Totalitarian educational practices of the 20-30s of the XX century: from prerequisites to consequences

Abstract

Based on the generalization of socio-cultural factors of social development in the period from 1918 to the mid-30s of the twentieth century and formed at that time educational models, values, ideals and worldviews revealed the essential features and main trends of the national educational space in totalitarianism. The semantic and structural features of the educational space in the 20-30s of the XX century have been analyzed, the general philosophical and sociocultural determinants of system transformations in all its dimensions have been substantiated. In particular, the consequences of unjustified, from the point of view of educational needs and available educational potential, expansion of territorial-subject dimension have been shown, when the increase in the number of educational institutions with new names did not give their actual growth and semantic diversification. Based on the analysis of party and government documents related to the problems of education, as well as philosophical and pedagogical works of this period revealed the specifics of the deployment of sign-symbolic dimension of educational space, which was to level the natural process of metatext, instead - artificial planting of texts with strong ideological direction. In the public consciousness, and hence in the textual space, there was a devaluation of established categories (personality, individuality, society, etc.), at the same time such concepts as "class", "team", "idea" gained weight. Collectivism, solidarity of interests and the priority of the collective over the individual, discipline and subordination over free will have been asserted. Significant changes have been established in the subjective dimension of the educational space: the idea of the inseparability of an exceptional, unique personality from society is gradually transformed into an indisputable statement about the "merger" of man with society by abandoning his/her own individuality. As a result, there was a shift of the individual to the denominator of the social, which from an important attributive characteristic of the individual has become the main goal, determinant and regulator of his/her life. And the recognition of the external determinism of all human actions has led to the "compression" of the educational space in its subjective dimension to the size of the environment.