Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to define his policies of perestroika, or restructuring, for the comprehensive reform of Soviet society, much has been written in the USSR about the national educational system that could not have been written before. The earliest of these writings, dating to 1986 and '87, may be compared to what was published during the years of the Khrushchev thaw; factual information and critical analyses of educational practices were forthcoming in greater quantities and to greater extents than previously. The political events of 1988 that have taken place prior to the date of this writing—chiefly the Communist Party Central Committee Plenum of February 1988 and the Nineteenth Communist Party Conference of July—have made possible far greater openness, or glasnost', in discussions of educational issues. This new chapter in the history of the Soviet educational reform of the 1980s, which was initiated in 1983 and 1984 by the short-lived pre-Gorbachev governments of Iurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko and which has been extensively chronicled in this journal, has found its first written reflections in newspaper articles. The Soviet press is openly publishing the debates that are taking place about how to reformulate the educational reform.