Foreign languages faculty

Transplantation of the Project Idea Back to Europe
By the dawn of the 20th century, the United States had been firmly established as a world power. Her influence was noticeable not only in politics and trade, but also in education. Like Europe, America had become an important exporter of innovative and progressive educational ideas. The project method, principally in the broad version of Dewey and Kilpatrick, as it was repeatedly and wrongly said, was discussed in Canada, Argentina, Britain, Germany, India, and Australia. The center of the discussion, however, was in Russia where, since the revolution of 1917, substantial effort had been invested in developing progressive alternatives to the bourgeois and capitalist methods of teaching through lectures and books. In the early 1920s, project work was introduced and promoted to Russian educators, primarily by Lenin's wife and colleague Nadezhda K. Krupskaya. Somewhat later (around 1930), it acquired eminent importance when Victor N. Sulgin, head of the Institute of Educational Research in Moscow, proclaimed his concept "withering away of the school" and declared the "metod proektov" to be the one and only truly "Marxist" and "democratic" method of teaching (Holmes, 1991, p. 123). According to Sulgin, the project was the ideal approach to combining theoretical insights with revolutionary practice, and to accelerating the transition from capitalism to communism. In contrast to bourgeois schooling, teaching in the proletarian state extended beyond stringing together abstract subject matter. Rather, it consisted of an unbroken sequence of projects where the pupils would acquire, by productive work, the knowledge with which they could spur on the political and economic development of the Soviet Union. Thus, fifth grade students were encouraged to go to factories and support workers in their fight to fulfill production and financing plans. This was accomplished by writing reports on the heroes of labor, demonstrating against idlers, and exhibiting workpieces and products of their own. Sulgin's proposals were initially discussed at specially-convened pan-Russian "project conferences" and then were formalized into a comprehensive national "project curricula".
However, the new curricula had just been passed when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union intervened. In a resolution dated September 5, 1931, the highest decision-making body in the country condemned the "ill-considered craze for the project method" (Anweiler, 1978, p. 431), declaring that the project was not suited for teaching the knowledge and skills necessary to increase industrial production and strengthen communist consciousness. Indeed, there was considerable risk that, through the fusion of instruction and work, progress achieved in the field of general and scientific education in recent years would be jeopardized. This governmental resolution brought the discussion of the project method to an abrupt halt. Like progressive education as a whole, the project method was no longer on the agenda of the educational theory debate, either in the Soviet Union or in the countries that were to come under Soviet domination in Eastern Europe after World War II.