Ideological contradictions in the teaching of history in the Soviet secondary school at the stage of transition from the dogmatic model to the critical comprehension of the past

Abstract

The formation of school history education in the USSR developed through the coexistence of two didactic orientations: the orientation towards the assimilation of an integral, worldview-defined picture of the past and the orientation towards the formation of the pupils' capacity for independent historical judgement. The balance between these orientations changed at different stages, and the transition from the predominantly expository (dogmatic) model to a model that incorporates procedures of critical comprehension of the past constitutes the substantive core of the process under study. The aim of the work is to reconstruct the inner logic of this transition and to propose a didactic typology of its stages. The historical-pedagogical and structural-functional methods and the conceptual-categorial analysis of the normative and methodological documents of school history education were applied. An author's periodisation has been constructed, in which each stage is matched with a dominant type of educational historical cognition, together with a matrix of correspondence between didactic means and the cognitive skills formed in the pupil. It has been established that the tension between the systematising and the developing functions of the school course was constructive in nature and served as a mechanism for the gradual enrichment of the methodological apparatus with work on the historical source and the comparison of points of view. The accumulation of these techniques within a stable content line prepared the conditions for the inclusion of procedures of critical comprehension without abandoning the systematic character and accessibility of the exposition, which explains the continuous character of the methodological evolution of the Soviet secondary school.