Ideas and Ideals

The authors consider the quality of education, its structure and content and how they meet the demands of an individual and the country's economy. The article highlights the idea about the restructuring of the Russian economy as a priority task and a necessary prerequisite ensuring the quality of education. The role of education is shown in achieving the economic growth and reducing social inequality in the country. The article identifies the "bottlenecks" in the modern Russian educational system, secondary and higher educational systems are among them. The authors offer to take into account the international educational activity, its positive and negative effects, as well as to preserve education in Russia as a public good, not a commodity.

The article is devoted to identifying the lessons of national history in the context of the processes of transformation of history education in the XIX-XX and XX-XXI centuries. Their relevance is linked with the development of modern historical culture and the problem of formation of historical consciousness and self-consciousness of youth. The theoretical foundation of the study is the results of a comparative analysis of undertaken investigations on the issue of school history education in the conditions of social transformations. The empirical basis is the results of research performed by the author on the problem of historical consciousness and self-awareness of school youth in 2014-2015. Theoretical and practical importance of identifying the lessons of history is being revealed during the process of reforming and further development of national history education, which is a factor of historical culture and socialization. The author presents the identified trends of the historical culture formation, historical consciousness and self-consciousness of the post-Soviet generation, philosophical, methodological principles of teaching history in schools in accordance with the contents and the condition of historical consciousness and self-consciousness of modern students.