“Education by the city”: urban imagination in school textbooks of the 1920s

The first post-revolutionary decades became one of the key periods in terms of the formation of the urban imagination and urban culture. The article attempts to outline the possibilities of studying this process through the prism of school textbooks. To accomplish this task, the author turns to the reconstruction of the reform that unfolded during this period, which determined the directions and framework for the formation of the corpus of educational and methodological literature in general and the appeal to urban topics in the practice of education. The analysis of localization, complex teaching and active learning methods embodied in the practice of the labour school (trudovaya shkola), and the contribution of schools to the formation of the local history movement which flourished in the 1920s, becomes an important focus. In this context, the question arises about the role of the textbook in the educational process, on the one hand, and about the impulses for the emergence of urban issues, on the other. With this in mind, the author refers to the characteristics of the body of textbooks that were focused on the development of the theme of the city. In the final part of the articl, a comparative analysis is given of two primary schools workbooks, “On Our Own” (Svoimi silami) (1925-927) and “Our City” (Nash gorod) (1928-1930), which were the most ambitious attempts to represent the city in the educational text. This analysis reveals various approaches to the development of real and imaginary exploration of the city within the framework of the school curriculum, aimed at adapting students to the urban environment and active inclusion in urban life.