The research literature describes in detail the phenomenon of conservative education (Aronwitz & Giroux, 2003), a traditionalist approach (Kozlowski, 2002) to teaching and the formation of a student according to established patterns. Among the standard features of conservative educational policies, one can single out resistance to 'modernism' and rejection of innovation (Pandolfini, 2013).

Recently, some researchers have paid particular attention to the phenomenon of reversibility in educational policy (Schulte, 2019) when some elements of the previous practices that disappeared a while ago are being restored (school models, assessments, curriculum). Most researchers consider these phenomena using the framework of political competition between liberal and conservative forces (Cervinkova, 2016; Craske, 2021; McClellan, 1999). The paper argues that this interpretation needs to be revised and suggests a more detailed analysis of such phenomena and a different understanding.

In the context of modern Russia, one can detect the return of both Soviet and pre-revolutionary elements of education. Spiritual culture classes and religious culture classes are examples of the latter. The elements of the Soviet curriculum and the educational process are more widely represented. Those features are initial military education, political education classes, soviet authors in the Literature programme, unified History textbooks, unified school uniforms, militaristic movements under the supervision of the state, and others. 

The purpose of this work is to explain the role of parental support in the process of reinstalling elements of education from past eras in modern Russia. In this paper, we address the following research questions. First, what is the parental attitude towards the return of Soviet and imperial education features? Secondly, can parents be considered as interested parties in such a reinstallation?

The paper includes theoretical and empirical parts. In the first part, we provide an analysis of the restoration of former educational features in England, Poland, and Russia and various theoretical frameworks that were being utilised to interpret such restoration. The work investigates the concept of 'nostalgia' in education policy (Labaree, 2006). We suggest using the stakeholder theory (Parmar et al., 2010), the concept of pre-, post- and cofigurative cultures suggested by Margaret Mead (1978), and a status quo bias theoretical framework (MacMullen, 2011) to analyse the process of intergenerational culture transfer. 

Stakeholders are interested or involved parties, institutionalised and individuals. Regarding school education, the following stakeholders can be distinguished: the government, the school's teaching staff, higher education institutions and families. This study will focus on the interaction between the state and parents. 

According to Margaret Mead, different 'cultures' describe different hierarchical relationships in upbringing. In communities with prefigurative intergenerational relationships, adolescents are guided by their parents as the primary authorities. In the co-figurative type, teenagers are raised in communities of their own kind, and in the post-figurative type, children 'raise' their parents. In the context of the state orientation towards the parent community in the process of reinstating the content of education and educational policies, one might assume that such a government's assumption can be successful only if Mead's prefigurative culture dominates society.

We hypothesise that the government may find support for a conservative turn politics among the parents because they are expected to have a nostalgic spot for such a return. In addition, parents' support for returning to the roots, 'back to basics' approach might be explained by status quo bias, which is a predisposition to return to some kind of 'normality'.

In the empirical part, we analyse such phenomena in the relatively recent Russian education policy concerning restoring some parts of the school curriculum from Soviet times. We conducted a series of interviews with curriculum experts, educational policy experts and families. We performed fourteen semi-structured interviews with parents of middle and high school students from Russia. Notably, the interviewed parents graduated from school in the post-Soviet period, from 1996 to 2001. The interview topics were presented in several segments. First, parents were asked to answer questions about the goals of schooling and the ideal education content. In addition, we asked in detail about their attitude to the return of Soviet authors to the Literature program, to the reinstalled course of initial military training and revived Technical Drawing. Additionally, the interview guide included topics that were supposed to help establish the type of intergenerational relationships in the communities under study. These are questions about the importance of a shared learning experience, a discussion of the child's learning process, and several others. We invited experts to get an idea of how the state interacts with parents and how parents in Russia generally feel about the observed conservative turn in education.

The analysis of these interviews partly confirms our hypothesis that the parents support the restoration of the old curriculum elements based on their desire to have a shared learning experience with their kids and to transform the relationships with the kids from prefigurative to postfigurative cultural assumptions. The only rationalisation for such an attitude is 'It is important for the child's character'. Parents also support the return of Technical Drawing and initial military education because they argue that these subjects prepare children for adulthood. Experts state that parents are excluded from the educational process in the modern Russian tradition. They also argue that parents are always unhappy with the school for their children, and our study confirms this idea. Thus, parents nostalgically recall their school years and consider their children's education insufficient and of lower quality than theirs. The experts conclude that parents would like their children to study as they did, but without making their own mistakes.

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