Freedom and Humanities and Social Sciences Education in Russia: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

This article presents a retrospective analysis of the evolution of the Russian humanities and social sciences education system, highlighting issues that the current system has faced during the country's repeated transformations in the twentieth century, especially in the 1990s.

Notes

English translation © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text, “Svoboda i gumanitarnoe obrazovanie v Rossii: problemy i perspektivy.” This is a revised version of the original article “Gumanitarnoe obrazovanie kak faktor formirovaniia grazhdanskoi identichnosti,” Politiko-filosofkii ezhegodnik, 2010, no. 3, pp. 145–69. Published with the author's permission. Svetlana G. Il'inskaya, candidate of political science, associate professor, and senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. Translated by Brad Damaré. Translation reprinted from Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 3. doi: 10.1080/10611967.2015.1123043.

^1. The first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia [Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia] was published from 1926 to 1947, the second from 1950 to 1958, and the third from 1969 to 1978.

^2. See, for example: A.L. Nikiforov, Filosofiia nauki: istoriia i metodologiia (Moscow: Dom intellektual'noi knigi, 1988); V.S. Stepin, Teoretichesoe znanie (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2003); V.S. Stepin, V.G. Gorokhov, and M.A. Rozov, Filosofiia nauki i tekhniki (Moscow: Gardariki, 1996).

^3. The Great Encyclopedic Dictionary [Bol'shoi entsiklopedicheskom slovar’] (1988) gives the history of humanities and social sciences on p. 320; the social sciences on p. 466; and on p. 787 it refers to the sciences as “natural, social, human, and technical.” Humanities are difficult to distinguish from the social sciences, given that the human being is, in principle, inseparable from society.

^4. One person who drew attention to the evolution taking place within the framework of contemporary thought was Avraam Mol’. In his work Sotsiodinamika kul'tury (Moscow: Progress, 1973. pp. 43–46) he defined the “screen of knowledge” in a mosaic culture of thought as the unstructured set of information scraps that the contemporary individual assimilates primarily through mass media. Because of this he remains on the surface of phenomena, receiving occasional impressions from facts that more or less influence him, while bringing neither critical judgment nor mental effort to the process of perception.

^5. A.N. Zhdan, Istoriia psikhologii: ot antichnosti k sovremennosti: Uchebnik dlia studentov psikhologicheskikh fakul'tetov (Moscow: Pedagogicheskoe obshchestvo Rossii, 1999), p. 420.

^6. Ibid., p. 422.

^7. E.A. Spirkina, “Novaia kontseptsiia obucheniia psikhoterapii,” Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–14.

^8. E.B. Fantalova, Diagnostika i psikhoterapiia vnutrennego konflikta (Samara: Izdatel'skii dom BAKhRAKh-M, 2001), pp. 79–82.

^9. M.V. Rozin, “Religiia i psikhoterapiia: vozmozhen li kentavr?” MPTZh, 1994, no. 2, pp. 191–200.

^10. E.A. Spirkina, “Podgotovka psikhoterapevtov i psikhologov-konsul'tantov (problem adaptatsii zapadnogo opyta),” Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1994, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 121–27.

^11. A.G. Granberg, “Integratsiia v mirovuiu nauku,” Osnovy regional'noi ekonomiki (Moscow: GU VShE, 2000).

^12. S.Iu. Glaz'ev, “Kak ne proigrat’ v voine,” (24 July 2014). http://worldcrisis.ru/crisis/1584472.

^13. M. Parenti, Demokratiia dlia nemnogikh (Moscow: Progress, 1990), pp. 68–69. [English original: Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011), p. 49.]

^14. B.G. Kapustin, Sovremennost’ kak predmet politicheskoi teorii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), pp. 241–42.

^15. The author of this article participated in the preparation of one such methodologically innovative educational program, Istoriia [History] for grades 10–11 (textbook + DVD with recorded video lectures) (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2007). Reissued with amendments and supplements in 2010.

