Teacher Education Reform as Political Theater

Russian Policy Dramas

Elena Aydarova

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476148, 9781438476155
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476162
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

An ethnography of Russian teacher education reforms as scripted performances of political theater.

Winner of the 2021 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society of Professors of Education

Winner of the 2020 Critics Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association (AESA)

Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Council on Anthropology and Education

Around the world, countries undertake teacher education reforms in response to international norms and assessments. Russia has been no exception. Elena Aydarova develops a unique theatrical framework to tell the story of a small group of reformers who enacted a major reform to modernize teacher education in Russia. Based on scripts circulated in global policy networks and ideologies of national development, this reform was implemented despite great opposition-but how? Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Aydarova teases out the contradictions in this process. Teacher Education Reform as Political Theater reveals how the official story of improving education obscured dramatic and, ultimately, socially conservative changes in the purposes of schooling, the nature and perception of teachers' work, and the design of teacher education. Despite the official rhetoric, Aydarova argues, modernization reforms such as we see in the Russian context normalize social inequality and put educational systems at the service of global corporations. As similar dramas unfold around the world, this book considers how members of scholarly communities and the broader public can respond to reformers' stories of crises and urgent calls for reform on other national stages.

Part I

Historical Context

Sowing the Seeds of Discontent

Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich—that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.

—Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Throughout its development, teacher preparation in Russia had a complex relationship with the state and with the society: it stood on the crossroads of competing priorities that placed contradictory demands on its performance. In this chapter, I present a synopsis of how pedagogical universities as stand-alone institutions dedicated to teacher education evolved in the Russian context. My goal, however, is not to present a comprehensive account of this evolvement as this has been done by others (see Long and Long 1999). Rather, I foreground some of the issues that gained particular significance in the current context of its reforms and provide descriptions of key features of the system to situate the drama that unfolded in the last couple of years.

I break up my narrative by several different decades but do not follow a strict chronological timeline. Instead, I trace how the change introduced at one point in time mutated through subsequent decades to produce the kind of results that subsequently made the work of pedagogical universities particularly challenging. In presenting my analysis, I abstain from demonizing the Soviet state, as is customary in the accounts of that period. Instead, I focus on the evidence that is available to me—primary sources from the Russian archives, a variety of secondary sources in Russian and English, as well as interview data. In doing so, however, I am aware that the line between reality and fiction was blurry in the Soviet Union as much as it currently is in modern Russia. Multiple sources of evidence might state the same lies. While others abandoned any attempts to contextualize their projects in official historical documents for this reason and turned instead to personal accounts only (see Matza 2010), I bring various sources together to allow them to corroborate or challenge the storyline presented.

On the Eve of the Revolution: Education and Teacher Preparation in Imperial Russia

The Russian Empire did not have compulsory education. A variety of schools existed: some were run by local authorities, some by the ministry, some by churches. Schools that provided access to higher education—such as gymnasiums or lyceums—were not equally accessible to children from different social classes. In fact, the Cook’s Circular of 1887 stated that “gymnasiums and progymnasiums are freed from receiving the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, laundresses, small tradesmen, and the like” (as quoted in Long and Long 1999, 5). Many could not rely on formal schools to provide basic instruction and had to learn from any individual available to teach them. Literacy rates varied significantly between urban centers and rural areas: they rarely rose above 47 percent among the adult population in Saint Petersburg and Moscow and dropped to about 14 percent in Siberian regions (Bogdanov 1964). Literacy rates among males were often twice as high as literacy rates among females.

Teachers who taught in Russian schools varied in the extent of their preparation as well. For basic schools that offered elementary education, most teachers were prepared in pedagogical gymnasiums that were equivalent to high schools. Other teachers came from universities, teacher institutes, and teacher seminaries. While universities offered a range of educational specializations, those who graduated from them received no training in pedagogy or teaching methods. Teacher seminaries and teacher institutes focused exclusively on teacher preparation and offered courses in pedagogy. They, however, were not considered higher education institutions and did not give their graduates the right to enter universities upon graduation. Teacher institutes were nicknamed “plebeian universities” because they were more accessible to those who came from lower middle classes (Panachin 1979).

