Struggle over the Soviet Future: Science Education versus Vocationalism during the 1920s

Abstract

Scholars have documented how Bolshevik activists recognized the centrality of education as the means of inculcating in young citizens new values. However, what, exactly, constituted those Soviet values was still hotly contested during the 1920s. This contest was most vehemently waged in the crucial but understudied arena of education. A close look at those disputes provides a new understanding of factional politics within the People's Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), revealing fundamental fault lines that divided not only non-Bolshevik progressive educators from Bolsheviks but also Bolsheviks from each other.' Because the leadership claimed legitimacy on the basis of the scientific nature of Marxist doctrine, the nature of science became central grounds for dispute. The Lysenko Affair is most widely known, but was politicized far earlier. In the 1920s the debate was not between valid and know-nothing anti-science, but rather between two different views of the nature of science. For one party, the heirs of the progressive educational movement of the tsarist era, was an open system that pursued knowledge of the universe for its own sake, and inculcated in its students a democratic questioning of received truths. For them, most of all taught children to think independently and critically, and it instilled in them a wide-ranging curiosity about the universe. For their opponents, radical Marxists of a Stalinist bent, was a source ofcertain knowledge, valuable only because it provided a means of manipulating the material world. For them, taught schoolchildren how to achieve the technical goals the leadership had established.