Pedagogical research and higher education : an illumination from the second Russian revolution 1986-1992

The value of educational research; its aims and most appropriate locations has been questioned in a number of countries. The issue may differ across countries with distinct traditions of worthwhile knowledge and the institutional setting for educational inquiry. With this proviso, the changes in educational research in the last years of the Soviet Union may be of wider interest. It could no longer serve as a branch of total planning in an engineered society. Its practitioners floundered when faced with the educational implications of new forms of political authority and social relations. But they took up new questions of teaching and learning with verve and success. This may suggest perhaps a more realistic definition of the function of educational research in countries beyond Eastern Europe