On the formation of historical memory of the Great Patriotic War among students of secondary schools of Kazakhstan

Abstract

The article aims to determine the level of historical knowledge, and the depth of historical memory of students of schools of Kazakhstan about the Great Patriotic War learned from modern school textbooks. The research objectives include: to find out how much schoolchildren honor the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War; to identify whether students know statistics, geography, and terms related to the War; determine how well schoolchildren know the heroes of soldiers and rear troops who participated in the War; to analyze the impact of the educational literature of secondary education on the formation of students' knowledge about the War. We should note that transforming school knowledge into mass ideas about the past is too complicated. That is why the article pays considerable attention to school textbooks and curricula and the historical memory of students about the history of the Great Patriotic War. The author conducted an online survey among 500 students of grades 9–11 of schools of Kazakhstan through the google forms service. The study showed that students' historical memory about the War's specific events and heroes is extraordinarily ambiguous and should be replenished. It is especially true for participants in the partisan movement of the Great Patriotic War and the life history of the peoples of the Kazakh SSR during the War.