Lost in Social Science Education: Destinies of the Discipline in Russia

Abstract

The proposed article makes the readers focus on the evolution and prospects of social science education in Russia, taking into consideration the reform of the school subject curriculum of 2024. The importance of considering social science education is motivated not only by its perception as a tool of consolidation and state-building, but also by the aspect of the struggle for historical memory and collective identity. It seems to be valuable to pay attention not only to organizational issues, but also to the content of social science education (the curriculum and the ways to interact with the learning material), its system-forming core. The article consistently reconstructs the biography of the academic subject of social science, a retrospective allows to identify «the excesses» of pedagogical discourse: of both ideological and academic nature. Developing the topic of the concept of social science as a subject in school education, based on the cultural concept of the content of education, the authors present the results of a comparative analysis of the two most authoritative scholars of social science education in Russia: L.N. Bogolyubov, Moscow and N.I. Eliasberg, St. Petersburg. While the St. Petersburg conception is based on values that are primarily assigned in relation to academic knowledge, the Moscow one designs the opposite algorithm, where the value component is regarded more as a product than as basis. The current reform is designed, supposedly, to solve the accumulated problems in terms of duplication of material from other subject areas, concentric deployment of material, and the content redundancy of the course. The «new» social science should solve the problems of strengthening all-Russian identity and civism, awareness of the legal foundations and commitment to national ideals. The applied nature of the new course is confirmed by the updated thematic plan, which now includes key elements inherent in modernity and the everyday life of a schoolchild. The transition to topical life issues is aimed at enabling students to act as subjects, being participants in social relations, and not consumers of knowledge/goods/services. The authors conclude that the effectiveness of the reform depends primarily not on the new curricula, but on the philosophical and pedagogical approach the teaching methods rely on. Only by analyzing pedagogical practice, we will be able to assess whether the new course turned out to be truly practical. For now, two evolutionary scenarios of social science education support seem possible: the creation and improvement of the educational and methodical basis of the new course in social science education, focusing on ethical and legal issues following the St. Petersburg scholars; an update on an integrated, truly academic, prolonged course of social science education. The current publicly announced scenario constructs a new reality in some way ignoring the accumulated experience.