A Machine for Developing a World View

Abstract

This article examines hand written school press publications of the beginning of the 20th century. It is based on a text collection of school manuscript journals and newspapers from two St Petersburg schools: the Vyborg Eight-year Commercial School and Vvedenskaya Boys’ Classical Secondary School. In this article the texts are considered as a social act, i.e. as one of the mechanisms of this kind of socialization, and not only as an indicator of latter. According to the schoolchildren themselves, one of the goals of the school press was to form a world view. This article conducts a short review of how the idea of a world view has developed in Russia during the 19th century. Furthermore, the article examines the practices which have been used by the school press in order to form a world view. The article also examines those conditions which have been created in the school press: the active students struggling against an inert mass, censure and also self-censure in the school press. The findings provide a new source for microhistorical research that investigates the peculiar features of socialization typical of the Russian intelligentsia at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. In the conclusion, the author attempts to widen our understanding of the beginning of the 20th century.