intersection of Tikhvinskaya Street and Sushchevsky Val, one of the oldest schools in Moscow operates. Now it is called the State educational institution secondary school No. 204 named after A.M. Gorky. The school was opened in 1918 as the First Experimental Demonstration School of the People's Commissariat for Education. It was part of the First Experimental Station of Public Education, in the creation of which Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky took an active part. S.T. Shatsky (1878-1934) - an outstanding Russian Soviet teacher, organizer of children's educational institutions - the "Settlement" society (1906), the labor colony "Beautiful Life" (1911), a system of experimental educational institutions – kindergartens and schools united into the “First Experimental Station for Public Education with urban and rural branches” (1919-1932). The city department included a school, which later became school No. 204 named after Gorky. Our educational institution became a laboratory of pedagogical thought and pedagogical experience, where new teaching methods were developed and experimentally tested and old ones were improved. The school grew quickly. As a result, it was created original project a new school building, which has housed our educational institution from 1936 to the present day. . In commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the literary, artistic and social activities of A.M. Gorky Experimental school No. 1 NKP, which has achieved excellent results in the teaching of Russian language and literature, by the resolution of the Board of People's Commissariat of Education dated October 5, 1932, signed by A. Bubnov, it was named after M. Gorky. Since 1955, the School entered the system of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR as an experimental institution of the Research Institute of Teaching Methods, and since 1967, the School became an experimental base of the Research Institute of School Equipment and Technical Teaching Aids of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR. To solve the problem effective use teaching aids, a classroom system was created with appropriate equipment and equipment for the educational process; teaching aids and their complexes were developed; the pedagogical effectiveness of the classroom system of classes was studied; new models of offices and laboratories were created.

Throughout its existence, the school maintains and develops the principles of education laid down by its founder Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky:

• 
  Humane and personal approach to the child
• 
  Placing the child’s personality at the center of the entire educational system
• 
  A combination of individual and collective teaching methods
• 
  Setting difficult goals.

One of Shatsky’s main ideas is the creation of an “open” school, a center for education and upbringing in a social environment.

Our school is focused on personal development and meeting the educational needs of children. The activities of the school are based on the position of cooperation pedagogy that between the main aspects of children's life - physical labor, play, art, mental and social development - there is a certain connection, constant interaction is found, and ultimately certain changes in one direction cause accordingly changes in another area.

The school creates conditions for receiving a good education, developing the child’s creative abilities and work skills.

Currently, about 500 children and 450 external students are studying at the School. For many years, the main contingent of students came from families of the intelligentsia. Currently, the student population is mainly formed from families of entrepreneurs, employees of commercial organizations (managers, economists, accountants), and employees of government agencies. A characteristic feature of the school is continuity. Many students are children and grandchildren of former graduates or their relatives.

Training proceeds in the following stages:

1. 
   Preschool gymnasium

2) Primary school (1-4 grades).

3) Basic school 5-9 grades.

4) High school 10-11 grades.

The curriculum for 2006-2007 is given in the appendix.

Preschool gymnasium. Children aged 5-7 years study at the pre-school gymnasium for one or two years. The purpose of this training is to prepare and adapt children to learning at school, to develop in the child a positive attitude towards learning in a team. To do this, it is necessary to give an idea of ​​the nature of communication between teacher and student, introduce various forms of work, enrich students’ speech, teach them to read, develop interest in reading, and cultivate emotional responsiveness to their native nature and the world around them. It is important to identify children with suspected learning difficulties and begin corrective measures as early as possible. The following subjects are studied in the preschool gymnasium: reading and speech development, mathematics, the formation of study skills, introduction to logic, drawing, music, development of work skills, sports activities.

The preschool gymnasium shows quite high performance in its activities.

Gymnasium students admitted to 1st grade are well prepared: they know how to listen, sit, read well, count, and have fairly well-developed hand motor skills. They are ahead of their peers in terms of intellectual development.

Elementary School. Primary school education lasts four years, grades 1-4. The school is open on educational system"School2100".

Principles of education using the School2100 system:

• 
  It is based on the idea of ​​developmental education and developmental training. The main principle of learning is the understanding and acceptance by students of the historical and cultural logic of setting these tasks, the logic of the emergence of methods for solving them, and the system of historical and cultural development of scientific knowledge and methods of obtaining it. The implementation of this principle provides an opportunity for students in their own activities to understand the sources and foundations of the acquired knowledge, to comprehend their general cultural meaning and functions.

• 
  The principle of transferring an oriented knowledge function to the learner.

• 
  The activity principle of organizing training.

• 
  The content of education is built not “from the bottom up” from individual isolated knowledge, abilities, skills to combining them into some integrity, but “from the top down” - from the most general educational goals to individual components of a single knowledge about the world.

• 
  Possibility of educational variability

• 
  Mastering functional literacy (skills and abilities) associated with educational, cognitive and creative activities is a means of ensuring the activities of students, and not the content of education.

There are extended day groups at the elementary school.

Basic school 5-9 grades. Upon completion of primary school, students can continue their studies in the basic class of a basic school or, based on competitive examinations, enter a gymnasium class.

Basic and gymnasium classes have different curricula (see Appendix 1). In particular, the study of a second foreign language begins in the gymnasium class. The ninth grade is important at this level, in which students must choose a profile for further education. .

Pre-profile training has the following components:

• 
  individual and group lessons in subjects

• 
  additional educational services for grades 7-9:

Rhetoric

Secrets of Russian spelling

Theory and practice of writing essays

Learning to think, reason, prove

Speak English

Speak German

Photoshop

• 
  clubs at school: choreography, sports, music

The school has an agreement with the Children's Creativity Center on Vadkovsky, where school students attend art and music classes.

