WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE FAMILY

For many years now we have been speaking and writing a great deal about universal pedagogical education, about the search for new forms and methods of educators' work with families; we ha ve been generalizing a diversity of sometimes brilliant and interesting experience. But can we claim today that the schools have achieved very much in the pedagogical enlightenment of parents, in having an influence on the family? It would take considerable audacity to make such a claim. What is going on here? Might it be that, even as we attempt to influence the family, we fundamentally know nothing about it-except, perhaps, that it might be a ''drinking'' family or a sober one? Yet statistics show that more and more frequently, it is adolescents from families considered well-to-do that are committing most crimes. Hence their prosperity is an illusion, and what we need to do is study the family in a more in-depth and comprehensive manner in order to find out what is most important for parents to be taught. The schools can be helped a great deal in this by special studies conducted in the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociological Research.