Teacher seminaries were the most prevalent teacher preparation institutions in Imperial Russia (Panachin 1979). These were schools that opened in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century to prepare teachers who would know both the subjects they would be teaching and pedagogy. By 1917, there were 183 teacher seminaries with about 120–150 students in each (Prokof’yev et al. 1967). Their goal was to train politically trustworthy teachers who identified with teaching as a profession rather than a temporary position. Grigor’yev in his Historical Essay on the Russian School describes the principles that were foundational to teachers’ seminaries:

The education of the seminary’s students is created according to their future mission. They must be confirmed in the holy truths of faith, receive clear knowledge in it, and with that, the main effort should be directed toward arousing in their hearts warm feelings of faithful love to God and the Holy Savior and passionate faithfulness to the Lord Emperor. Respect for law and civil order, love for their labor and a desire of their soul to pour into the hearts of children under their care a feeling of faith and virtuousness should be made a part of all the students’ thinking. (Grigor’yev 1900, 447)

This description reflects the central role of religion in teacher preparation—the first subject on the list of courses offered in teacher seminaries was “The Divine Law.” The Bible teaching was fused with instilling in students faithfulness to the tsar as well as “respect for law and civil order.” Seeing the growing unrest among the Russian population, imperial ministers hoped to use teachers to prevent a larger uprising. This heavy emphasis on divine law limited teachers’ knowledge of natural sciences and other disciplines: students spent four times more on Bible classes than on the study of all the natural sciences combined (Panachin 1979).

Teacher institutes were similar to teacher seminaries but were not quite as numerous—by 1914 there were about forty-four teacher institutes spread around the Russian Empire. Unlike teacher seminaries that enrolled men and women, institutes admitted only men. Students in both teacher institutes and teacher seminaries received their education at the expense of the state but then were required to work at a school for no less than six years. Together with the provision of preparation for teachers, more forward-looking statesmen supported the establishment of teaching as a profession with the help of teachers’ professional meetings and publications. Even though those were on the rise at the turn of the century, the tsar’s desire for a tighter rein on his subjects resulted in an abrupt end of support for these endeavors (Long and Long 1999).

To become a teacher in imperial Russia, however, one was not required to have professional training. Instead, it was possible to take an exam to receive a permission to work at a school. Those exams took place in universities. Those who had university education could take an abridged version of an exam; those who did not have a higher education degree had to take a full exam. Usually an exam consisted of a written and an oral portion and two demonstrations of a lesson. Most exams checked candidates’ knowledge of the subjects they would be teaching, but some later started adding questions about pedagogy. Panachin (1979) notes that often exams were used not to determine those who were best fit for teaching but rather those who were “politically trustworthy”—candidates were required to submit paperwork proving that they were not involved in any political activities or had any conflicts with authorities. By the end of the nineteenth century, about 20 percent of elementary school teachers took an exam to receive permission to work at a school. Permissions for teaching varied depending on the candidates’ educational background. Those who lacked higher levels of education received permission to be private tutors or “home teachers.” During Soviet times and subsequently post-Soviet times, exams were for the most part eliminated as an entry into the profession. Based on the Central Committee’s Decree No. 19 from 1936, one could receive a title of teacher after some form of pedagogical education and working at a school for a year, if one did not have prior work experience at an educational institution. In 1939, a follow-up decree canceled the one-year requirement and stated that one could be awarded the title of teacher based on a diploma from a pedagogical institute, a teachers institute, or a pedagogical college (Karpova and Severtseva 1957, 162). This practice remained in effect until the current wave of teacher education reforms.

The low levels of education across vast swaths of the population did not escape the attention of those who fought to overthrow the tsar. In a 1913 speech to be delivered by a Bolshevist member of the parliament, Lenin (1957) wrote about the dismal state of affairs in Russian education. Quoting the data published in an Annual Russian Handbook, he emphasized that less than fifty people out of a thousand had access to education, when the proportion of school-aged children constituted about one-fifth of the total population. Of great concern to Lenin were deplorable conditions of living that many teachers, particularly in rural areas, were subjected to, together with the miserly pay they were receiving for their work. “There is not a single other savage country where masses of people would have been robbed of education, light, and knowledge left in Europe, except for Russia” (Lenin 1957, 145). Throughout the rest of the speech, constant comparisons were drawn between the “civilized” and “developed” countries of the West, where illiteracy was all but eradicated and where education was generously financed by governments, and “backward” Russia, where none of this was happening. America occupied a prominent place among these examples. Lenin noted how even though the United States did not have as high an educational achievement as some of the European states, it had four times the number of students than Russia did and was spending 426 million dollars on education. “Of course, we receive objections … that Russia is poor,” he went on to say, but that poverty only manifested itself in the state’s inability to provide education for its population. Russia was not poor when it came down to lavish expenses on the police, army, military interventions, and state bureaucrats.