• 
  in the 9th grade, the course “Your Career” was introduced (based on the program of S.V. Chistyakova). The main objective of the course is to compare potential and professional “I want” and “I can”. The first part of the course is related to recognition and understanding of oneself. Any professional activity places demands on the personal qualities of a specialist and, in order not to make a mistake in choosing a profession, it is necessary to correlate your qualities and capabilities with the requirements of the chosen work activity. The course contains many tests and assignments that allow you to learn and test yourself. The second part of the course is related to getting to know various professions. For this purpose, practical classes and testing are carried out to show the features of this type of work activity.

High school 10-11 grades. The high school is multidisciplinary. In the 2006-2007 academic year there were two specialized classes: natural and mathematical and socio-economic.

When forming the curriculum for grades 10-11, the federal basic curriculum was taken as a basis, which assumes the presence of three main components:

• 
  Basic general education subjects aimed at completing the general education training of students;
• 
  Profile general education subjects that determine the specialization of a particular profile;
• 
  Elective subjects that satisfy the cognitive interests of schoolchildren.

The school conducts the formation and implementation of specialized education within the framework of the city experimental site (GEP) GEP “Development various forms network interaction of educational institutions providing specialized training, their managerial and methodological support." Scientific supervisors:

Pishchulin Nikolay Petrovich, Doctor of Philology, Vice-Rector for Research, Moscow State Pedagogical University – scientific supervisor

Pishchulin Sergey Nikolaevich, Ph.D., Moscow State Pedagogical University – scientific consultant

Voronina Elena Vladimirovna – Ph.D., leading specialist of the Southern District Education Department - project coordinator

Experiment hypothesis:

The organization of pre-profile and specialized education will ensure continuity of education, high-quality training of students in core disciplines, provided that the basic level of education in non-core disciplines is maintained.

One of the new forms of student certification is passing the Unified State Examination in the subject (USE).

Results of passing the Unified State Exam in the 2005-2006 academic year

	Item	Number of participants	Quantity "5"	Quantity "4"
1.	Russian language	9	4	5
2.	Russian history	4	2	2
3.	Social science	1	1	0

The school cooperates with Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Stankin Moscow State Technical University, Institute of Economics and Economics named after. Griboedova.

Cooperation agreements have been concluded with universities. Cooperation with MTU Stankin has been going on for about 30 years.

Forms of cooperation:

1. 
   coordination of school programs in specialized subjects with university requirements
2. 
   regular training of school teachers at universities
3. 
   holding “professor days” at school
4. 
   conducting an information campaign on admission to these universities
5. 
   participation of schoolchildren in olympiads and conferences in universities

Every year a survey is conducted regarding the demand for specialized classes. Taking into account the social order of the school students and their parents, in the current academic year preparations are underway for the opening of a medical and biological class: an agreement has been concluded with the Moscow State Dental University, a curriculum is being developed, the issue of personnel is being resolved, and a recruitment campaign for the third specialized class has been launched.

Over the past five years, 98% of graduates have had the opportunity to continue their education at universities in Moscow and Russian Federation.

Our results are the facts that elementary school students have been winners of the Intellectual Marathon in Moscow for two years in a row, and the school as a whole received the title “School of the Year” for pedagogical excellence, creative search, success in teaching and education.

Paid additional educational services. The school has a system of paid additional educational services. These classes are held after the main classes. Parents select a set of activities for their child from the list provided and enter into an agreement with the school to conduct them. The curriculum for paid additional educational services (PAES) is given in the appendix.

School psychologists provide support throughout the entire educational process. Testing is carried out in elementary schools psychological readiness to school, then school motivation, anxiety, level of aggression, etc. are tested. Individual consultations are provided for children and parents.

Students’ project work is of great importance for the development of independence and a creative approach to solving various problems.

Within the framework of this direction, a school-wide project has been prepared for English language“Culture and science of Britain. The lives of wonderful people." The project was carried out in grades 5-10 by the following groups:

5th grade: Group No. 1 – “D. Rowling and Harry Potter"

group No. 2 – “A. Milne and “Winnie the Pooh””

6th grade: Group No. 1 – “I. Newton”

7th grade: group No. 1 – “G. Wells”

8th grade: group No. 1 – “W. Shakespeare”

Group No. 2 - “A. Christie”

9th grade: group No. 1 – “R. Burns”

Group No. 2 – “B. Show”

Grade 10: Group No. 1 – “Jerome K. Jerome”

Group No. 2 – “F. Mercury”

Project problem was formulated by the students as follows: “Why, when reading the works of great writers and poets, studying the works of famous scientists, do we only skim through their biography?”

The goal of the project was to create almanacs-encyclopedias that would make it possible to present the biographies of great people as a collection of unusual, little-known facts.

The objectives of the project were the formation (grades 5-7) and improvement (grades 8-10) of skills in the elements of publishing; mastering the skills of working with a significant amount of information; development of skills in using the Internet.

135 students took part in the project.

The presentation of the project was carried out in the form of a theatrical performance in which 94 schoolchildren participated.

In the 2006-2007 academic year, the school began to work in the city experimental site (GEP) on the topic “Development of an organization model educational process based on students’ educational and research activities.” Scientific adviser:

Leontovich A.V., Ph.D., Deputy Director of the Moscow City Palace of Children's (Youth) Creativity

The theme of the school’s experimental work is “Development of the basic elements of technology for research activities of primary and high school students”

For educational and research activities, 10th grade students were proposed the hypothesis “Oil is a means of conducting international politics.” That is, it was necessary to prove that when oil refining volumes change, changes in the economic and political life of the world and a further correction in oil prices as the main energy carrier occur.

