Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2016 number

This article describes higher education in RSFSR in 1918-1936 as an elevator of social mobility. The main focus of this article is on the policy of students “proletarianization”. This policy was aimed at acceleration of social advancement for the descendants of working class and poorest peasantry, and also at the lower social mobility for the representatives of the former propertied classes and the “bourgeois” intellectuals. The author analyzes practices that provided preemptive rights and privileges for the “workers”, as well as “filters” and “barriers” used by the Bolsheviks to prevent the “unproletarian elements” from entering colleges. The conclusion is made, that the results of the students “proletarianization” policy were highly controversial. On the one hand , it contributed to the sharp increase in the number of specialists, who came from the working class and the peasantry. Education became an effective elevator of social mobility for hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. On the other hand, an intention to radically change the social image of students as soon as possible effectively undermined the foundations of the very existence of higher education institution. It was not by chance that both attempts to break higher education system coincided with two peaks of inspiration of workers’ educational mobility, and normalization periods were characterized by cancellation of this policy. The growing awareness of the defects of the revolutionary transformation of educational sector led to abolition of the most radical laws, experimental institutes and forms of education in the second half of the 1930s, and to relative “normalization” of education system in terms of its institutions and access to education for discriminated groups.