Rural Schools: Between the Scylla of “Continuity” and the Charybdis of “Excessiveness”

Abstract

The article provides a historical perspective on a key conflict in the development of rural education, which is that it is usually accompanied by rejection of rural labor and expansion of “pro-urban” orientations and practices among youth. Since the Russian Empire of the late 19th century, throughout the Soviet Union, and into post-Soviet Russia, the government has been trying hard to retain rural population where it is and to ensure “continuity” of rural youth’s agricultural activities (in the terms of the expert rhetoric of the late 19th century). Education policy makers of the Russian Empire believed that the reason for youth rejecting rural labor was the “excessiveness” of school education with regard to actual agricultural needs. Such excessiveness was normally fought by bringing down the level of school education attainment and reducing school hours in favor of agricultural education. The same policy, if only otherwise formulated, resonates in both the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods. No constructive solution has been found yet to solve the problems of rural education, and rural schools in particular. The fundamental conflict in such development can only be resolved in the context of emerging new conditions of rural existence (agro-industrial complex, distance learning).