Students took the components of this hypothesis as the basis for their work, since the topic needed to be considered comprehensively. As a result, four interrelated topics appeared: “History of oil production”, “Main oil fields in the world”, “Oil and energy crises of the world”, “Oil and international relations”.

For a more complete coverage of the problem, 10th grade students were involved in the work. with works in chemistry “Physico-chemical properties of oil”, “Oil refining”, “Petroleum products in chemical industry" and ecology "Petrochemical industry and the state environment" All works were combined and presented at the 10th grade conference.
Particular attention is paid to the problems of raising children. According to Shatsky, feasible and reasonably organized physical labor contributes to the organization of children’s lives and provides an opportunity for the development of self-government. But at the same time, children’s lives should be permeated with aesthetic feelings and positive emotions. There should be plenty of space for play and artistic activities.

The teacher’s task is to direct the educational process towards the child’s ascent to human culture, but at the same time not to impose it on him, not to force him to behave one way and not another, but to promote independent development culture. The school holds excursion days: students visit various museums in Moscow and the Moscow region. Quite often, students go on excursions to other cities. Children also receive aesthetic education at the Dali Theater Studio and in creative workshops. Children's works constantly decorate the school. In addition, we have a system of student self-government that helps students demonstrate their civic positions in practice.

As part of the development of distance learning, the school has introduced a form of education - externship. Such a training system is considered as a form of intensive, individual training, as well as a form of knowledge control when mastering educational programs in the form of self-education. Our school's external course was opened in 1991 and was the first in Moscow.

Externship functions as structural subdivision schools and provides assistance that allows students to master general education programs in groups or individually. In addition, the student has the opportunity to be certified externally both in individual subjects and for the full course of one or more classes.

Currently, the School sees its development in creating an open multifunctional school focused on working with students from different backgrounds. social groups, for dialogue, development of interpersonal and intergroup communication, open literally all day long for both children and adults. In an open school, the prevailing trends are towards expanding and strengthening its interaction with life, all social institutions - family, cultural and educational institutions, public organizations, local authorities, etc. In an open school, teaching and education focus on the creative direction of human activity, creating all the necessary conditions for the personal development of the child. To implement this approach, it is necessary to significantly strengthen the influence of the school in society by creating new areas of activity and improving the quality of the school’s work. In this regard, the primary objectives of the school are:

• 
  improvement of multidisciplinary education
• 
  strengthening pre-professional training of students
• 
  organization of primary vocational training majoring in "Office Management"
• 
  organization of training according to individual programs.

The School Board serves as the governing board of the school. The competence of the School Board includes:

Making proposals for changes and additions to this Charter, as well as reorganization, changes in the structure and liquidation of the School;

Publication of local acts;

Operational planning of the School's statutory activities;

Collection and processing of information;

Development of Regulations on the list and procedure for the provision of paid educational services;

Formation and use of various funds;

Development of Regulations on external studies;

Development of Regulations on preschool education;

Development of conditions and procedures for encouraging School employees, applying disciplinary measures to employees;

Determines the start and end dates of classes, the procedure for completing the academic year;

Creation necessary conditions for the work collective to fulfill its powers provided for by the Law of the Russian Federation “On Education”, full assistance and development of the initiative and activity of workers.
School website: http:// shkola204. people. ru consists of the following sections:

1. 
   Our coordinates.
2. 
   Historical information about the school.
3. 
   Contents of training.
4. 
   School orders.

Information about the teaching staff

An analysis of the staff of the school's teaching staff showed that currently the school's teaching staff is characterized by great stability, and the number of teachers working on a permanent basis is increasing.

More than 70% of the team are teachers with more than 10 years of experience. The school employs:

Honored Teachers of Russia - Klimenko G.M., Moskvitina G.I., Mukoseeva S.V.;

Candidates of Science – Klimenko G.M. Semenenko G.M., Petrenko O.L.

excellent students of public education - Antonova E.S., Galayko T.F., Kandaurova T.K., Mitrokhina E.A., Semigina A.I., Fadeeva-Murashova E.A., Shapaeva G.V.;

17 teachers were awarded Certificates of Honor from the Ministry of Education of Russia.

Of the 59 teaching staff have:

highest qualification category – 43;

first qualification category – 12;

second qualification category – 4.
Ensuring the educational process.
The educational process is carried out in 26 educational (subject) rooms, 2 computer science laboratories, a gym and a sports ground, equipped.

The school's library collection consists of more than 50 thousand volumes of educational, methodological, fiction, reference and analytical literature. The uniqueness of the school library lies in the fact that it contains lifetime publications by A.S. Pushkina, M.Yu. Lermontova, L.N. Tolstoy, dictionaries of Brockhaus and Efron, part of the personal library transferred to the school by its founders S.T. Shatsky.

Leningrad utopia. Avant-garde in the architecture of the Northern capital Elena Vladimirovna Pervushina

The first secondary exemplary demonstration school in Lesnoy - Factory School No. 173

Current address - Polytechnicheskaya st., 22, bldg. 1.

Factory School No. 173. Photo from the 1930s

Another school designed by A.C. Nikolsky, L.Yu. Galperina, A.A. Zavarzin and N.F. Demkova was built in 1928–1933 in the Lesnoy district, on Polytechnicheskaya Street, opposite the Polytechnic Institute Park.

The school included two buildings with separate entrances - for students of the first stage (primary grades) and the second stage (from 5th to 10th grade). In total, more than a thousand children studied at the school. The basement housed a dining room and workshops. On the ground floor there is the director's office, an assembly hall, and a medical unit. The remaining three floors occupied classrooms, and an observatory was installed in the turret on the roof. The school also allocated a special building for apartments for teachers and staff.

