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THE
HISTORY TEXTBOOKS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA: A NEW GENERATION
The business of educational publishing in Russia experiences
now a real boom. Though the number of publishing houses
issuing literature for secondary school has been reduced
recently as a result of competition, the market of
educational literature now attracts some big publishing
houses which specialised earlier in issuing fiction
and other sorts of popular literature. Indeed this
market is infinite in Russia: one can say for millions
of copies. For this reason the Federal expert council
on history is overloaded with textbook manuscripts
applying for Ministry of Education recommendations
to use them in school.
The market of the educational literature has at least
three segments. First, this is a programme of educational
publishing funded by the federal government. The aim
of this programme is to provide free textbooks for
acquisition in school libraries. This state programme
develops within the framework of the Federal list
of textbooks. It is made up by the Ministry of Education
on the base of recommendations of the Federal expert
council. Thus, the selection of books for the state
investments is in the competence of the Ministry.
However the state at present is not capable of ensuring
the realisation of this program because of lack of
finances. Therefore the insertion of any textbook
in the Federal list does not just guarantee state
investment in it.
A more significant segment of the market comes from
regional demands and most of the books sold are purchased
with money from regional budgets. So each region draws
up a list of textbooks and estimates how many they
need for free acquisition in school libraries. The
criteria of the selection of the books for the regional
order tends to be rather different: it ranges from
the subjective choice of the local authorities to
the analysis of the teachers' demand. But this segment
is, perhaps, the most important for the publishing
houses which product educational literature.
Lastly, the third segment of the market is the free
sale of textbooks. The existence of this segment is
determined, at first, by the capability of some schools
to get money for textbooks, buying the independence
of federal or regional authorities. However, many
schools are compelled to buy the textbooks because
of the scarcity not only of the federal, but also
of the regional budgets as well which are not capable
of ensuring free acquisition of textbooks in schools.
The burden for the supply of the students with the
textbooks is shifted in such cases to their parents'
shoulders. But as a result some teachers have the
opportunity to choose freely those textbooks which
correspond their own tastes and didactical aims. However
their choice is essentially influenced by the prices
of textbooks
So it is possible to state that a teacher today has
real right to choose for their students textbooks
appropriate for achievement of the aims of teaching.
However the realisation of this right for the majority
of schools is restricted with financial limits, the
frameworks of the Federal programme of educational
publishing or the lists of the textbooks funded from
the regional budgets, and also by the ways of unfair
competition used by some publishing houses or even
authors of the textbooks .
The overcoming of the monopoly of one textbook, a
characteristic of the Soviet times, has stimulated
the development of history textbooks and caused great
variety in their contents, methodology and didactics.
This provides the basis for considering modern textbooks
as textbooks of the new generation. Instead of the
former rigid Marxist scheme the reader will find different
ways of interpreting history.
Nevertheless, adherence to scheme still remains from
the heritage of the old school. Only a few textbook
authors deliberately avoid structuring their texts
in accordance with the definite academic methodology.
In the majority of the textbooks the worn-out Marxist
clothes were changed for the modern cut of "civilisation
approach".
When in the beginning of the 90-ties the Ministry
of Education and the publishing houses wished to find
authors the new generation of textbooks, they did
it in the universities and in the academic institutes,
as they were concerned mainly about searching for
an alternative to the Marxist methodology . It was
supposed that such an alternative existed and that
it was possible to present in the textbooks the whole
history as harmoniously as earlier, but without the
Marxist terminology.
Academicians have partly justified these hopes. Instead
of the boring 'social and economic structures' one
could find in new teaching materials more euphonious
'civilisations', but very often they were no more
than a disguise, as "under fashionable make-up
one can easily guess the painfully familiar features
of bases and superstructures, social revolutions and
productive forces" . The paradigm of the possibility
to learn to understand world history as a whole and
integrated processes still dominates in the mentality
of the academicians in Russia. By the ironic remark
of Mikhail Boitsov, thanks to more than half a century
of domination by official Marxism, it was preserved
here "the most essential part of the European
19th century - its historical consciousness"
and "we became, eventually, almost the only country
where at the end of 20th century historical science
still exists" . Partly because of this, partly
due to the traditions of teaching dogma, the history
at school still remains as learning of the world historical
processes.
