Abstract

Left-handers have always been surrounded by stigma and controversy, and attitudes toward this group have always been rooted in the ideas and traditions of power relations existing in a given society. Thus, the goal of this study is to describe the retraining of left-handers as it was conducted in Soviet education. The impact of political power on an individual’s body-mind interaction is a significant problem in research on the creation of the “New Soviet Man.” The teaching of left-handed children in the Soviet Union is a noteworthy example of the totalitarian regime’s illusionary endeavors to change human nature. The Soviet education envisaged neither a special attitude nor any particular pedagogical strategies for the work with left-handed children. The Soviet science was based on the anthropological understanding of man as a tabula rasa, which made it possible to explain the omnipotence of Soviet pedagogy as well as the unswerving belief that it was possible to educate every child into a true member of the socialist society. The present study provides insight into the disciplining of the left-handed children’s bodies and minds using pedagogical tools that was being conducted in Soviet Latvia.

Highlights

  • The education of left-handers is considered an underresearched field everywhere in the world (Bertrand 2001; Kusher 2017), and historians call this group “a people without a history” (McManus, Nicholls, Vallortigara 2010).Left-handers appear to have always been surrounded by controversy and stigma, the group being hated, tolerated or admired in different times and cultures (Bertrand 2001)

  • Given that some respondents studied at school until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the questionnaire results confirm the fact that the retraining of left-handed children had not been over with the lifting of the ban on genetics in 1965 nor after the methodological guidelines on the protection of left-handed children by the USSR Ministry of Health in 1989

  • The study of the education of left-handers in Soviet Latvia confirmed the thesis that the typical efforts characteristic of the modernist paradigm to solve social problems through education (Smeyers, Depaepe 2008) were clearly manifested in the USSR

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Summary

Introduction

The education of left-handers is considered an underresearched field everywhere in the world (Bertrand 2001; Kusher 2017), and historians call this group “a people without a history” (McManus, Nicholls, Vallortigara 2010). Left-handers appear to have always been surrounded by controversy and stigma, the group being hated, tolerated or admired in different times and cultures (Bertrand 2001). Researchers have turned to learning the specifics and educational support of left-handers quite recently (Smits 2017). The history of the education of left-handers in the Soviet Union is terra incognita in that it is an unexplored field. The mass retraining of left-handed children had lasted until 1985 and the socalled perestroika (1987–1991) (Arestova 2012)

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