The facade of the school was formed by a combination of buildings of different heights and was decorated with protruding stairwells and “pseudo-ribbon” windows, combined in groups of three. The compositional center of the building was the tower of the main staircase, topped with an observatory. The main entrance is decorated with thin corner posts, which created the feeling of the building being raised above the ground.

The building was subsequently rebuilt.

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Presented with some abbreviations

A characteristic feature of the first years of Soviet power was a huge craving masses to knowledge and the development of creative initiative in school affairs.
N.K. Krupskaya wrote in 1918 that the revolution shook up the very bottom and at the same time showed these bottoms the entire abyss of darkness in which the autocracy kept them. The uncontrollable, spontaneous craving of the masses for knowledge was a companion of the revolution.
In the first three years of the existence of the Soviet socialist state in the most difficult conditions of civil war and devastation; The school network in the country has grown by 13 thousand units, and the number of students has grown by almost 2 million.
The formation of a new, Soviet school followed unknown and very difficult paths. Among a significant part of pedagogical theorists and teachers, the influence of bourgeois pedagogy was still very strong.
The lack of development of issues of Soviet pedagogy and the influence of pseudo-radical petty-bourgeois pedagogical theories led to the so-called proletkult sentiments among some leading workers in public education (L. G. Shapiro, V. N. Shulgin, N. A. Polyansky, etc.).
The bearers of these sentiments interpreted the labor school as a school of labor and thereby diverted the school's attention from the tasks of mastering knowledge and forming on this basis the socialist consciousness of the younger generations.
The People's Commissariat for Education, local public education authorities, and progressive teachers persistently searched for new ways of education and training. These searches were vividly embodied in the activities of experimental demonstration schools, experimental stations of the People's Commissariat for Education and communal schools.
Experimental demonstration schools began to emerge in mid-1918. And in 1919 there were already 27 of them, and in the 1920/21 academic year, according to data from only 25 provincial departments of public education, there were about 100.
Experimental demonstration schools were created by the People's Commissariat for Education and local departments of public education as pedagogical laboratories, where new methods of upbringing, education and training were to be developed and implemented.
With all the diversity in the nature of the work of experimental demonstration schools, their main efforts were aimed at finding ways to organize the work of children in workshops and on agricultural plots, connecting the study of general education subjects with labor, organizing children's groups, self-government and socially useful work.
The most famous were the experimental demonstration school in Pokrovsky-Streshnevo, the experimental demonstration school named after A. N. Radishchev in Moscow, Volskaya in the Saratov province, Bogorodskaya, Kraskovo-Malakhovskaya and Losinoostrovskaya in the Moscow province, Totemskaya in the Vologda province.
The activities of experimental demonstration schools played a positive role in the formation of the Soviet public education system. However, one cannot help but notice that their work was quite strongly influenced by “proletkult” sentiments and the theory of “free education”.
Communal schools made a significant contribution to the development of the theory and practice of the Soviet school. They were created, as a rule, to raise children left without parents. They were most often created on former lordly estates and at first had the character of production and consumer children's associations based on the principles of self-service. Their experience developed in the direction that somewhat later received its full development in the institutions created by A. S. Makarenko.
The activities of the experimental stations of the People's Commissariat for Education were more versatile. The first such station was created in March 1919 by a team of teachers headed by S. T. Shatsky. The station had two branches: a rural one in the Kaluga province and a city one in Moscow. Soon Shaturskaya and Gaginskaya stations were organized in the Ryazan province and Malakhovskaya in the Moscow province.
The experimental stations of the People's Commissariat for Education were searching for new content, organization and methods of training and education. They broadly raised the problem of the influence of the school on the development of the economy and life of the adult population, and were closely associated with scientific and pedagogical institutions and organizations.
In 1920, there was a change of leadership in the department of the unified labor school of the People's Commissariat for Education. This department was headed by L. R. Menzhinskaya. The board included A.V. Lunacharsky and M.N. Pokrovsky, A.K. Timiryazev, V.N. Verkhovsky, I.M. Knipovich and other scientists began to take an active part in the work of the department. The department persistently sought to overcome the proletkult sentiments of previous years and set as the main task of the school equipping students with knowledge at the level modern science, a clear understanding of the political and economic tasks of building communism. As a result, a new curriculum for the Soviet school was created, published by the beginning of 1920.
This curriculum featured a significant expansion of science education. Due to the sharp reduction in classes for studying foreign languages, the plan allocated time for the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) almost five times more than in the previous gymnasium, and more than two times more than in a real school; for social sciences - one and a half times more than in a gymnasium and a real school, and twice as much as in a commercial school. Basically, the question of the connection between general education and labor was resolved correctly.
In the explanatory note to the natural science program, for example, it was said that there are two methods for resolving the issue of the connection between general education and work at school: “We can proceed from a certain labor process or task that, for one reason or another, arose in school, and around this tasks to group scientific information that is, to one degree or another, related or may be related to a given work task.”
The authors of the program had a negative attitude towards this method of connection between general education and work because it is based largely on chance, and with its help it is impossible to methodically correctly arrange the course material. In addition, when grouping scientific information around labor tasks, this information will inevitably be given dogmatically, since the idea of ​​the labor complex is not subordinated to the scientific plan of a particular course. It has its own logic.
“That’s why,” the explanatory note went on to say, “we believe that putting self-service or work in some workshops to produce some useful things at the forefront and around these works, as around the central axis, to place the educational material, sometimes pulling it by the hair by force can sometimes be harmful.”
In the exemplary programs, educational material was arranged in a scientific sequence; the teacher was tasked with ensuring that students acquired systematic knowledge using methods that corresponded to the content of the material being studied, the patterns of students’ cognitive activity, and the formation of skills to apply knowledge in life.
