CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Rudderham, Hannah Lindsay |
|---|---|
| Title | The Soviet-American Educational Conjuncture: Progressive Education East and West, 1890s-1930s |
| Summary | From 1918 to 1931, elements of progressive pedagogy originating in capitalist America were utilized in the Soviet Union’s proletarian schools. The present thesis seeks to explore and explain this apparent contradiction. The development of the progressive education movement is examined with particular emphasis on the United States before turning to the Soviet case. This shows that American progressive and early Soviet educators shared a remarkably similar vision of the school as an institution that could enact positive social transformation. This similarity, combined with contemporary understandings of the United States and the post-World War I devaluation of German model, made American progressive education an attractive source of methods and philosophy for developing Soviet school programs. American educators’ enthusiastic accounts of Soviet schools are then considered, revealing the main attraction of the Soviet school system was its experimental quality. The mutual interest and interaction between Soviet and American pedagogues are shown to be part of broader social issues and politics in both settings, illuminating the progressive education movement as a response to shared problems of mass education in the modern age. |
| Supervisor | Shaw, Charles |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/rudderham_hannah.pdf |
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