29 Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The Uni- versity of Georgia. He taught high school English in the Chicago area from 1976 to 1990 while earning his MAT and PhD from the University of Chicago. The volume he coedited, Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research won the 2009 Edward Fry Book Award from the National Reading Conference. E-mail: smago@uga.edu. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2, March–April 2011, pp. 29–35. © 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490204 PETER SMAGORINSKY A Distant Perspective on the School of the Dialogue of Cultures Pedagogical Movement in Ukraine and Russia This article responds to articles that offer the School of the Dialogue of Cultures pedagogical movement in Ukraine and Russia as an approach that will revolutionize schooling. In this response I question the degree to which the exclusive intellectual quality of the private school curriculum could be adapted to schools characterized by poverty and other factors that would mitigate against students’ embrace of a classical education. I begin this response to the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology’s two-issue feature on the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) pedagogical movement with a set of qualifiers that I hope helps the reader to situate my perspec- tive properly. First, I come to this response with no prior knowledge of either Bibler or the SCD; the articles published in the journal represent the first opportunity I have had to learn about their approach to teaching and learning. Second, I do not speak Russian and so rely on translations to inform my understanding of the SDC approach to schooling, and as such, it is entirely possible that my reading will be compromised by my inability to grasp conceptually some points they are making; that something has been lost in translation. And so I undertake this response with a certain degree of caution, and from a distance that might refract my reading of these texts in ways not intended or anticipated by the authors. In an SDC school, an education is predicated on an understanding of how cul- tures develop and what happens when they are put in dialogue with one another.