“Labor processes,” said the explanatory note, “are thus closely connected with the curriculum, defined by it and interpreted by scientific and educational goals... With this approach to the matter, the initial requirement is that children master the basic concepts of the academic subject in a certain methodological sequence. Labor is subordinated to educational goals.”
The authors of the program and the explanatory note to it emphasized the need for students to study the most important practical applications of natural science to engineering and technology, but they recognized the undesirability of separating independent educational subjects in engineering and technology, explaining this with the following considerations: “By separating engineering and technology from individual natural science disciplines, we thereby we tear them away from the scientific base, and then, inevitably, the scientific basis of technology and technology will be obscured. On the other hand, scientific natural science is drained of blood by such a separation of technology, since it is deprived of a huge mass interesting information, which have a positive effect on arousing students’ interest in science.”
This concept of the connection between general education and labor was not flawless, although it was a well-known step forward. Its disadvantage was that issues of labor training and education were dissolved in the process of studying general education disciplines. Students did not master the system of technical and technological knowledge and did not acquire the ability to use the most common tools.
The tasks of ideological and political education were defined in the programs of 1920 as the need to study socialist and communist literature, without extensive involvement of students in practical work on the socialist reorganization of the economy and life.
These shortcomings were overcome gradually as the Soviet school developed in subsequent years.
In February 1920, V.I. Lenin, in a speech at the III All-Russian meeting of heads of extracurricular subdivisions of provincial departments of public education, set before the public education authorities the task of adapting all their activities to the transition to peaceful construction through a close connection between the goals and nature of education, teaching, upbringing and training , including school teaching and education, with a plan for electrification and socialist reconstruction of the economy.
V.I. Lenin convincingly showed that learning should consist of assimilating all the wealth of knowledge that humanity has developed, that this assimilation should not be simple memorization, but consist of deep independent processing of facts so that communism would not be something such that it is memorized, but would be something that is thought out by ourselves, would be those conclusions that are inevitable from the point of view of modern education.
V.I. Lenin especially emphasized the need to master scientific knowledge so that the younger generation could not only participate in the restoration of the economy, but revive it based on the use of the latest achievements of science and technology, especially in the field of electrification.
V.I. Lenin insisted on the need to combine teaching with everyday practical work to build a new life. The teaching should be organized in such a way that every day in any village, in any city, young people practically solve one or another problem of common labor, even the smallest, even the simplest.
The transition of the Soviet school to work in conditions of peaceful construction faced very serious difficulties associated with the severe collapse of the national economy and the famine of 1921. Under these conditions, the state was forced to transfer the school to the local budget. The network of schools and the enrollment of children in them has sharply decreased. While 80% of all children attended school before the age of 12 in 1921, by 1923 this percentage had dropped to 40.
Through the enormous efforts of the Soviet state, on the direct orders of V.I. Lenin in 1923, the reduction of the school network was suspended. Beginning with the 1923/24 academic year, the number of schools and students in them began to increase again.
The network of schools and the number of students grew at a particularly rapid pace in the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. IN union republics ah these years were spent big job on training teachers and creating textbooks in their native language.
During these years, the program methodological work both in the center and locally. The Scientific and Pedagogical Section of the State Administration of Education, headed by N.K. Krupskaya, is active in the People's Commissariat for Education. P. P. Blonsky, S. T. Shatsky, A. P. Pinkevich, M. M. Pistrak and other major teachers of that time took part in it.
Describing the main direction of programmatic and methodological work during this period, N.K. Krupskaya wrote that they set themselves the goal of laying the foundations of a materialistic worldview in the children coming to school, developing in them an understanding of the life around them and the radical restructuring that it requires, develop their ability to work, live and learn collectively. When drawing up the programs, the basis was taken work activity of people. The study of nature and public life. “It seemed to us,” wrote N.K. Krupskaya, “that in this way it is best possible to comprehend work, to instill in children a conscious attitude towards work and a conscious attitude towards the life around them.”
The search for ways to overcome formalism in students’ knowledge, the struggle for children’s deep understanding of the life around them and for their active participation in its socialist reconstruction met the urgent needs of the development of the Soviet school. These searches fascinated advanced teachers and served as the basis for the development of their initiative and creativity. This is the enormous positive significance of the experience of the Soviet school in the twenties. During this period, the school accumulated extensive experience in studying the facts of social life, phenomena surrounding nature and on this basis achieved a significant update in the content of education, raising the level of education and overall development of students.
In classes in Russian, and in national schools in the native and Russian languages, instead of mechanical memorization of grammar rules, observations of live speech were widely practiced. This line in the methodology of studying the Russian language was developed in detail in the works of the famous linguist and methodologist A. M. Peshkovsky. V. A. Desnitsky, V. V. Golubkov, M. A. Rybnikova, L. S. Troitsky and other literary scholars and methodologists persistently sought to study literary works in school as works of art.
They opposed a simplified, sociologizing approach to literature and its use only as illustrative material for a social science course. The name of M. A. Rybnikova is associated with the widespread introduction into school practice of the twenties of literary dramatizations, practical classes in expressive reading, choral recitations, literary debates and students’ own literary creativity.
Among teachers of natural and mathematical disciplines, the works of famous methodologists V. N. Verkhovsky, D. D. Galaiin, P. A. Znamensky, K. P. Yagodovsky enjoy deserved recognition.
The study of the surrounding life and the widely organized socially useful work of students stimulated the development of issues of labor and polytechnic training. N.K. Krupskaya insisted that socially useful work of students be a mandatory component in the work of every school to the same extent as every school is required to teach reading and writing.
