History textbook in era of gadgets

Eighteen months ago, President Putin called to develop unified school textbooks of the history of Russia, which will be of high quality and deprived of ambiguity. New history textbooks based on a single historical and cultural standard, developed by the Russian Military-Historical Society, should appear in a number of Russian schools on September 1st 2015. Professor of the department of methodology of teaching history at Moscow State Regional University, Oleg Volobuev, believes, that the creators of the new textbooks should solve a number of problems: ‘’This is the problem of the historical content of the textbook, and the problem of developmental education, and the problem of education, that is, how the textbook will meet the needs of schools with teachers and students, and the needs of society, and how it reflects the current state of the national historical science, and the world, too. That is how it has and what educational potential it has’’.

This, according to the historian, can be solved by to compounds: «one of these components is the historical content of the textbooks and the other is the methodical apparatus of the textbook. Moreover, the role of the methodological apparatus of the textbook cannot be underestimated, because the academic or historical material is absorbed not only through the text, especially today, not only through the text , as you wish, but also through the methodical device.

An electronic textbook has certain advantages that lie in the fact that it is possible to install hyperlinks to documents, hyperlinks to a number of illustrative materials, use documentary films». 

Recently the chairman of the expert council of the Russian Academic Foundation, Larisa Astanina, announced that it is planned to create movie character training, which will be accompanied by the single history textbook, in conjunction with a film studio of documentary films in the future. "Now electronic gadgets are firmly in the lives of modern students. In order to get them interested in history we have decided with the documentary films production studio to distribute a disc with a video, which may be of interest of the students, so they would want to read the textbooks, the history books,"  Astanina said.

A member of the Central Board of the Russian Military History Society, Armen Gasparyan, believes that ‘’the modern history textbook is a very serious work performed by professional people, which reflects absolutely all the problems that were, for example, in Russia in the 20th century. This is the first issue. The second one. The history book which was issued recently is really a textbook, and indeed a history book, because if you look at the history books, for example, in Moldova,  you will find out with huge surprise that Nazi Germany was defeated by Romania with a little help from the USSR. A very little help, and maybe even only in France. If you look at the history book released in Ukraine, there you will find guidance on how to teach children to perform scenes from the heroic life of Bandera and Shukhevych and other equally amazing people, with which the history of Western Ukraine is rich.’’ 

Gasparyan sees another problem in Russia: ‘’in the years of the USSR there was so-called popular scientific literature, which belonged largely to the additional extracurricular reading. Today we have a huge problem with this. We have a really clever, correct, sustained, balanced, wonderful history book, but with the additional scientific popular literature, when a child wants to get extended knowledge of any issue, he will face difficulties, because there are very serious monographs, of this volume, that not even every adult is able to read. We do not have popular scientific literature even about WWII. You can go to any bookstore and you will be surprised to see that there are collections of documents produced by specialized institutes, there are historical monographs and there is absolutely no popular scientific literature, which can explain to children some basic things in a popular form’’.

According to the historian, in this regard ‘’it is a fact that the history textbook provides links to online resources, where there are, conventionally, scans of scientific popular works, a number of works of the 80s, for example, relating to the Great Patriotic War, which are quite modern even today. Therefore, if the textbook makes it possible, if not through, conventionally, a bookstore, but through the Internet to obtain more knowledge of these complex topics, it's wonderful. Honor and praise to the creators, they have done a great job.’’