Historical and pedagogical prerequisites for the formation of school upbringing systems in Soviet Russia in the first decades after the revolution

Abstract

The early Soviet decade is often described either as a radical break with pre-revolutionary pedagogy or as a period of scattered experimentation that never coalesced into a system; both readings leave open the question of which sources the school upbringing practice of 1917-1920s grew from and to what extent it can be described through the category of an upbringing system. The study aims to identify and systematise the historical and pedagogical prerequisites for the formation of school upbringing systems in Soviet Russia during the first post-revolutionary decade. The historical-genetic and comparative methods, conceptual-categorial analysis, structural-functional reconstruction and content analysis of the normative and programmatic documents of the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR were applied. A four-component typology of prerequisites is proposed, separating the socio-political, ideological-theoretical, organisational-managerial and properly pedagogical layers; the target, content, organisational and environmental components of the emerging system are reconstructed; a three-stage periodisation of the decade is substantiated. It is established that continuity with pre-revolutionary reform pedagogy is real, yet the inherited forms are resubordinated to a new ideological function, so that the system forms not as a ready-made construction but as a field of competing and gradually unified solutions; the category of an upbringing system applies to the decade only as a description of a becoming rather than a completed whole. The proposed separation of the layers of prerequisites removes the apparent dilemma of rupture and continuity, showing that they belong to different levels of one and the same process.