Teaching Students at the Social-Pedagogical Department of the Social Science Faculty of the Moscow State University (1921-1925)

The Bolsheviks, who came to power after the 1917 Revolution, believed that they should restructure the whole complex of social relations. The higher school was not an exception and it had to be, as the rhetoric of the time went, “proletarized” which implied changing the social composition of students. In 1919, the Bolshevik power closed Law Faculties and Historical Departments of Historical-Philological Faculties at universities. Instead, they established so-called Social Science Faculties. The article considers teaching students at the Social-Pedagogical Department of the Social Science Faculty of the Moscow State University from 1921 to 1925. It describes the process of the Social Science Faculty and the Social-Pedagogical Department establishing as well as the history of their further reorganization. It also enumerates the aims pursued by the Bolsheviks in developing a new educational structure. The author highlights that the pre-revolutionary academic experience was rejected. Simultaneously, a new system and teaching practice were emerging. They were molded to correspond to the task set forth by the Bolsheviks: training specialists in different fields of the Soviet framework, ideologists able to work in the media, education, culture, and science. A huge number of young people were enrolled at the Social-Pedagogical Department. A lot of them were unprepared to acquire new knowledge and, consequently, were expelled. Besides, the author draws attention to the reduction of vocational courses in favor of ideological ones. She points out that the university administration employed ex-revolutionaries who taught social courses supplanting professional ones. Therefore, the academic requirements were lowered. The effort to simplify the curriculum resulted in two tendencies. The first one was reducing specialized academic courses which were substituted by the politically loaded Marxist social science. The second tendency was replacing lectures with practical student-self study in ‘seminaries’ and seminar small groups. Curricula and academic requirements had been constantly altered and transformed. Although the Social-Pedagogical Department was the successor of the pre-revolutionary Historical Department, its curricula did not provide specialized historical courses, such as paleography, diplomatics, sphragistics etc. Ancient languages were not taught either. Modern foreign languages were rarely included and not emphasized. It is hard to say whether or not the Social-Pedagogical Department trained effective executives, but, apparently, social scientists had to be but primitive Marxism doctrinarians.

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