In the comprehensive programs of the State University of Education, an attempt was made to find a connection between general, polytechnic education and labor training, although in the practice of their implementation these connections took on an artificial and, as a rule, narrowly utilitarian character. Work assignments were also random in nature and did not provide for the systematic acquisition of technical and technological knowledge and work skills.
In 1927, a labor training program was first developed, which, along with instilling in students the skills of processing wood, metals, fabrics and other materials, set the task of teaching the elements necessary in any labor process: planning, selection of materials and tools, evaluation of the completed product, etc. .
Many schools offered excursions to production facilities, technical clubs worked, and a number of schools introduced practical training for students.
In 1929, the board of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR adopted the “Five-year plan for labor polytechnic training in schools of the first and second levels.” This plan provided for: for groups I-IV - the organization of workrooms or regular classrooms equipped for labor, folding workbenches and portable equipment; for factory seven-year schools and schools for collective farm youth - the organization of workshops and laboratories; for the remaining seven-year schools - the creation of central educational and production polytechnic bases, one in small towns and workers' settlements and one per district in large cities.
This advanced the cause of labor and polytechnic training. Moreover, work in the workshops had to be combined with the widespread development of socially useful work of students and the attachment of city schools to industrial enterprises, and rural schools - to state farms, collective farms and MTS.
The close connection between schooling and the economic and political life of the country contributed to an increase in the level of ideological and political education of students. During these years, a system of anti-religious education of children and youth, education of Soviet patriotism and proletarian internationalism was taking shape.
In the late twenties and early thirties, under the leadership of the Communist Party, the offensive of socialism unfolded along all fronts in our country. The technical re-equipment of the national economy was carried out at a rapid pace, the collective farm system was established in the countryside, and the labor and political activity of the working people increased. Raising the level of culture and education of the people was an important component of socialist construction.
In this regard, the XVI Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1930) adopted the resolution “On universal compulsory primary education.” The number of students in schools increased from 13.5 million in the 1929-30 school year to 21 million in the 1932-33 school year.
Further successes of socialist construction brought to the fore the task of expanding and improving the quality of training of specialists for industry, agriculture, science and culture.
The network of secondary and higher specialized educational institutions that existed in the country and the level of training of specialists in them did not meet the needs of the national economy and its restructuring based on the latest achievements of science and technology. This problem became the subject of discussion at the July (1928) and November (1929) Plenums of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
The resolution of the November (1929) Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks noted that the pace of training new personnel cannot be compared with the pace of industrialization and socialist reorganization of agriculture and that the country faces a huge shift in the “scissors” between the demand for specialists and the pace of their preparation. This may become an obstacle to the further successful development of the socialist economy, especially since there is not only a quantitative shortage of specialists, but also serious shortcomings in the quality of their training.
Over the course of several years, a giant leap has been made in expanding the network of higher and secondary specialized educational institutions. This can be judged by the following figures: in the 1927/28 academic year, there were 148 higher educational institutions in the country, with 168.5 thousand students; in the 1933/34 academic year there were already 714 universities and 458 thousand students.
In subsequent years, further expansion of higher and secondary specialized education was planned. The secondary school played a significant role in preparing students for higher and secondary specialized schools.
Among those admitted to the country's universities in 1927, those who graduated from the workers' faculty accounted for 28.7%, those who graduated from technical schools - 9.5%, and those who graduated from second-level schools - 46.5%.
The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated August 23, 1932, especially emphasized the role of high school in training contingents for higher educational institutions. In this regard, it was proposed to reorganize, starting from the 1932/33 academic year, the seven-year polytechnic school into a ten-year one.
In 1933, common types for the entire country were defined secondary school: primary, incomplete secondary and secondary.
The thirties were characterized by rapid growth of the network of seven-year and secondary schools and an increase in the number of students in them, mainly due to middle and senior (V-X) classes. The number of seven-year schools increased from 7,834 in the 1929–30 school year to 36,261 in the 1938–39 school year. The number of secondary schools increased accordingly from 1914 to 12,469. The total number of students increased from 13.5 million in the 1929-30 school year to 34.8 million in the 1940-41 school year.
The network of schools in the republics grew especially quickly. In the Uzbek SSR, for example, by the 1937/38 school year the number of schools had increased by 27 times in cities and 68 times in rural areas compared to the pre-revolutionary period.
The need to increase the pace and quality of training of specialists with higher and secondary specialized education has acutely raised the problem of the quality of general education training for students in secondary school.
Analyzing the results of admission exams to universities and inspections of schools, the newspaper Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee wrote on March 16, 1929 that many school graduates are poorly prepared to continue their education at universities and technical schools, that the school does not develop students’ habits of reading that students’ speech is poor and stylistically unsatisfactory.
There were serious gaps in students' knowledge in mathematics and physics. An analysis of exam papers in physics indicated that applicants experienced serious difficulties as soon as they had to solve problems of an applied nature, confirm conclusions or laws of science with experience, or read a drawing or diagram.
Based on an analysis of the results of admission exams to universities and the quality of students’ knowledge, in 1929 a special methodological letter of the Glavsotsvos People’s Commissariat of the RSFSR “On Improving the Quality of Second-Stage School Work” was published.
While correctly characterizing serious deficiencies in students' knowledge, this letter, however, gave incorrect recommendations about the mass introduction of the so-called project method in schools.
In fact, this led to disorganization of training and education and to a further decline in the quality of students' knowledge. In 1931-1936. Several resolutions were adopted by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the school, which determined the direction of its further development.
