THE REVIVAL OF GERMAN NATIONAL EDUCATION IN THE USSR IN THE 1950S: PLANS AND REALITY

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of post-war national education of Soviet Germans, attempts to restore the German school starting from 1957. The post-war resettlement of Germans in the east of the country determines the geography of the topic under study: the territories of Western Siberia and Altai, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The prohibition of national schools in 1938, deportation during the Great Patriotic War, the special settlement , which lasted until the end 1955, — all this undermined the tradition of the German school, significantly reduced the level of literacy of Soviet Germans by that time. Reform limited 1957 consisted in attempts to restore only the teaching of the German language, it was not about the revival of the German national school. Language teaching was first introduced only in the primary grades, but it soon became clear that language teaching in general was needed in schools. The question of teaching staff was acute, there was a chronic shortage of teachers. A positive moment was the organization of the training of teachers of the German language on the basis of pedagogical schools in Altai and Kazakhstan, as well as the Omsk Pedagogical Institute. The first successes of the late 1950s soon gave way to stagnation, and then curtailment of the reform in the late 1960s. One of the reasons for the incompleteness of the reform in relation to the Germans was the retreat from the traditional pedagogical policy of the USSR, which developed in the pre-war period: since 1958, parents chose the language of instruction for their children. Having survived the deportation and special settlement , the parents were concerned about the future of their children, so they often refused the German language of instruction. The decline in national education in the 1960—1970s was a general trend in the USSR, by the early 1980s the number of languages in which teaching was conducted decreased from 46 to 16. A feature of the German school was the absence of teaching in German, only the study of German remained