On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 08:30:31PM +1100, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
Enjoy :) http://isreview.org/issue/82/education-literacy-and-russian-revolution
Some really awesome stuff in there - here's a teaser: " Chamberlin questioned Lunacharsky, the commissar for education, about whether such a model provided sufficient education in basic skills such as grammar and spelling. Lunacharsky replied: “Frankly, we don’t attach so much importance to the formal school discipline of reading and writing and spelling as to the development of the child’s mind and personality. Once a pupil begins to think for himself he will master such tools of formal knowledge as he may need. And if he doesn’t learn to think for himself no amount of correctly added sums or correctly spelled words will do him much good.”23 But, Chamberlin explained, it was hard to provide hard data on the success of the program, as “marks are proverbially an unreliable gauge of students’ ability; and Russia has no grading system.”24 Examinations were also largely abolished, including those that had previously been necessary to gain entrance into institutions of higher education. Why? Because “it was believed that no one would willingly listen to lectures that were of no use to him.”25 " One could say in response to the above that the USSR proved a formidable military power and still provides America's rocket engines to get to the ISS, so history shows that the USSR's soviet program worked well for a time, despite its ultimate collapse. Re Vygotsky's explorations of learning and psychology - something dear to the heart of my own schooling experiences: "Although this task was incomplete upon his death, and both his work and the revolution itself were derailed by Stalinism (his work was banned under Stalin for twenty years after his death),34 he made great headway in this process..."