^16. See, for example: V.P. Pugachev and A.I. Solov'ev, Vvedenie v politologiiu (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2000); Kategorii politicheskoi nauki. Uchebnik (Moscow: MGIMO (U), ROSSPEN, 2000); A.I. Solov'ev, Politologiia: politicheskaia teoriia, politiecheskie tekhnologii (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2006).

^17. Rossiisskaia politicheskaia nauka: v 5 t., ed. Iu.S. Pivovarov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008).

^18. O.V. Gaman-Golutvina, B.G. Kapustin, and A.I. Solov'ev, Sovershenstvovanie prepodavaniia politologii. Analiticheskii doklad (Moscow: Logos, 2005), p. 88.

^19. See, for example: R. Patnem, Chtoby demokratiia srabotala. Grazhdanskie traditsii v sovremennoi Italii (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1996). In that case, however, the reassessment was carried out with the participation of “outside experts.”

^20. A. Glinchikova, Raskol ili sryv «russkoi Reformatsii»? (Moscow: Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia, 2008).

^21. D.E. Letniakov, Rossisskaia traditsiia obshchestvenno-politicheskogo uchastiia (XI–nachalo XX vv.). Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata politicheskikh nauk (Moscow, 2009).

^22. Parenti, Demokratiia dlia nemnogikh, p. 408.

^23. V.A. Kovalev, “Rossisskaia politologiia v usloviiakh involiutsii sistemy obrazovaniia i sotsial'noi degradatsii,” Mirovaia politika: problem teoreticheskoi indentifikatsii i sovremennogo razvitiia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), p. 461.

^* Komsomol was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union. The name comes from the first syllables of the three Russian words meaning Communist Union of Youth.—Ed.

^26. The devaluation of the ruble, which eliminated the savings of tens of millions of people; the virtual failure of the government to fulfill social guarantees; the introduction of private ownership, and the distribution of ownership through mortgaging auctions, when the government used government-backed loans to transfer virtually all the important economic sectors to people close to the administration. All this took place against a background of nonpayment of pensions, social benefits, and wages, and also of mass unemployment.

^27. There were quotas for “national cadres”: members of ethnic minorities, orphans, the disabled, veterans who had just demobilized from the Soviet army, and other categories.

^28. A. Ochkina, “Kontseptsiia izmenilas’?” Levaia politika, 2007, no. 1.

^29. Zygmunt Bauman pointedly noted this feature in his Myslit’ sotsiologicheski [Thinking Sociologically], when he wrote that amateurs would not indulge in debating the composition of stellar matter, but they see nothing complicated in the problems of social science.

^30. See E.M. Avraamov et al., “Sovremennoe vysshee obrazovanie i perspektivy vertikal'noi mobil'nosti; M.V. Arapov, “Bum vysshego obrazovaniia v Rossii: masshtaby, prichiny i sledstviia,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2004, no. 6.

^31. This is evident from reading the abstracts sent to the Academic Council, where the author of this article serves as research secretary.

^32. B.Iu. Kagarlitskii, “EGE vmesto istorii.” http://scepsis.ru/library/id_606.html.

^33. Students often do not read the work, but rather read a “cheat sheet” for test preparation.

^34. A. Nikolaeva, “Astap Blender kak sofetskii potsient.” http://www.chaskor.ru/p.php?id = 11754@_openstat.

^35. S.I. Plaksii, “Bolonskii protsess v Rossii: pliusy i minusy,” Znanie. Pominanie. Umenie, 2012, no. 1.

^36. Z. Bauman, “Obraznovanie–pri, dlia i nesmotria na postmoderniti,” Individualizirovannoe obshchestvo (Moscow: Logos, 2002), pp. 155–75.

^37. Revansh istorii: rossisskaia strategicheskaia initsiativa v XXI veke (1998), Global'noe politicheskoe prognozirovanie v usloviiakh strategicheskoi nestabil'nosti (1999), Iskushenie globalizmom (2000), Pravoslavnaia tsivilizatsiia v global'nom mire (2000), Narod bez elity (2006), Pravda zheleznogo zanavesa (2007), and others.