Education in the Family and Family Policy in the Soviet Union

Abstract

In our Western societies we are living in a period in which we are confronted with the costs and limits of the following: economic planning and growth, the expanded state system of social policy, and expansion in the formal educational system. In this situation the search for quality instead of quantity, the search for private and grass-roots, instead of state, initiative, and the search for informal instead of formal settings for education and learning seem to be growing in importance. There is a widespread awareness that we have, by means of quantitative growth and expansion, created structures of economy, policy and education that have been shown to be unable to satisfy basic human needs, needs as reflected, for example, in the well-known hierarchy of Maslow. In this context of a change of conditions and attitudes, certain topics — partly new, partly old — seem to gain a new priority in policy. One example of a new topic of this sort is environmental policy and education, and one example of the new priority of an old topic is family policy and education.