Administrative Perestroika and Rewriting History: The Dilemma of Glasnost in Soviet Education Available to Purchase

The reformist processes of glasnost and perestroikaexacerbated an existing crisis in education in the Soviet Union. Although Mikhail Gorbachev′s initiatives did not elicit a strong response among educators before early 1987, they provoked strong discord over the extent of desirable change in national educational policy thereafter. This conflict merged with a wide‐ranging debate over the rewriting of the nation′s history, especially the version to appear in secondary school textbooks. Seizing both issues, classroom teachers and lowlevel administrators made a sustained effort to increase decision‐making authority at the bottom of the educational apparatus,including at the classroom level. By 1989, these differences had settled into a pattern of ongoing, implacable disagreement.