Editor's Introduction

Abstract

There has been a great deal of discussion in Russia about the lack of a program to deal with the upbringing component of education during the post-Soviet period, a topic made more urgent by the collapse of old institutions and the slow progress made in replacing them. Compounding the problem is the fact that families are often in no state to deal with the need to compensate for the lack of state run programs in the schools and in official organizations. As S. V. Darmodekhin puts it in "Problems of the Development of the System of Children's Upbringing in the Russian Federation," families are "becoming more disorganized, the old established moral and ethical norms and traditions of family life are breaking down. Conflicts between husbands and wives and between parents and children are getting worse; they are in a state of depression as a result of lack of legal, moral, and economic protection. All these aspects have led to a lowering of the family's upbringing potential, its role in the socialization of children. Problems, poverty, the fact that parents are so busy, and the unfavorable psychological atmosphere are having a lethal impact on children's upbringing and on their moral and physical development." The negative consequences of this are clear and evident, including an increase in the number of runaways, in child abandonment, drug abuse, prostitution, youth gangs, criminality, and the increased risk of life-threatening diseases. As Darmodekhin notes, there is a great need for new policies to deal with the problem, the necessary scope of which he discusses. Part of the solution must lie in helping families to cope with their weak economic status, especially those families most at risk of failure, including those considered by L.G. Luniakova in her article "On the Present Standard of Living of Families of Single Mothers." Although most of the mothers who took part in Luniakova's study worked, half of them nonetheless had incomes that were a third or less of the official minimum subsistence level. As a result, "poverty and destitution are deeply entrenched in their lives and everyday activities," a situation that does not augur well for the educational performance of their children. In addition, the growth of drug abuse among young people in the post-Soviet period has implications well beyond the fate of the individual, as is shown in "Adolescents as a Group That Is Vulnerable to Narcotics Addiction and HIV Infection," by L.S. Kolesova. In a nation facing a population decline and a growing percentage of elderly people, anything that impairs health, and especially reproductive health, makes a bad situation worse. For example, the rate of diseases of all kinds among Russian youth aged fifteen to seventeen rose by almost forty percent in the 1990s, while the rate of infectious diseases more than doubled. At the present time, "the adolescent age group accounts for the most rapid rate of spread of narcotics addiction, AIDS, and sexually transmitted disease…, as well as viral hepatitis B and C." The lack of knowledge about how these diseases are contracted, and about the extent to which they are life-threatening, is making things even worse than they need to be. Thus, young people are making decisions without any understanding of the consequences. As Kolesova notes, it is "easy to see that these characteristics add up to nothing more nor less than pedagogical waste on the part of the social institutions that are supposed to be responsible for the upbringing, education, and social adaptation of children and adolescents." As these articles show, the root of the problem is a combination of social and economic stress following the collapse of the USSR, and the disappearance of the many official and unofficial mechanisms through which the lives of young people were controlled.