News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform by Simon Huxtable

Author:Simon Huxtable [Huxtable, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192857699
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Youth and Labour Education

The transformation of youth citizenship was not simply about debate and participation but also encompassed changing ideas about labour. Khrushchev rose through the Party ranks during the ‘Great Break’ and his vision of work belonged to the early post-revolution decades. He decried a situation in which parents ‘scared’ their children away from manual labour.20 Mistrustful of ‘abstract knowledge’, Khrushchev wanted to increase the prominence of labour in the Soviet school; under his leadership new lessons on labour were introduced into the curriculum.21 The planned educational reforms of 1958 formed the focal point of the Party’s shift towards labour education. The policy aimed to increase the number of workers and peasants in higher education, shift the balance from academic study to technical education, and mandated a compulsory spell of work in industry or agriculture for all students.22 This attempt to return the country’s school system to the labour radicalism of the 1920s was opposed both within the Party and outside, but Khrushchev nevertheless succeeded in extending the length of schooling by a year to accommodate this expansion of vocational training.23

There was, however, another side to post-Stalinist labour discourse. In the era of the scientific-technological revolution, workers required not just brute force, but creativity too. The teacher and pedagogue Vasyl Sukhomlinsky wrote to Khrushchev about the shortcomings of his reform plans, which he saw as selling short the humanitarian aspects of education.24 While Sukhomlinsky, who emerged as one of the most passionate advocates of humanitarian education, believed passionately in the need to introduce schoolchildren to physical labour, he also felt that the link between schools and work required a ‘spiritual’ element.25 Children were alienated from schoolwork, he argued, because they saw no connection between physics or poetry and their future careers.26 Rather than rote learning scientific laws, young people needed to be taught how to apply their knowledge in new and unexpected ways.27

For Sukhomlinsky, such education took place in the classroom, but it could also extend beyond its walls. In an article for the paper, Sukhomlinsky described an excursion to rural Ukraine in which children toured local farms.28 During their explorations, the children found a ravine which had rendered one of the fields unusable. They decided, apparently on their own initiative, to make the field fertile again by planting oak trees, and they subsequently gathered acorns and gave them to a local kolkhoz. However, the local farm neglected the crop, and in winter it became covered in snow due to negligence. The children, upset at this disregard of their hard work, decided to redouble their efforts. They ground the acorns and gave it to the forestry commission as animal feed. For Sukhomlinsky, the children’s determined action was proof that communist ideas possessed meaning only when converted into ‘deeds and actions’ and consolidated through ‘conflicts and fights’. Though none of the activities detailed in this account was novel—Komsomols had dutifully trudged to local kolkhozy for decades—they had taken action through their own initiative and, in doing so, become citizens. Children

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