The Spectre of Paedocracy in the Puppet Theatre: On School Self-Management and the Limits of Children’s Agency in the First Years of Soviet Rule

Аннотация

The 1920s in Soviet Russia are known to have been a period of unprecedented growth in children’s autonomy in various fields of social life. The decision to introduce children’s self-management to the comprehensive labour schools, taken by Narkompros in 1918, belongs here.1 Over the next decade this radical idea, extended to all the schools in the country, rapidly decayed into a more moderate pedagogical position which took the form of a set of unobtrusive everyday practices, principally the organisation of meetings, and rotas for classroom-tidying and other practical tasks. This article analyses the evolution of the idea and the practices of self-management on the basis of published and archival sources containing a description of the practices and statements of pedagogues, teachers and schoolchildren about school self-management. An analysis of the arguments in favour of the extension of restriction of children’s agency within self-management indicates that teachers perceived the introduction of self-management as an attack on their own authority, and that there was a wide consensus among pedagogues that children’s agency must be supervised, particularly in decision-making. The contradiction between declarations of children’s autonomy and the need for supervision by a pedagogue was resolved by appealing to the skill of pedagogy in making the manipulation of children imperceptible.