The other feature, which makes the overwhelming majority
of the modern textbooks relate to the books of the
previous generation and in common is the recognition
of the textbook as an exclusive and authoritative
source of factual and conceptual knowledge. All other
teaching materials, such as collections of sources,
work books and tests serve, as a rule, as an addition
to the textbooks and are aimed mainly at promoting
learning the fact
In effect, many authors consider their task to give
students an opportunity to comprehend history just
like they comprehend it. As it was correctly remarked
in a review, "the authors of some textbooks are
convinced that they give not only one of the interpretations
of history, but a correct interpretation" . This
conviction reflects the preserved belief in the possibility
of finding an only true concept of humanitarian knowledge,
in general, and of history, in particular. Though
modern historiography is not capable of giving either
the sole, nor the whole concept of universal history,
this circumstance is not taken into consideration.
One more feature, characteristic of many textbooks
of the new generation is the increase of facts. Introducing
more and more new facts into school curriculum, ploughing
up more and more new fields of historical knowledge,
the authors are not inclined to neglect the well cultivated
fields and to abandon the stocks, which had been the
basis of their own education. Overloading by facts
"becomes more and more a characteristic sign
of the new textbooks - informative redundancy of the
text" .
This "factocentrism" became even more obvious
with the transition to the concentric system of secondary
education. Textbooks for the second stage (10-11 grades)
differ from the textbooks for the first stage (5-9
grades) predominantly by the volume of facts. Rather
often the authors of the programs and textbooks see
the didactical aim of the second stage as mastering
knowledge learned by students at the first stage of
studying history. One can even suspect, that the authors
of the teaching materials while selecting the facts
put the question "What may a student not know?"
rather than "What he has to know?".
The aspiration to fill the textbooks with as large
volume of facts as possible is conditioned by the
traditional belief in the power of knowledge, in one's
capability of mastering its limitless sum. This conviction
became even stronger due to the freedom of selection
of facts, without any censorship, and this freedom
leads to the belief in objectivity of a fact and,
respectively, in the possibility of the objective
presentation of history based only on facts.
Another reason for the raising the concentration of
facts in textbooks are the standards of entrance examinations
in universities. The competition for entry to the
prestigious universities has became in the past few
years more intense, and history is one of the subjects
of entrance examinations for several humanitarian
specialities. And the guarantee of success in this
competition is the volume of knowledge. For the selection
of the best applicants an examiner needs, of course,
to eliminate the worst ones, and the guaranteed means
for putting a bad mark is the wrong answer of the
applicant to the questions "who?", "where?",
"when?". Therefore the system of preparation
for the entrance exams is based on learning as large
volume of knowledge as possible, and the system of
giving examinations - on putting such questions, which
could discover the gaps in this volume. Already this
reason is sufficient to realise why the programme
of the entrance examinations aims at increasing the
demanded volume of knowledge and at the gap with the
average capabilities of school history teaching.
In this competition with universities the school finds
itself in a position of an evident loser. All its
attempts to meet the requirements of universities
are parried by the complicating of questions and increasing
of the volume of demanded knowledge. The system, thus,
is like an arms race, a competition between armour
and artillery.
Thus, one has to admit that the majority of the textbooks
of the new generation differ, in fact, from their
predecessors mostly in their contents rather than
in didactics. But one also can see new tendencies
for changing the aims of history education and in
the role of teaching materials. An evident proof of
that is the popularity of work books as a new genre
of the educational literature. As a rule they are
used as supplementary means for enhancing the learning
of textbook material. But the perception of them as
materials with quite self-contained aims, aimed at
the development of particular skills, becomes more
and more widespread . Work books such as those developed
by Yury Troitsky and his colleagues as a documentary-research
sets, are designed to exclude the textbook as a authoritative
source of knowledge. For Yury Troitsky "it became
apparent that the paradigm … which one could
call as classical deterministic textbook system is
exhausted ".
