Handbook on the History of Mathematics Education by Alexander Karp & Gert Schubring

Author:Alexander Karp & Gert Schubring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer New York, New York, NY

5 Soviet Mathematics Education: After 1931

The period of reforms ended as decisively as it began. Between 1931 and 1936, the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolsheviks) issued a series of resolutions that fundamentally transformed the school system.

5.1 Schools Under Stalin

A resolution passed in 1931 stated that the principal shortcoming of school education consisted in the fact that “teaching in the schools does not provide students with a sufficient breadth of general knowledge and does not satisfactorily solve the problem of preparing for vocational schools and colleges sufficiently competent individuals with a sound grasp of the fundamentals of science” (Abakumov et al. 1974, p. 157). Consequently, former innovative techniques were declared to have been left-wing distortions, and they were replaced by a gradual revival of the style and substance of pre-Revolutionary education, often in their more conservative versions; for example, analyzing the curricula for the 1937–1938 school year, Sakharov (1938) wrote: “With a single stroke of the pen, the propaedeutic course in geometry for the fifth grade has been eliminated – a course for which more than one generation of mathematicians had fought” (p. 78).

Much else disappeared as well. This was motivated by the argument that students were overburdened with work and thus failed to assimilate the basic topics in the course (the Central Committee’s resolution of 1932 explicitly singled out the propaedeutic study of three-dimensional geometry in seventh grade as an example of the fact that “a number of subjects are covered hastily, and children fail to acquire a sound grasp of the relevant knowledge and skills” (Abakumov et al. 1974, p. 161).

The changes did not take place overnight, but every year more and more aspects of education became more and more rigid. Standard mandatory textbooks were introduced across the country; after a few trials, the textbooks that became established in this position were textbooks from the pre-Revolutionary period by Andrey Kiselev. Exams returned; gradually, exams started being composed not in individual schools and not even in regional centers, but in Moscow – identical exams for the whole country – something unheard-of prior to the Revolution (Karp 2007a).

Curricula – for example, the ninth grade curriculum for 1935 – included such topics as progressions, the generalization of the notion of an exponent, exponential functions, inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the concept of the limit, the length of a circumference and the area of a square, the relative positions of lines and planes in space, and basic trigonometry. The curricula during the period of reforms were somewhat different, which is partially explained by the fact that ninth grade was the highest grade during this period, while by 1935 a tenth grade had been created and certain topics were moved to the tenth grade curriculum. But more important than such changes was the fact that deviations from curricula, which had previously been viewed as inevitable, since teachers were instructed to take local conditions into account, were now practically prohibited. A teacher’s very conduct in class and the structure of the lesson were strictly regulated.

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