A few introductory comments may help the Western reader decode the following article, written by the director of the Laboratory for the History of Education under the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow. Although the tone of the article makes clear that Dneprov is extremely dissatisfied with conditions in his area of history (and the stridency of his criticism of Soviet scholarship is in itself somewhat unusual), he must often resort to indirect and elliptical comment to make his basic points. Dneprov is representative of a younger generation of Soviet scholars, well versed in the changes in methodology and content that have affected the writing of history in the West, and impatient to introduce similar directions in the Soviet Union. Even more important, Dneprov notes that Soviet scholars have made significant advances in the study of the medieval period in general—in part because historians of talent often gravitate to more remote times where the strictures of ideology are less unbending and freedom of research more prominent. Yet Soviet educational historians have made few advances in this field, which has been studied in virtual isolation from general cultural developments, and which has adhered closely to dogmatic strictures first put forth in the 1930s.