History lessons in the training of an engineer-educator: Russian social democracy of the early 20th century

Abstract

Vocational pedagogical education trains a specialist of a dual nature who combines engineering and pedagogical qualifications; the humanities component of such training, however, is often reduced to a background cultural minimum weakly connected with the profile of future activity. Between the renewed history course, mandatory for non-historical programmes, and the subject logic of training an engineer-educator a methodological gap persists: historical material is presented without correlation to the social mission of the technical specialist as a mentor. The aim of the work is to substantiate the didactic potential of a specific historical episode of the early 20th century connected with the educational practices of the social-democratic movement and the participation of the technical intelligentsia in workers’ education, for the formation of the professional stance of an engineer-educator. On the basis of conceptual-categorial analysis, the structural-functional approach, content analysis of normative documents and modelling, an author’s typology of the didactic functions of this historical material is proposed, together with a matrix of its correlation with the requirements of the federal educational standard, the professional standard and the concept of history teaching. It is established that the educational experience of the early 20th century possesses not an illustrative but a genealogical value for the future engineer-educator: it reveals the historical origins of the educational function of the technical specialist and makes it possible to transfer the humanities component of training from a general cultural background into professionally addressed content.