The transformation of Russian historical and pedagogical education in the 1990s and early 2000s

Abstract

The article reconstructs and provides a quantitative and qualitative description of the transformation of domestic historical and pedagogical education in 1991-2005 against the background of sociocultural and political ruptures of the post-Soviet period, when de-ideologization was accompanied by paradigmatic plurality and competition among scholarly schools. It is shown that the changes were nonlinear and simultaneously affected institutional regulators, curricular architecture, and the substantive «frameworks» of disciplines within the historical and pedagogical cycle. Based on a comparison of corpora of curricula, syllabi, and textbooks, the dynamics of contact hours allocated to «History of pedagogy» are identified: a sharp reduction by the mid-1990s (almost by half compared to 1990) was combined with growing interregional variability, recorded through an increase in the coefficient of variation to levels indicating the collapse of former unification and the transfer of decision-making to the institutional level. At the same time, a subsequent recentralization and partial stabilization by the early 2000s is traced, albeit with an irreversible shift toward a greater share of seminar-based and interactive formats. Content analysis of textbooks demonstrates an inversion of thematic proportions: a noticeable decline in the dominance of the Soviet block is accompanied by a rapid expansion of foreign and pre-revolutionary material and a short-term surge in citations of Western authors, interpreted as an effect of «open borders» and uncritical borrowing followed by correction and a transition to synthetic models. The article also examines the regionalization of historical and pedagogical training through the introduction of national-regional modules, revealing the polycentric nature of the educational space and the linkage between content localization and dissertation activity within regional scholarly communities. Overall, the article makes it possible to assess the actual place of historical and pedagogical disciplines in teacher professional training through measurable indicators and to understand the points at which reforms led either to a loss of fundamentality or to a renewal of the methodological horizon under conditions of strengthened standards and restricted academic autonomy.