The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On primary and secondary schools” dated September 5, 1931 noted a fundamentally new content of the school’s work and a slight increase in the level of general and polytechnic education of children and youth. At the same time, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks stated that the school still does not meet the requirements that are imposed on it at the present stage of socialist construction.
The resolution noted: “The fundamental drawback of schools at the moment is that schooling does not provide a sufficient amount of general educational knowledge and unsatisfactorily solves the problem of preparation for technical schools and for high school completely literate people with a good command of the basics of science (physics, chemistry, mathematics, native language, geography, etc.).”
This and subsequent resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, developing the basic idea of ​​the resolution of September 5, 1931, obliged the People's Commissars of the Union Republics to organize the scientific development of secondary school programs and the compilation of textbooks, ensuring in them:
- a precisely defined range of systematized knowledge in each subject, ensuring the comprehensive development of those graduating from high school and their preparation for studying at technical schools and higher educational institutions;
- careful selection educational material into secondary school programs and textbooks, taking into account its scientific and practical significance, the role in the communist education of children and youth and the possibilities for its truly lasting and conscious assimilation by children of a given age and in the time allotted for this;
- increasing the ideological and political level of educational work, especially the teaching of socio-political disciplines. Widespread use in classes in all subjects of materials on the socialist reorganization of the country's life. Strengthening the struggle against any attempts to instill elements of anti-proletarian ideology in the children of Soviet schools;
- further development Polytechnic school in close connection with the systematic and solid mastery of the sciences, especially physics, chemistry and mathematics.
The implementation of these provisions constituted the main content of the work of the Soviet school in the thirties.
During this period, new curricula, programs and textbooks were developed for each subject, teaching methods were streamlined, and methodological work with teachers was organized.
During these years, the transition to systematic teaching of the fundamentals of science was persistently and consistently carried out. The school has made significant progress in providing students with deep and enduring knowledge. Basically, she successfully completed the task assigned to her “to prepare for technical schools and for higher education completely literate people who have a good command of the basics of science.” The report to the XVIII Congress on the work of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks indicated that the creation of a multimillion-strong Soviet intelligentsia, emerging from the ranks of the working class, peasantry, Soviet employees, flesh of flesh and blood of the blood of our people, is one of the most important results of the cultural revolution in our country.
However, the school's efforts to overcome the fundamental shortcomings in its work and improve the preparation of students for entering universities and technical schools were somewhat one-sided. Attention to issues of preparing students for life and work was weakened; theory was sometimes given without connection with practice; elements of formalism and discipline in teaching and in students’ knowledge increased. These shadow sides in the development of the Soviet school of the thirties caused critical comments from N.K. Krupskaya and a number of other teachers.
As if summing up numerous critical remarks on the state of teaching Russian language and literature, mathematics, physics, chemistry and other subjects in 1932-1938, N.K. Krupskaya said on December 14, 1938: “I won’t say that I was very pleased with the school . At school they pay too much attention to learning: like little birds, the kids open their mouths, and the teacher chews everything for them and puts the finished product in their mouth. The kids have a good memory, they will give you quotes that an adult won’t remember right away, they will amaze their parents with their knowledge, but to think things through, to really work on their own - we don’t teach kids this enough at school.”
These warnings of N.K. Krupskaya were not sufficiently taken into account in the work of the Soviet school, and by the end of the thirties a certain separation of education from life began to develop.
By the end of the second five-year plan (1933-1937), a socialist society had basically been built in the USSR and the country had entered a new period of its development - the period of completion of the construction of socialism and the gradual transition to communism. In March 1939, the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was held, which emphasized the decisive importance of the cause of the communist education of the working people and overcoming the remnants of capitalism in the minds of people.
The school had to implement a broad program to improve the level of education, instill communist consciousness in the younger generations, and it persistently sought ways to combine the preparation of students for continued education and practical activity.
The congress approved the main tasks of the third five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR. In the field of education, it was planned to implement universal secondary education in the city and complete universal seven-year education in the countryside and in all national republics. The number of students in secondary schools in cities and workers' settlements was to increase from 8.6 to 12.4 million, and in rural areas - from 20.8 to 27.7 million.
With a significant increase in the number of people graduating from high school, most of them had to go to practical work. In this connection, the question arose that young people should receive some preparation for practical activities already in secondary school.
The treacherous attack of Nazi Germany on our country disrupted the peaceful creative work of the Soviet people. The years of the Great Patriotic War and the post-war restoration of the national economy are the brightest pages of the heroic history of the Soviet people. And during these years, the Communist Party and the Soviet state showed constant concern for children, for schools, for teachers.
During the war years, the school and public education authorities made great efforts to ensure the uninterrupted operation of schools, despite the difficulties. The evacuation of the child population from areas of possible military action was organized. A lot of work has been done to prevent child homelessness and neglect; new personnel have been trained to replace teachers who have gone into the army; meals for children have been organized in schools, etc.
Schoolchildren took an active part in the heroic work of the people to help the front. They worked on the fields of collective and state farms, in school workshops, in hospitals and children's institutions. High school students made up a significant portion of the local air defense force. IN eastern regions The RSFSR, the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan warmly welcomed hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren evacuated from the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Belarus and the western regions of the RSFSR.
Despite the difficulties of wartime, during these years major changes were carried out in the Soviet system of public education and in the work of schools: the beginning of schooling for children from the age of seven; the creation of seven-year and secondary schools for working and rural youth; the introduction of a five-point system for assessing students' knowledge, final examinations at the end of primary and seven-year schools and matriculation examinations; rewarding students who excelled in their studies with gold and silver medals, etc.
