Educação em tempos revolucionários: o Narkompros e a organização da educação soviética (1917-1931)

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the historical formation of the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) and its central proposal: the Unified Labor School. Understanding education as a constitutive element of socialist construction after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the study seeks to understand how Narkompros organized and implemented a Marxist-based educational reform in the Soviet context. The thesis outlines a timeframe between 1917-1931: the initial structuring period of the United Labor School and the first educational reform under Stalin's government, inserted within the Five-Year Plans. The work also identifies the main inspirational sources of the Soviet pedagogical proposal, such as Marxist socialist pedagogy, and critically engages with the approaches of the new school. The analysis shows that the United Labor School was structured as a project that articulated scientific content, productive labor, self-management, and social relevance, aiming at the comprehensive formation of the human being. As a result, the thesis demonstrates that the United Labor School was not merely an abstract theoretical formulation but a concrete representation of the socialist education proposal, shaped by the historical conditions of the revolution and the permanent state of exception experienced by the Soviet Union. In this sense, it mobilizes Lefebvre's (2006) concept of representation to understand the school as a conceived, lived, and perceived space, and Losurdo's (2004) notion of the state of exception to contextualize the structural limits of the Soviet experience. It concludes that Narkompros's educational proposal expresses the historical attempt to establish a school committed to human emancipation, in opposition to the assumptions of bourgeois education.