Modernization of the School Education System in the National Autonomies of the Middle Volga in the 1920s

Abstract

School education has traditionally been the most important area in the history of every nation and region. The official authorities often used the school to their advantage, to carry out certain policies and manage the territory. The aim of the work is to study the modernization processes in the field of school education, which were carried out in the autonomies of the Middle Volga region during the 1920s. In the comparative aspect, this problem has not been previously considered in Russian historiography. The study was carried out mainly on the basis of the analysis of diverse sources, especially archival materials. Using the example of such national autonomous entities as Mari El and Chuvashia, both general trends and distinctive features that existed during the formation of the new Soviet school system are shown. It can be argued that the educational policy of the 1920s was not fully sound, since the radical transformations of that time period led to extremely undesirable consequences. Among the positive results of the formation of a new school and the modernization policy in the field of education, we can name quantitative changes marked by an increase in the number of educational institutions, the number of teachers and the contingent of students. The policy of the educational program, proclaimed in the 1920s by the Soviet government, was also not brought to the end. The reasons for the failures were both objective (the consequences of the Civil War, famine, insufficient funding for education) and subjective (public dissatisfaction with certain measures in the field of school affairs, the refusal of individual teachers to cooperate with the new government, etc.) factors. As a result, in the early 1930s, the course of the Soviet government in relation to secondary schools was seriously revised.