The current assessment of the state of political division in the United States is foreboding. Americans are more divided than any time since the Civil War, leaving some to opine that these differences may be irreconcilable. This speculative analysis takes seriously as its point of departure the position of a growing number of American commentators…

This article sheds light on a paradox in the Soviet educational landscape: the development of specialised foreign-language schools in the context of a purported egalitarian society. These schools endured, and even thrived, through the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, a historical overview for Soviet-era development of specialised-school…

This paper explores relations between literacy education, ideology and politics, based on an analysis of educational reforms during Soviet and US military occupation in North and South Korea. Following the end of the Second World War, anti-illiteracy campaigns in the two Koreas became important means of political socialisation for Koreans amid the…

This is a personal narrative about my transformative journey as an educator through the calamities of the failed perestroika in the Soviet Union and cultural shocks of living in the United States and Canada. I analyze the factors contributing to my academic abilities that allowed me to graduate with a PhD in mathematics from a university in Russia…

Universities elsewhere have been changing its purposes, functions, roles, and pursuits in society. This study is a case study of Mongolian higher education in which institutional changes are taking place incrementally. The purpose of this study is to explore institutional isomorphism or homogenization of a case university in Mongolia in two…

Throughout her childhood, education was important to Mukadas Tashieva. She attended a village school in the mountainous Kara-Suu region, where students would either walk or arrive by horse. Under the Soviet educational system, education was free and compulsory, teachers were strong, and classes were highly structured. There were challenges,…

In this creative article, the reader is invited into an a/r/tographic chronotope, through which the author remembers her learning and schooling experiences in the Ukrainian USSR. The purpose of remembering is to render an elusive meaning of dialogic pedagogy in the soviet compulsory schooling with a focus on the child's lived experience of…

In this paper, we explore the role of mundane artefacts, namely bank notes, in the construction of language policy. Our case study involves a site of complex language policy and politics, namely the current day territory of Transcarpathia. During the twentieth century the region of Transcarpathia belonged to several different states: to the…

The Popular Front line made the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) a more hospitable place for "brain workers." The emphasis the line placed on mass ideological and cultural struggle against fascism meant that they became important allies to be won for the working class. As the principal transmitters of ideology and culture to the…

This historiography of Hungarian higher education focuses on the evolution of academic freedom and institutional autonomy at Hungarian institutions of higher education. Through an exploration of trends in higher education policy, structure, and funding, the evolution of institutional autonomy and academic freedom provided a framework for…

This paper critically considers the notion of educational policy transfer by addressing the roles of significant actors, based on an analysis of educational reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation in the two Koreas. Using evidence from the Korean cases, the paper challenges the state-centric, linear, and static views of…

The article is written within the framework of a broader study investigating school and university representation in the Soviet/Russian and foreign audiovisual media texts. The research outlines that in Soviet cinema the image of the female teacher was transformed in the following sequence: a heroine-revolutionary; a heroine of hard work; an…

This paper studies transformations in the role of higher education in Russia as represented in official Soviet and post-Soviet policy documents between the 1950s and 2013. The focus is on the categories defining the purposes and tasks of higher education in the larger context of society and economy. There is a basic dichotomy in relation to the…

The demise of Soviet genetics in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has stood for many as a prime example of the damage that social and political dogmatism can do when allowed to meddle in the workings of science. In particular, the story of Trofim Lysenko's rise to preeminence and the fall of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union has become a lasting…

Analyses of society during the Soviet period need to include an understanding of the construction of everyday life by ordinary people, as well as of the policies and behavior of political leaders and of the formal structure of Soviet institutions. The usefulness of this approach can be seen by looking at data on how students in the 1970s…