The member of the parliament who was to deliver that speech did not get a chance to finish it—he was stopped when he began saying that this injustice would only end when the people would rise up and topple the government of that time. But the speech captured an important juxtaposition: Russia as “backward” and “savage” against the “developed” and “civilized” West. This juxtaposition demonstrated the reflexive gaze that came to dominate discursive shifts in Soviet educational politics throughout the twentieth century and reemerged in the 2010s among the reformers who became key participants in my research. If the Soviet state later came to use that reflexive gaze to emphasize Russia’s accomplishments in education, then modern-day policymakers drew on the same language that Lenin used to justify radical reforms in order to overcome Russia’s “backwardness.” It also captured an important irony that continues to ring true nowadays: How is it that in a country with high oil and natural gas revenues, education remains so underfunded?

The Revolution and the 1920s:
The Time of Experiments and a Pursuit of New Forms

With the Revolution of 1917, education was in the limelight. After all, socialism and communism as ideological systems rested on the assumption that for the working class to govern itself it needed to be highly educated or enlightened. Education became the cornerstone of social transformation and economic development. One of the first decisions made by the Soviet leaders was to introduce the so-called “Unified Labor School.” Unlike its many predecessors, the Unified Labor School was supposed to be the same for children from all different social backgrounds. It was based on Dewey’s principles of student-centered learning and activity-based approaches to education (Mchitarjan 2000). In labor schools, project work was used to bring together intellectual, physical, and moral development of new generations. In a six-week teacher preparation program in 1920, the purpose of the labor school was described as follows:

The ideal of the modern labor school must ensue from the main purposes of the state, which is in the hands of the working class. Its task is the upbringing of proletariat children to be people developed in multiple dimensions (or well rounded, cultured), called to be conscious creators of the new society and new culture, natural participants in proletarian “dictatorship” as a regime that realizes truly human freedom and rights of a human personality [Rus. lichnost’] by destroying the class-based state. (Obyasnitelnaya Zapiska k Obshchestvenno-Politicheskoy Chasti Programmy 6-nedelnyh Kursov 1920, GARF, A2306, 10, 236)1

This vision for the labor school captures the school’s responsibility for creating the New Man—“a man marked by selfless love of the motherland, unquestioned loyalty to the Party, devotion to the cause of proletarian internationalism, respect for public property, dedication to socially useful labor, and such traits of character as discipline, obedience, courage, and creativity” (Counts 1961, 13).2 It also reveals several important aspects of the philosophical foundations of Soviet education. The school sought to create “multiple-dimension people,” which in Russian carries a strong intellectual overtone (Dimov 1981). Even though critics of the Soviet system often claim that education was expected to serve the needs of the economy and not the individual, this criticism is not completely fair. Reading was encouraged and heavily subsidized by the state not because it could increase workers’ productivity but because it could support spiritual growth among Soviet citizens as one of those multiple dimensions.

Schools were meant to prepare students to be “conscious creators of the new society and new culture.” This is an important principle that runs through much Marxist theorizing on education throughout the twentieth century in Russia and in other countries. It underscores the role of education in enhancing the subjects’ ability to shape the world around them—a principle that bears an important contrast with the current wave of reforms. Finally, this preparation was deemed necessary to create citizens ready for self-governing. Disputes among the political elite about the extent to which the working class would be able to govern itself eventually led to the creation of a system in which opportunities for self-governing were diminished and protests were violently stamped out. But the vision for schools and for education remained relatively consistent throughout the Soviet era. Some modern-day observers speculate that well-educated citizenry contributed more to the downfall of the Soviet state than its weak economy.

