АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ ФОРУМ

FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE
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Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2020, no. 16

 

HOW TO EDUCATE PIONEERS IN INDEPENDENCE AND INITIATIVE: THE PEDAGOGICAL TACTICS OF ARTEK AND ORLYONOK (1957–1991)

Anna Kozlova
European University at St Petersburg
6/1A Gagarinskaya Str., St Petersburg, Russia
yeklopozhka()gmail.com

Abstract: The article examines the attempt by the leaders and planners of the Artek and Orlyonok model camps in the USSR in the 1960–80s to put into practice the popular idea of the Soviet project of the child as the active and independent subject of his / her actions. Using archival documents and retrospective interviews with people employed at the children’s centres, it examines the reasons which at the beginning of the Thaw led the ideologists of the Central Committee of the Komsomol to allow sanatoria (where actions of the children who visited them at that time were strictly regulated by the regimen) to be turned into ‘schools of Pioneer activity’. It also surveys the reflections of pedagogues who carried out state orders to realise in particular ways this requirement under the conditions of an ‘organised’ institutional regime. The author points out that the techniques of developing ‘independence and initiative’ (inspired by order of the Central Committee of the Komsomol), developed over time in the late Soviet period, came to be understood by ex-employees as the seeds of an innovative personality-orientated approach, radically different from the Soviet pedagogical tradition. Michel de Certeau’s theory of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ is used to explain the collision between the intention of the order and its perception.

Keywords: Soviet pedagogical traditions, Pioneer camp, Soviet subject, Michel de Certeau’s theory of ‘strategies and tactics’, child subjectivity, Artek, Orlyonok.

To cite: Kozlova A., ‘How to Educate Pioneers in Independence and Initiative: The Pedagogical Tactics of Artek and Orlyonok (1957–1991)’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2020, no. 16, pp. 101–138.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8927-2020-16-16-101-138

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng016/kozlova.pdf