The “Educational Laboratory”: American Educators Visit Soviet Schools, 1925–1929
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Progressive educators who travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s were often enthusiastic about the schools they visited, despite the fact that early Soviet educational reform had been chaotic and largely unsuccessful. The accounts of five such visitors, John Dewey, Scott Nearing, Lucy L.W. Wilson, Carleton Washburne, and George S. Counts are examined here. They show that this discrepancy between perception and reality was not the result of naivety or even self-censorship. Rather, I argue that the progressive education movement’s utopian outlook was a key factor in these educators’ reception of Soviet schools, enabling them to recognize serious shortcomings, while maintaining they were among the most important schools in the world. In their orientation to the future, they viewed Soviet schools as a laboratory, whose findings could advance the cause of the broader progressive education movement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".