Why did they destroy the Soviet school system at the beginning of the 21st century?
School as a "matrix" of culture
School is one of the most stable and conservative social institutions, essentially the "genetic matrix" of culture. It reproduces new generations in accordance with its "matrix." Therefore, the type of school developed by a given culture is a crucial factor in the formation and reproduction of civilization.
School is a mechanism that preserves and transmits cultural and civilizational heritage from generation to generation. It is also an ideological institution that "produces the individual" of a given society, culture, and civilization.
Therefore, all state policy can be determined by schools. If schools are constantly under attack by "reforms and perestroikas" and "optimized," then we are witnessing the hidden destruction of a given society, state, culture, and civilization.
Showmanship, window dressing, and imitation have been the foundation of Russian government education policy from the early 2000s to the present. Plus, there's total Westernization and the imitation of Western schools. And without good schools, Russia has no future.The agony of school).
Personality education
At first, the school, based on the ancient and Christian tradition, emerging from the medieval monastery and universities, set the task of “educating the individual,” an individual turned to God, to ideals.
This same concept was adopted by the Soviet school system. Renowned American psychologist and educator Urie Bronfenbrenner, who for many years directed a large project on international comparisons of school education in different countries, wrote in his book "Two Worlds of Childhood: Children in the USA and the USSR":
The main difference between American and Soviet schools, in our opinion, is that the latter attaches great importance not only to subject teaching, but also to upbringing.
The "university" (or classical, academic) school strives at every level to provide a holistic set of principles of existence. To give a person an understanding of the principles of "what is good and what is bad." "To guide a person on the path." as noted by the best figures of Russian and Western culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“School has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, caution in judgment, and consistency in conclusions,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
As they rudely but accurately point out on the internet these days: “In the USSR, they tried to make a man out of every moron; now, they try to make a moron out of every person.”
Man is a consumer
The new Western, bourgeois-capitalist society required a manipulated individual, a consumer-slave, shaped by a mosaic culture, where people possess only fragmented knowledge.
The university (classical) school was left only for the children of the eliteAs a result, there are two types of schools in the West: the mass school, for future consumers (slaves of the system) who have access only to fragments of complete knowledge. Moreover, this school is gradually, gradually becoming simpler; and the elite school, which provides a university education to future managers, bankers, governors, senators, and presidents.
Market (capitalist) society emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as a result of a series of reforms and revolutions. This society required large numbers of people (essentially slaves) to fill factories, mills, plants, and offices. This society required a school of "mosaic culture." In other words, people would receive specific, specialized knowledge (a piece of the mosaic) and be able to operate a machine, repair equipment, and so on.
This school didn't provide a coherent system of knowledge that would liberate and elevate people. It didn't provide a system of knowledge that would teach people to think freely and independently. It didn't provide methods that would allow people to obtain a full education through self-education (reading). Like Napoleon (originally an artilleryman) and Stalin (a seminary dropout, a future priest), who became specialists in a wide range of fields through self-education.
The Western mass school creates law-abiding citizens, workers, and consumers. To this end, a limited supply of knowledge is selected and pre-categorized for people. They create ideal slaves of the system, content with life and themselves, considering themselves fully educated.
Meanwhile, the elite are trained separately. Elite schools provide a fundamental classical university education. They nurture strong, self-respecting individuals, and foster a caste-based, corporate spirit.
The myth of the unified school
In the West, a myth was created about a single school and its stages offering equal opportunities to everyone. In reality, a product of the French Revolution with its slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the school system in capitalist society offers only formal (legal) equality. The foundation lies in real opportunities: parents, clans, their connections, and capital.
School is unified and continuous only for those who complete it. This is a small segment of the population—the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. The three-tiered, unified school system was originally a school for the bourgeoisie (the rich). Clearly, some changes and adjustments have occurred over time. Specifically, for the sake of a liberal society's facade, blacks were allowed into US schools, and then given quotas for further education. But they did not become part of the US elite. Athletes, actors, rappers, and other clowns and buffoons are not the elite, but its servants. And for the average person, a pretty picture has been created within pop culture (a surrogate for real culture).
The population is still divided into two unequal masses, which are sent to two different types of education: a long one, intended for an elite minority, and a short, abbreviated one – for the majority.
Hence the proposals of the Russian dignitary Vladimir Medinsky that necessary Reduce the length of school and higher education, as 11 years of study is an "unaffordable luxury," and begin career guidance and vocational training earlier. He argues that in a rapidly changing labor market, people will have to obtain multiple degrees throughout their lives, and traditional 5-6-year university programs will become a thing of the past.
This reduction and simplification of mass education is a fundamental characteristic of the Western (capitalist) school system. Plus the creation of elite lyceums, gymnasiums, universities, and so on.
Between 1985 and 1993, Soviet civilization collapsed. Russia became the informational, cultural, financial, and economic periphery of the West and the capitalist system. Consequently, schools, which still provided a classical, university-level education and produced outstanding individuals, were subjected to a permanent cycle of "perestroika-reforms," "modernization-optimizations." And the teacher (the creator and maker) was reduced to the role of a penniless bureaucratic clerk.
The goal of Western reformers was to complete Russia's transition to a semi-colonial periphery of the "developed world." For Russia to preserve itself, its culture, and its civilization, it first and foremost needed to restore its national school system.
Everything else is imitation.
Information