School Museum: the Idea of Formation and the Significance of the Exposition for Academic Process

In the Soviet times school museums were closely connected with the field research of the schoolchildren. Pupils brought special things from the researches of the places of military glory and set up depositories. The system of patriotic upbringing, which was appropriate to state ideology, was being built around such museums. After the breakup of the USSR the ideology lost its sense and school museum was forgotten for some time, till in 2000s it aroused its interest: scientific publications, renewal of the soviet expositions and foundation of new museums. In this research we examined the internal content of museums and their role in school life in the recent years. We came to the conclusion that a modern museum became the reconstruction of a soviet museum due to similar formal discourse. There is no soviet ideology there now, but instead of Marxism-Leninism we have another image of an ideal world - the image of a happy soviet past. Besides, the museum has got a new function, which it didn’t have in the soviet times: school museum begins to form a community consisting not only from teachers and pupils but also from their parents