The Soviet Roots of the Eastern European Socialist Educational Politics The Two Ways of the Soviet Communist Pedagogy: From the Anathema of Herbart to the Rehabilitation of Herbart (Introduction to Educational Politics). Part 1. Toward the Total Alternativity

Abstract

Since the decline of Soviet political influence, we have been interested in Western European educational norms and methods in Eastern Europe. However, several elements of the two phases of Sovietization have been integrated into our academic culture. We forgot the ideology and methods of the first socialist state. After the 1917 revolution, the Soviet totalitarian educational politics fiercely refused the earlier Prussian schooling, including the Herbartian pedagogy of controlling and the bourgeois spirit of the schools in Western democracies. The new Soviet regime tried to create an egalitarian new society with the autonomy of the children and their schools. Under the conditions of the proletarian dictatorship, the builders of the future socialist society borrowed the defining patterns of their educational ideology and methodology from American and European pedagogues and psychologists who were critical of the system. The attempt to implement the idea integrated into Marxism, as interpreted by Lenin, won admiration from the political left of the time and later period. Although the idea of proletarian internationalism disappeared along with the program of the class struggle, new public schools organized on the basis of socialist educational principles were indeed created, but only in social democratic and capitalist welfare states that avoided Marxism-Leninism.