Another indication of the developments in the educational
literature is the inclusion of texts of sources with
a developed system of assignments based on the textbooks.
The pioneers of such design were Natalia Trukhina,
Mikhail Boitsov and Rustam Shukurov . In their textbooks
the additional materials did not limit their role
supplementing or illustrating the author's text, but
became the free-standing sources of information and
the subject for textual analysis. There also develops
the dialogue genre of teaching materials. Its pioneer
is Igor Dolutsky, who introduced this idea during
the Perestroyka times in a poorly published brochure
, but he has since developed it in better designed
textbooks . Following Dolutsky's example the dialogue
became to more or less extent a part of the text in
many textbooks.
Another type of the teaching materials are books made
in association with western technology. These materials
have been developed within the framework of the "Uroki
Klio" project by the Russian authors in cooperation
with experts from Austria, Denmark, Holland and Scotland
. In these books the narrative text is balanced with
sources and illustrations, and a system of assignments
is aimed to organise students' work through the historical
text. Though the volume of information of these materials
tends to be greater than in similar western books,
they are being used by the teachers, and by the authors
themselves as materials additional to other textbooks.
The problem for the development of a really new generation
of the history textbooks derives, in my view, from
another, more complex, problem which stems from the
aims of history education.
In the contemporary social and cultural situation
education becomes more and more individual rather
than a state or public issue, while history correspondingly
becomes the means of personal, rather than social
identification. The attention of the school to the
personality of the student demands changes in the
aims of history education. The infinite accumulation
of knowledge such as dates, names and facts together
with the academic comprehension of the nature and
sense of historical processes can not solve the problem
of the development of historical thinking and of a
each student's interest to history. To be relevant
and useful for a student, history should be, first
of all, interesting.
This idea itself is quite banal. However, school,
as a rule, separates the serious problems and the
potentialities of fun in history. The latter are usually
put for the service of the first. School is supposed
to give its pupils heavy baggage in terms of knowledge
as well as meeting the gravity of the aims of history
education and the strict requirements of the academic
science.
In reality "the dry residuum" of the average
student's knowledge is determined just by what was
interesting at history lessons. The same "dry
residuum" is alienated by modern culture. It
reproduces historical facts in different genres and
at different levels - from the elite down to elementary
kitch. Therefore the problem of selection for the
history curriculum can be reduced to selection of
those signs and symbols which live in the language
of the culture.
The other problem linked with the change in the aims
of history education is that the intellectual skills
which are developed in traditional schools and related
mainly to the reproduction of factual knowledge, rather
than with the analysis of texts are not sufficient
for a today's school graduate. These skills form a
good base for intellectual development at university,
but they do not allow independent study of history
nor help to solve personal and social problem.
In modern society a person more often finds himself
in a situation of choice, rather than of the necessity
of following a definite imperative. Therefore history
in the modern school has the task of giving each citizen
the intellectual means for solving those difficult
problems of choice which are met in everyday life.
The development of intellectual self-dependence has
become the topical, rather than theoretical problem,
as it was previously, when self-dependence remained
unclaimed.
Besides that, the modern society has become more and
more diversified. Interests, modi vivendi, cultural
and consumer standards, stereotypes of perception
not only differ more and more by social, ethnic, confessional
and other identification, but often come into conflict
with each other. The aims of stabilisation and maintaining
of stability in the society demand clear comprehension
both of these differences, and of these conflicts.
The nature of their settlements will depend very much
on the abilities of the citizens to comprehend the
natural character of the society's diversification.
These abilities mean not only the admission of different
views, not only understanding of an "alien",
but also the assumption of the validity and even the
correctness of opposite interests and points of view.
History is one of the most effective means for the
formation of notions about the diversified world.
It allows, due to temporal remoteness, to reflect
on another modus vivendi and at the same time easily
rouses, due to its reality, the feeling of empathy.
The dialogue in real history needs to be reproduced
in its lessons.
Alexander
Shevyrev
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