Iveta Kestere and Kitija Valeina: The visual representation of the classroom culture under the Soviet Communist rule: the case of Latvia (1940 – 1941, 1944 – 1985)

 

Introduction

Whatever their nature might be, ideological systems always try to manipulate education.[1] Under their spell educational institutions compile important opinions of various social groups and channel them into views favourable to a ruling political force in order to legitimize and strengthen a particular social system.

Capturing and channeling the minds of students and teachers is the task of political propaganda. Authoritarian regimes tend not to be shy about legitimizing their validity and they do so by aggressively “brainwashing” people and affecting their strategic decision-making. Thus, implemented “marketing” strategies can serve as an example, or model, for the study of propaganda per se.

We are interested to reveal, (1) how school classrooms were adapted for political propaganda under the Soviet communist regime?

The communist reality is still a grey area and holds many difficult questions to answer mostly because it continues to be entwined with censor-created misconceptions. Therefore we would be interested to develop a research methodology adequately and comprehensively addressing the question (2) what was the actual reality of communist educational space?

Latvia as a case study

The Baltic States, including Latvia, were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 – the bleakest period of Stalinization, the epoch which also continued after World War II. Upon marching into Latvia, the communists did not hesitate to interrupt and replace existing economic, social, and cultural ways of Latvian life introducing the foreign order used in other Soviet republics. Using fear and propaganda, the Soviet power did everything to convince the indigenous population in correctness and legitimacy of their actions. Thus, the case of Latvia is a good example for revealing specific traits of propaganda under authoritarianism.

In historiography, the Soviet era in Latvia is divided into several periods: (1) Stalinism (1940–1941 and 1945–1953), when Latvian society lived under the fear of physical repressions, (2) the post-Stalin or Khrushchev era, when some liberal reforms were introduced (1953–1964), and (3) the stagnation period (1964–1985) until (4) Gorbachev’s perestroika.

We will focus on the first three historical periods paying particular attention to the  reflection of political changes in the classroom culture.

Sources and methodology of research

Use of primary visual and material sources is particularly problematic in the case of Latvia, where each regime attempted to erase the traces of the previous one in the minds of people as well as in material culture. To overcome the difficulty, visual sources have been collected over an extended period of time and they consist of:

• The official image of the classroom, as accepted by state censors and, therefore, “officially” appeared in textbooks, press and newsreels. As Burke stated, images often illustrate a generalization,[2] and the pictures of classrooms in censured mass media can be considered an idealized generalisation of the Soviet school in general and classroom culture in particular.

By now, we have collected around 100 classroom images from Soviet textbooks (primers, readers, and textbooks in geography, English, Russian, history, and singing from the collections of The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (Germany) and Riga School Museum). Our collection also includes eight newsreels from Latvian State Archives.

• In order to determine how and whether the promoted image of the classroom actually was implemented in schools, printed sources and newsreels will be compared with photographs. There are several studies about classroom culture where photographs are used as an important historical source.[3] A photograph is of true value if it conforms to reality, it is an evidence of an event and has the status of a document.[4] It is important to collect as many photographs as possible, because “[n]o image can capture (represent) the totality of associations it is connected to.” At the same time, the research begins with one particular photo: “Only by looking at the singular image do we begin to see and engage with what it brings forth (darstellen); namely, the whole field of meaning which informs.”[5]

We have collected around 200 classroom photographs picked up from museums of Latvia, as well as from private collections.

• Material objects or materialities in the classroom are an important component of classroom culture.[6] Grosvenor observes that materialities and the visual design of a classroom  provide the sense of self-belonging.[7] Prosser believes that the visual culture of school has traces and markings of the past, present and probably the future hidden curriculum, the evidence that can help to understand the meaning of symbolical and physical school environment.[8]

Our research objects are memory albums or memory notebooks, filled questionnaires (comprising students’ questions to their classmates), memos and other written sources which form school memories of individuals.

Classroom culture and propaganda

We consider classroom culture as an externally determined organization of actors and materialities in educational space, the system including certain values, norms of communication, rituals, habits, and has a formal and informal nature.[9]

To introduce some order to school standard practices, fixed patterns of behavior, architecture design, school artifacts[10], as well as routine, rituals, and symbolic events, in other words, to all mutual “choreography”[11] of school and classroom daily reality, we set up a theoretical model of classroom culture which includes sets of seeing, doing, [feeling] and saying.[12]

It could be discussed as a set of five elements (Fig.1):[13]

 

Figure 1

We will discuss which classroom culture elements were used for propaganda and how. We will look at the following question: did propaganda really penetrate daily life as expected by authorities?

We will address also a Soviet school phenomenon, namely, the Little Red Corner – a specially created area for propaganda in classroom or school in general. This area was decorated with images and slogans, including clippings from press and brochures, and was used as a place for political meetings. Since 1940s, such spaces had to be created quickly, often by people completely ill-prepared for the task. We will also address the issue how to become “literate” in propaganda. We will reconstruct the system employed by teachers for the realization of propaganda.

The analysis of these Little Red Corners will include answers to the following questions. Who were the authors of propaganda? When and what type of propaganda materials were made by children? Answering the latter question we will reveal ways in which children themselves were involved in the creation of propaganda materials. We will address the question who were the “main heroes” in propaganda, and the more interesting and challenging one – who were its “secondary characters”. The final question is how heroes were “canonized” and turned into icons.  

