Nicholas Hans and the assessment of Soviet school policy of the Russian pedagogical émigré at the turn of 1920’s – 1930’s
This article reviews the problem of perception and assessment of the process of school building in USSR by the Russian pedagogical émigré at the turn of 1920’s – 1930’s. Having set the goal of creating the Russian foreign school, pedagogues and leaders of the social-pedagogical movement took a close eye on what was happening to the school homeward, assessed it with critical objectivity, highlighting the positive changes and pointing at dangerous tendencies. These issues are the focus of attention in the articles of Sergius Hessen, N. F. Novozhilov, A. L. Bem and N. A. Hans in the émigré pedagogical periodicals. Using the principles of the traditional historical-pedagogical research, approaches of content analysis and case study, the author determine the methodology applied by Nicholas Hans for analyzing the Soviet educational policy and school system. The authors reveal the scholar’s position, according to which the characteristic to the entire history of national school antagonism between radical and autocratic traditions finds its continuation in the Soviet school, that in turn, allows extrapolating the conclusions based on the development stages of prerevolutionary school towards new situation. N. A. Hans uses similar approach in preparation of works about the Soviet school policy, addressed to the English audience. For the first time the authors introduce into the scientific discourse a number of Russian and English language publications of N. A. Hans, a notable participant of the social-pedagogical process of Russian émigré community, but yet unfamiliar to Russian audience. Nicholas Hans was one of the few Russian émigré, who was able to integrate into the scientific educational space of the Great Britain and became a prominent pedagogue-comparativist.