Problems in teaching the Russian language in Yugra schools in 1945-1953

An attempt of a complex analysis of the Russian language teaching in the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug schools in the first years after the war is given in the article. The work is written on the basis of a historical-comparative method of the main factors of school education in Yugra in 1945-1953. The main sources of research are the materials of school reports in the second half of the 1940s -the beginning of the 1950s which were found in the State Archive of Yugra. The content of the work revealed the weakness of schools in the region after the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, the predominance of elementary schools that only gave the basic skills of reading and writing. The schools were located at large distances from each other, which hampered their interaction. By the end of the period under review the situation remained unchanged. For example, in 1945-1953 it was still difficult to bring the children of the indigenous peoples of the North to school in the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug. These facts were revealed in school references and records of the 1950s. The analysis of students' achievements in the Russian language in the schools of Yugra is made in this article. It was found that in the middle of the 1940s it was at a very low level. Almost a third of pupils in the region could not cope with the primary school curriculum. In the early 1950s the performance of Yugra school children in the Russian language increased significantly, having reached 86-87%, which was significantly higher than average test scores in the Okrug (82.1%). The article reveals the reasons of these changes. The schools of the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug did a lot of teaching and methodological work; cluster methodological associations worked to discuss and deliberate on methodological reports and analyze open lessons of teachers including of the Russian language. At the beginning of the 1950s, progressive teachers of the Russian language used the method of teaching from the experience of the best teachers of the country, especially from Moscow. Profesional development courses were organized for the Russian language teachers. The author comes to a conclusion that over the 1945 to 1953 period the Russian language teaching did not manage to achieve any fundamental changes in the issues raised in the article. The reasons were the following: the remoteness of schools in the Okrug from the developed centers of education and culture of the country, the low level of education of teachers of the Russian language in the region, the lack of socio-economic incentives for inviting qualified teachers in the area. That is why even the progress in students' achievements in the Russian language, in the author's opinion, was largely falsified by the teachers.

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