While the model of the school was chosen early on, the relationship between the state and the teacher took longer to define. Not all teachers supported the revolution and some staged protests against the Bolshevik uprising, albeit Soviet-era scholars called those “paid protests” (Kotomkina 2002). To create a dialogue with teachers, multiple conferences and congresses were organized. For example, an All-Russian Congress on Teacher Preparation took place in August 1919 (GARF, A2306, 10, 19). Its resolution called for a major overhaul of teacher preparation inherited from the Russian Empire to get rid of the past, so that new institutions could be built. More importantly, the debates revealed how uncertain the relationship between teachers and the new Soviet power was. Some among those in attendance argued that “a destruction of teachers’ work was under way” and that representatives of the Soviet state should treat teachers with more respect. Stories were shared about teachers who refused to take orders from the commissars appointed in their areas. Their insubordination was met with violence, which the conference chair admitted were cases when the Soviet power may have gone “a little overboard.” In conclusion, however, the organizers of the congress agreed that it was not necessary for all teachers to be devout followers of socialism. As the chairperson explained, “The Soviet power embodied by its representatives, such as Lunacharskiy and Pokrovskiy, does not demand that a teacher be a communist, but it does demand that a teacher be an honest worker, but of course, there should be some contact with the Soviet power.”

This sentiment soon disappeared from debates on teachers’ roles. In a meeting dedicated to the reform of pedagogical establishments held in 1920, speakers stressed the importance of bringing up generations of teachers that were good communists and socialists. During that meeting, attendees “unanimously accepted a resolution that the socialist labor school can only be built when there are enough socialist teachers. That is why the preparation of socialist teachers is the main task in a practical implementation of the idea of the labor school” (GARF, A2306, 10, 236).

The “preparation of socialist teachers,” however, did not have ready-made forms and had to go through multiple transformations before it reached a semblance of the system that worked through most of the twentieth century. First, institutions that prepared teachers before the Revolution were transformed into Institutes of the People’s Education—higher education institutions with three- to four-year-long courses of study. Two years later, those were eliminated. Pedagogical institutes and pedagogical colleges were created in their place. Later some of the pedagogical institutes were turned into departments of pedagogy of state universities. Even though higher education institutions proliferated, they were not supplying enough teachers. A variety of teacher preparation courses were opened. Some of those lasted a year, some two. The country’s leadership called teacher education programs to recruit as many people as they could, but they could often get only a fraction of students to enroll—teachers’ work was not popular and was perceived to be too strenuous (Kotomkina 2002). Multiple institutional forms that were being created had to address problems with teacher shortages and overcome barriers of high turnover among newly trained teachers.

Proliferation of institutional forms was also accompanied by diversity in curricula plans and teaching approaches (Panachin 1975). Many institutions ran programs that consisted of a large number of disparate and disconnected courses. The committee in charge of teacher preparation urged teacher educators to employ the principles of the labor school as a unifying principle in educating teachers. Shatskiy—one of the leading Soviet educators—proposed pedagogical courses where students “through the means of active independent work had to master the foundations of the labor school.” That required physical labor in workshops that had to be accompanied by “conversations, seminars, reports, lectures, where the educational side of physical labor would be worked through” (GARF, A2306, 10, 23). Along with the experimental forms of pedagogy that this approach exemplified, a more traditional version that focused on philosophical underpinnings of educational processes was offered at pedagogical departments in universities. For example, Tambov University in 1918 offered courses in pedagogy that combined both the history of pedagogical ideas and teachings in general pedagogy (GARF, A2306, 18, 91). Popov (GARF, R9396, 16, 804) described pedagogy courses of that era as “applied philosophy.” With multiple variations in curricular forms, most teacher preparation programs, however, did incorporate at least one course in political economy to prepare “socialist teachers” for the new school. Overall, these different approaches reveal that the 1920s were a decade of experiments and relative freedom in educational in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Context: Sowing the Seeds of Discontent
• Part II: Directing Social Change: Russian Policy Dramas
• Epilogue
• Appendix A. Summary of the Policy
• Appendix B. Theoretical Foundations
• Appendix C. Methodology and Data Analysis
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover