What Does Russia Need from Its Schools?

Abstract

It was clear, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, that the school system of the New Russia would have to undergo fundamental change of some kind. The question was, what kind of change, and how much? As will be shown in Chapter 3, wide-ranging change activities had already emerged some time before 1991, and work was well underway, in the newly independent Russian Ministry of Education, on the preparation of educational legislation to address, as its authors stated, the ‘crisis’ in Russia’s schools. The most striking evidence that something was wrong in the system was produced by the publication of statistical data on the material difficulties of the schools, which were the result of decades of neglect under the leftover principle (ostatochnyi printsip) of financing, with education, in common with the other parts of the welfare sector, being given much lower priority in state budgets than other sectors such as defence, a trend which had become increasingly pronounced in the course of Brezhnev’s period in office.