Research, theory and practice in the USSR

Abstract

On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it would be interesting forProspects readers to take stock of education in the Soviet Union. The idea is not so much to review progress in education since 1922 as to speak of the present situation, with its strong points and its unsolved problems, and to outline how you think education in the USSR should develop in the next two decades. It would also be desirable for emphasis to be placed mainly on qualitative aspects, since the quantitative problems (enrolment in schools, teachers, schoolbooks, premises, services of all kinds, etc.) have largely been solved.

This approach is all the more necessary because little is known outside the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe about the state of not tell those interested in education in your country about the qualitative aspects of your system, about the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.

Furthermore, the special concerns of the education system in the USSR in terms of recent developments would seem to be: the universal phenomenon of the ‘information explosion’; the universalization of secondary education, practically achieved at the end of the 1970s and the major ‘Guidelines for the Economic and Social Development of the USSR for 1981–85 and for the Period Ending 1990’ adopted in March 1981 by the Twenty-sixth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

This is the larger context surrounding this interview, with the successive questions treating theoretical and practical problems, the linguistic situation in the USSR and, finally, educational research and the dissemination of its results outside your country.