The Great Patriotic War clearly demonstrated the advantages of the Soviet education system. Pupils of the Soviet school showed examples of true heroism at the front and in the rear. But the war brought enormous destruction and losses to the entire national economy of the USSR, including public education institutions.
The Nazi invaders in the areas they temporarily occupied burned, destroyed and plundered 82 thousand schools, in which 15 million students studied before the war.
People's concern for the school and the great attention to the upbringing and education of the younger generations on the part of the Communist Party and the Soviet state made it possible to cope with the difficulties of the post-war period in the shortest possible time. Even during the war, as territories captured by the enemy were liberated, over 70 thousand schools were restored. In 1946-1950 18,538 schools were built using state budget funds and collective farm funds.
According to the plan for the restoration and development of the national economy of the USSR for 1946-1950. in 1950, 193 thousand primary, seven-year and secondary schools were supposed to operate with a student population of 31.8 million. In fact, in the 1950/51 academic year, over 200 thousand schools operated in the USSR, with 33.3 million children studying.
The 19th Congress of the CPSU (1952) set the task of completing during the fifth five-year plan the transition from seven-year to universal secondary education (ten-year) in the capitals of republics, cities of republican subordination, in regional, regional and largest industrial centers and preparing conditions for the full implementation of universal secondary education in the next five-year plan education (ten years) in other cities and rural areas.
This determined the further rapid growth of the network of secondary schools and the number of students, especially in high school. From 1950 to 1958, the number of secondary schools more than doubled (from 15 thousand to 30.7 thousand), and the number of students in high school more than tripled (from 0.7 million to 2.2 million).
In the fifties, the school continued to improve the preparation of young people for entry into higher and secondary specialized educational institutions. This was very important, since in the post-war years the problem of training specialists of higher and secondary qualifications again became one of the most pressing problems of socialist construction.
Gigantic plans for the restructuring of the entire national economy, social life and life of Soviet people based on the use of the latest achievements of science, technology and culture required a significant expansion of higher and secondary specialized education. In 1945, the needs of the national economy for specialists were met by only 1/6 of the graduates of secondary specialized educational institutions, and by 1/8 of the graduates of higher educational institutions.
Total for 1945-1958 Higher and secondary specialized educational institutions trained more than 7 million specialists and in 1959-1966. more than 7 million more. In 1959, 63% of all specialists employed in the national economy were graduates of universities and technical schools from 1946-1959.
In connection with the growing need of the national economy for workers in mass professions, as well as the rapid growth in the number of secondary school graduates, significantly exceeding the planned enrollment of universities, in the mid-fifties the issue of preparing secondary school graduates not only for continuing education in universities and technical schools, but also urgently arose in the mid-fifties. but also to practical activity, to productive work in industry and agriculture.
The 19th Congress of the CPSU, in order to further enhance the educational role of the general education school and provide students graduating from high school with conditions for free choice of professions, proposed to begin polytechnic education in high school and carry out the activities necessary for the transition to universal polytechnic education.
This directive was specified in the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. In 1952-1958. Work began to find the most rational ways of labor and polytechnic training for students.
The Old Korsun Secondary School No. 15 of the Krasnodar Territory and the Siverskaya Secondary School No. 1 were widely known at that time. Leningrad region, Maksatikha secondary school of the Kalinin region, Kutuzov seven-year school of the Moscow region, Kuplinskaya secondary school of the Ryazan region, secondary school No. 10 of Chelyabinsk, secondary school No. 11 of Kalinin.
The teaching staff of these schools sought to ensure an organic connection between polytechnic and labor education and the study of the fundamentals of science at school, to develop the initiative and initiative of students, and to organize their active participation in socially useful work.
A number of important studies on issues of polytechnic education date back to this period. Based on these studies and the best experience of schools, a system of labor and polytechnic training for secondary school students was developed, the main elements of which were: the implementation of the polytechnic principle in the teaching of general education subjects, lessons manual labor in grades I-IV, practical classes in educational workshops and at school educational and experimental sites in grades V-VII, workshops on mechanical science, electrical engineering and the basics of agriculture in grades VIII-X.
The most common workshops were on the basics of agriculture, on studying a car, tractor, electric motor, lathe, on performing simple installation work in electrical and radio engineering.
These workshops were conducted in close connection with the study of physics, chemistry, biology and other academic subjects. Excursions to production were widely practiced in schools, industrial practice and theoretical and practical study of special subjects in technical and agricultural circles were introduced. During this period, the beginning was made of the creation of student production teams on state and collective farms.
The main drawback was that the emerging system of labor and polytechnic education became the property of only a relatively small number of advanced schools. In the bulk of secondary schools, the labor and polytechnic training of students remained completely insufficient.
A negative impact on school practice was that, having quite naturally switched a number of important elements of labor and polytechnic training of students to extracurricular and extracurricular activities (participation in productive work, industrial practice, study of special subjects in technical and agricultural clubs), the school curriculum did not highlight the necessary time for these activities, which created overload for students.
The successes of the Soviet school during the period under review are indisputable. It has trained millions of educated, cultured citizens, active participants in socialist construction, and has raised a remarkable cadre of outstanding scientists, engineers, and designers, whose quests and creative work are embodied in such historical scientific and technical victories as artificial earth satellites, nuclear power plants, a nuclear icebreaker, high-speed jet passenger planes.
The Soviet school played a decisive role in the implementation of the cultural revolution, contributed to the rise of the culture of all the peoples of our multinational Motherland, it raised a generation of youth who devoted all their strength and knowledge, abilities and talents to the great cause of building communism. Success in school development is one of the most important components the final victory of socialism in our country.