What to teach and how to teach? This question has been haunting throughout the history of schooling. Both educators and politicians were well aware of the role that the content of education plays in educating the younger generation and in developing the state as a whole. Therefore, for example, the Spartan education system, the knightly education system in Europe, and the gentleman education programs in England are known in history.
There are also interesting periods in the history of Russian education when the educational program of the school changed radically. One of these reforms was the restructuring of the school in the young Soviet republic.
After the October events of 1917, A.V. Lunacharsky and N.K. Krupskaya were at the helm of school life. Their works in 1918 adopted the first documents about the school. If you read the "Basic Principles of the Unified Labor School" from the perspective of the Russian school today, then we can confidently call them relevant and modern.
Having studied the educational programs of the USA and Europe, N.K. Krupskaya and A.V. Lunacharsky included the most progressive ideas in the basis of the new Soviet school.
Respect for the student’s personality and refusal of physical punishment, active teaching methods, an individual approach to each student, the development of gifted children and care for the lagging behind are not an exhaustive list of the proclaimed school transformations.
The new school refused to use physical punishment for students with rods. The requirement for teachers was one thing - to be able to captivate children in the classroom, so that there was no reason for disciplinary action. The best student incentive is school self-government.
Education programs of the Unified Labor School were concentrated around three main areas of student life: nature, labor, society. In those years, educators were encouraged to use what we call integrated learning today.
The main subject of elementary education is a kind of children's encyclopedia. For example, an object of animate or inanimate nature (a pet, a mechanism, a natural phenomenon) was selected and examined from the standpoint of human use, information was provided on the physical and chemical properties of this object, its origin, development history, etc. That is, acquaintance with the objects of the surrounding reality should have been comprehensively from the standpoint of all sciences.
An exaggerated view of the reform of the education program of those times can be seen in the film “Two Captains” by V. Kaverin. Remember how the students studied the cow. At a lesson in their native language, they learned to write the word “cow”, in geography they studied where these cows live.
The improvement of the education system in Soviet Russia also involved the introduction of new teaching methods. The project method came to school. Pupils learned to plan their studies, were engaged in research, defending projects aimed at transforming the surrounding life. The core of the Unified Labor School education program was productive labor. Labor and an active, creative knowledge of the world around us - this is what the reformers sought.
But their ideas were not destined to come true then. On the one hand, not all teachers were able to see the prospect of the development of reformist ideas. On the other hand, the impending totalitarian regime did not need actively-minded people.
In September 1931, a party resolution was adopted, which condemned the method of projects (it was bourgeois after all), productive labor, and activity in training. For many years, a reproductive system of education came to school, based on the principle of “teacher’s question - student’s answer”
Only in the 90s of the twentieth century did the Russian school again hear about the method of projects and research activities, about humanistic education.