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Ignatovich, Elena

University of British Columbia

This dissertation challenges the monopolistic notion of lifelong education and lifelong learning (LLL/E) as concepts constructed in and by the West to include interpretations of LLL/E in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian state policy discourses and interpretations of education in socio-political and academic discourses in the Russian Empire. The research project explored three hundred years of Russian history, from 1721 to 2021, to trace how the four keywords (vospitanie, obuchenie, prosveschenie, and obrazovanie) constituting the Russian concept of education emerged and how they were used historically in state constructed discourses on education to express the idea of continuity in individual and collective education and learning. Framed by the theory of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000), studies on the history and policies on lifelong education, and the theory of learning societies (Coffield, 2000; Schugurensky, 2007), the findings derive five models of the Soviet/Russian learning state-society, their distinct systems of lifelong and lifewide education as products of successive Soviet/Russian modernity programs and identify the discourses in which they are constructed, and which shape them. The study shows that developing lifelong and lifewide education was part of Russian and Soviet modernity projects. The uniqueness of distinct Soviet/Russian models is in the incorporation of traditional Russian approaches to education as a combination of vospitanie (directed development) and obuchenie (instruction), Western ideas, and Soviet/Russian contexts. The Bolsheviks’ modernity project in the 1920s can be viewed as one of the first examples of creating mass lifelong education. By the 1960s, the Soviet Union ran a system of lifelong education that could have formally met the requirements of the Western models of lifelong education proposed a decade later by the OECD and UNESCO; however, the Soviet model differed in terms of the objectives and the interpretation of socio-economic dimensions such as democracy, society, modernity, technology, culture, and state. The study contributes to the body of literature on LLL/E by revealing the construction of Russian/Soviet education and the invisible history of Soviet holistic lifelong and lifewide education from cradle to grave and by providing the grounds and a framework for further investigation of non-Western modernity projects and their education models.

Text

2022-12-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83470

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/