THE CONTENT PROBLEM OF THE SECOND GENERATION OF THE UKRAINIAN SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS ON WORLD HISTORY (1996-2001)

Abstract

The set aim of the article is to demonstrate the process of creating school textbooks on World History in Ukraine during 1996-2001 as well as the influence of the methodological and the ideological historiography approaches on it, to analyze the changes in the content and in the structure of school textbooks under certain historical conditions in the aspect of the choice of the main facts, the leading outlook ideas, the ways of the material representation, and their polygraphic characteristics. The author of the article stated that, during 1996-2000, a few variative textbooks for each World History school course were created, and there were some alternative textbooks on the History of Middle Ages and the History of Modern Times. The following conclusion was made: in this period, the textbooks, mainly, changed in two aspects: methodological and methodical ones. In particularly, it was found that the principal approaches to the formation of the content of the World History textbooks for the secondary schools were considered to be civilization, culturological, and stadial-regional ones. The textbooks on World History for thehigh school touched upon the social and political as well as the military history, mostly. The hot-burning issue of this period appears to be a new problem: the author’s desire to express his/her opinion on that or another phenomenon, event, historical fi gure and his/her responsibility for being objective and unbiased, whichis demanded by the educational literature. In the article, it is denoted that the textbooks of the second generation were much more improved than their predecessors. In particularly, more attention was paid to mastering the material as well as the additional texts. One more positive tendency was the start of creating educational and methodological series, which included a textbook, a reading book, a workbook, didactic materials, and a teacher’s book. However, the analysis demonstrated that the majority of textbooks included reproductive and partially reproductive tasks; the attention which was paid to the pupils’ independent work was not enough; in particularly, the conclusions were provided in the end of the paragraph.