Separate Schools

The dust-jacket of this book is divided in two: in the top half, rows of boys sit studiously at their desks; underneath, a roomful of girls in their uniform black dresses, white collars and plaited hair, look up obediently, presumably towards a teacher just off-shot. It seems a long way from the ideals of the Revolution, in which the gender restrictions of the nineteenth century were to be overturned and the hierarchies of the imperial classroom abolished (one 1918 decree, for example, announced that ‘the pupils also have the right to talk back to the teachers’). The ideal of the post-war school presented in these two images suggests a retreat from these revolutionary principles: girls and boys are recognised as inherently different, but both groups are expected to study in an orderly and respectful manner. Yet, as Thomas Ewing shows, things were rather different in practice, and the new policies openly criticised by the early 1950s. Despite the generally limited scope for free discussion in the late Stalinist period, educational experts, teachers, children, and parents all weighed into debates about the advantages and disadvantages of segregating boys and girls. They argued about whether the policy was progressive or retrograde, as well as reflecting on whether it worked in practice or not: did the rows of obedient schoolgirls and boys actually exist, or was the post-war classroom in fact a little more anarchic than anyone wanted to admit

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