We will analyze rituals, traditions and symbols depicted in the visual sources. In this section we will discuss the prohibition and enforcement of celebrations and associated symbols (flags, attire, songs). We will address the question of how pupils and teachers resisted propaganda. By analyzing forms of protest, we will search for answers to the questions what is the opposite to the concept of propaganda. Can it be “tradition/traditional”? It is important to know how traditions were used to fight propaganda and how they were used for propaganda purposes.

We will describe which holidays were truly celebrated and which “illegal” holidays and symbols became a form of protest.

Conclusions

We will conclude our research with a discussion of the answers to the general questions posed in the beginning, namely, what a totalitarian power finds to be important in classroom culture for the development of propaganda policies and how we can assess effectiveness of propaganda in history.

Synergy

COST Programme CA16213 New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA16213

Literature

142. On classroom culture: Sjaak Braster, Ian Grosvenor, Maria del Mar del Pozo, eds., The Black Box of Schooling. A Cultural History of the Classroom (P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2011); Frederik Herman, School Culture in the 20th Century. Mentality and Reality History of the Primary School (PhD theses, K.U. Leuven, 2010); Marc Depaepe, Order in Progress. Everyday Education Practice in Primary Schools – Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuvern University Press, 2000); Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn, Kate Rousmaniere, eds. Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1999); Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (NY: Teachers College Press, 1990); Norris Brock Johnson, West Haven: Classroom Culture and Society in a Rural Elementary School (The University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Margaret Mead, School in American culture (Harvard University Press, 1951); Iveta Kestere, The classroom as an arena for political propaganda: Communism and Nazism in Latvian classrooms (1940-1956), Annali online della Didactica e della Formacione Docente, Vol.8, No.12, 2016, 26-61; Kitija Valeina, Reflections of formal education in informal classroom culture: Case of Latvia (1964-2004), Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia, Vol.37, 2016, 126-142.
143. On the use of visual sources: Grosvenor, I., Dussel, I., Kestere, I., Priem, K., Rasmussen, L., van Gorp, A. ‘We seek revelation with our eyes’: engaging with school cultures through montage, Encounters in Theory and History of Education / Rencontres en Théorie et Histoire de l’Éducation,  2016, Vol.17, p.2-26; Gasparini F., Vick M. ‘Picturing the history of teacher education: Photographs and methodology’, History of Educational Review, 2006, 35 (2): 16–31; Rousmaniere, K. ‘Questioning the visual in the history of education’, History of Education, 2001, 30 (2): 109–116; Heywood , Sandywell B., eds., Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (London: Routledge, 1999); Prosser, J., Visual methods and the visual culture of schools. Visual Studies, Vol. 22, No.1, 2007, 13-30; Edwards, E., Material beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs. Visual Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002, 67-75.
144. On the use of materialities as sources: Martin Lawn, Ian Grosvenor, Materialities of Schooling: design, technology, objects, routines. (Symposium books, 2005); Norris Brock Johnson, The Material Culture of Public School Classrooms: The Symbolic Integration of Local Schools and National Culture, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1980; Karin Priem, Visual, Literary and Numerical Perspectives on Education: Materiality, Persence and Interpretation, In Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation. Switzerland: Springer, 2014, 53-70.

 

[1] Depaepe, M. and Hulstaert, K. “Demythologizing the educational past: an attempt to assess the “power of education” in the Congo (DRC) with a nod to the history of interwar pedagogy in Catholic Flanders,” Paedagogica Historica Vol.50, No.1-2 (2015): 14.

[2] Burke, P. Eyewitnessing. The Use of Images as Historical Evidence, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001, 187.

[3] Braster, S. Educational Change and Dutch Classroom Photographs: Qualitative and Quantitative analysis. In Black box of shooling. A Cultural history on classroom culture, Brussels: Editions scaientifiques internationales, 2011, 21-38; Grosvenor, I. On Visualising Past Classrooms. In Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom, New York, Peter Lang, 1999, 83-104.

[4] Grosvenor, I., Lawn, M. and Rousmaniere, K. (eds.) Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom, New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

[5] Davey, N. The Hermeneutics of Seeing, in Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual, ed. Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, London: Routledge, 1999, 24.

[6] Lawn, M. and Grosvenor, I. Materialities of Schooling: design, technology, objects, routines. Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005.

[7] Grosvenor, I., Lawn, M. and Rousmaniere, K. (eds.) Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

[8] Prosser, J., Visual methods and the visual culture of schools, Visual Studies, Vol. 22, No.1, 2007, 13-30,

[9] Valeina, K. Reflections of formal education in informal classroom culture: Case of Latvia (1964-2004),  Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia, Vol.37, 2016, 126-142.

[10] Herman, F. School Culture in the 20th Century. Mentality and Reality History of the Primary School. PhD theses, K.U. Leuven, 2010, 10-11.

[11] Grosvenor, I. “To Act on the Minds of the Children”. Paintings into Schools and English Education, in The Black Box of Schooling. A Cultural History of the Classroom, ed. Braster, S., Grosvenor, I., del Mar del Pozo, M., P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2011, 39.

[12] Gherardi, S. Organizational Knowledge. The Texture of Workplace Learning. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

[13] Kestere, I. The classroom as an arena for political propaganda: Communism and Nazism in Latvian classrooms (1940-1956), Annali online della Didactica e della Formacione Docente, Vol.8, No.12, 2016, 26-61; Valeina, K. Reflections of formal education in informal classroom culture: Case of Latvia (1964-2004),  Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia, Vol.37, Vilnius: Vilnius University, 126-142.