Patriotic Education in Contemporary Russia

1.2 The approach

In this research, the sociological perspective is adopted to identify modern patriotic education as a social structure born of the values and attitudes of teachers and school administrators, their experiences of upbringing in the Soviet Union, and a symbolic heritage of memorialization. The tradition of scholarship that influenced this book is based on excellent studies conducted to explain the interconnection of the Soviet trauma with contemporary behavior of the Russian people; the role of schools in educating citizens and broadcasting state-approved knowledge; the peculiarities of the Russian mentality and the national idea relating state, society, and authorities; and the meanings of patriotism and patriotic education in contemporary Russia.19 These investigations pay very thoughtful and careful attention to the processes of post-Soviet socialization in its individual, group, and societal dimensions. They help to answer many questions about the peculiarities of the Russian people, Russian society, and the Russian state. However, perhaps more importantly, they also justify the new questions, one of which is: What are the social roots of citizen-raising in contemporary Russia? This question is at the core of this book.

In order to answer the question sociologically, I found the theoretical inspiration for my study in an approach popularized by Pierre Bourdieu and his followers to be an effective method for analyzing social structures and social agents’ experience. In the center of this approach lies the concept of habitus. Habitus is often described by Bourdieu as a “feel for the game,”20 referring to the interconnected social and individual processes leading to the formation of structures and contexts. Habitus is a “complex internalized core from which everyday experiences emanate.”21 It is the embodied set of dispositions intuitively generated from practice that determines people’s behavioral choices and tastes based on their past experiences.22 Although perhaps too socially deterministic, this concept provides an opportunity to study phenomena considered to be political, like patriotism formation, from a sociological perspective.

On the one hand, habitus refers to a person’s individual history, which forms his or her values, attitudes, and frames for actions and choices. On the other hand, habitus is also connected to the collective history of groups and communities, like family or school, of which the individual is a member,23 and with historical circumstances, structures, and power arrangements. These internalized layers are reproduced unconsciously and determine individual actions.

As a conceptual and methodological tool, habitus is often used in sociological, cultural, and educational research together with other important concepts like capital, field, and doxa, which are interconnected and closely linked to habitus. Capital represents different forms of resources that individuals use in their practices. These are physical and monetary resources (economic capital), intellectual qualifications (cultural capital), networks and social relations (social capital), and prestige and honor (symbolic capital). Field represents a kind of social space with particular rules of the “game,” where people perform their social activities, set their social positions, and build social structures. Doxa represent fundamental values and discourses, which make a particular field socially unique and different from other fields. These values, attitudes, and discourses are taken for granted by individuals who see them as inherently true and necessary to their existence.24

In the present study, I considered the aforementioned concepts as a gui­ding light for the analysis rather than a firm framing methodology, as my primary interest is a sociological examination of patriotism, not the complicated concep­tual labyrinth of the Bourdieurian perspective. Such an approach leads to the creation of a text that is simultaneously theoretically based and still comprehensible to a reader who is not specialized in Social Science or in Russian studies.

Using habitus as a conceptual tool allows for limiting the research focus on social and cultural issues, which is very important for sociological study of such a politicized topic as patriotism and citizenship formation. Viewed in this framework, the model of patriotic education tends to be associated with the attitudes, norms, and values of its major agents: teachers, school directors and deputies of extracurricular activity, local guidance counselors, and regional and federal civil servants involved in the process of patriotism formation. To study them, I used various sources of empirical data, including the texts of federal, regional, and local patriotic education programs, statistical data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Russian public opinion research centers (Levada Center, WCIOM, the Public Opinion Foundation), the World Values Survey (Wave 6, 2010–2014), and open interviews conducted in 2015–2016. The fieldwork was completed mostly in rural areas of Russian regions (Moscow Oblast, Leningrad Oblast, Pskov Oblast, Saratov Oblast, Novgorod Oblast, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Tver Oblast, Voronezh Oblast), as well as in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Most of the interviews were conducted face to face, and some via Skype. I found most of the interviewees through the “snowball method” (referral from others), and some I contacted by e-mail. To protect their identities and allow them to speak freely, locations and rough age estimations have been scrambled.

The interviewees, representing different social groups involved in the process of patriotic education, can be divided into two groups. The first group is represented by federal and regional officials (12 interviews) from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Leningrad Oblast, and Pskov Oblast. These interviews allowed me to understand the features of the normative base of patriotic education, to address as thoroughly as possible my many concerns regarding the legislative documents, and to understand the goals pursued by the Russian state through introducing state programs and other tools of patriotism formation.

The second group includes local officials and guidance counselors (8 interviews), school directors (15 interviews), schoolteachers (25 interviews), and priests in the Russian Orthodox Church (6 interviews). Following the paradigm of habitus as a methodological and conceptual tool, my overall picture of social reproduction of patriotic education in Russia is based on the interviews. This approach has its benefits and limitations. On the one hand, the empirical nature of the major source of information uncovered the inner dynamics of the educational process, with its hidden meanings, covert values, and latent attitudes forming the basis of the revival of patriotic education in Russia; the extensive use of interview fragments throughout the text should help readers form a collective image of my interviewees who, with some exceptions, were remarkably similar in attitudes and background. On the other hand, this approach limits the conclusions of the study to the small number of interviewees. To overcome these restrictions, at least in part, I relied widely on historical literature, educational texts, and supplementary methodological materials mentioned in the interviews as teachers’ common sources of information.

1.3 Book structure

This study does not pretend, of course, to uncover all shadows of contemporary patriotic education in Russia, its political echoes, and its ramifications in the international arena. Such an investigation would occupy many volumes. I have attempted to analyze the social features of the model of patriotic education in Russia in order to examine the process of the institution’s revealing and the role of social elements in that process. Patriotic education in Russia is a great example of how a political idea can lead to the formation of social structures, and how, in time, those social structures can lead to the restoration of the original political idea. Social structures are often insufficiently investigated within the study of political phenomena, and thus their role is undervalued. This book attempts to rectify this, at least in part, by focusing on the social elements of patriotic education.

Following the introduction, the second part of the book is devoted to the legislative and institutional backgrounds of public policy for patriotic education in the USSR and Russia. Drawing analogies with the Soviet era, some researchers consider the Concept of Patriotic Education, as well as the related governmental programs, as a foundation of the educational process in contemporary Russia. Through the analysis of national, regional, and local legal acts and programs, I argue that the poor quality of these documents disqualifies them from acting as such a foundation. Moreover, I suggest that a careful approach to public programming might be a good alternative to ideology, as the logic of public programs and their evaluation would provide clear objectives, concrete indicators, and measurable correlations of funds allocated for the programs with performed results. However, the quality of state programs for patriotic education is surprisingly poor. They have no real connection to the processes of patriotism formation and are replicated for their own sake and for the support of budget money. With mediocre indicators and performance evaluation, they cannot be considered useful even in maintaining the jingoistic patriotism often attributed to Russian patriotic education. For teachers and school administrators, they are mostly “empty things” stuffed with emotional phrases about the necessity of raising citizens devoted to their Motherland. The real processes, structures, and agents of patriotic education are mostly outside the scope of public programming.