It is amazing how fast the time is running and how fast there comes a moment for a new journal issue and for the new joy of meeting with you again. This issue is devoted fully to a very topical but not very well developed theme of authorial schools, their theoretical analysis and practical implementation in different educational institutions of Russia, USA, and other countries in the world. I need to confess that the topic itself is very personal for me because a large part of my research, publications, and “life” in education is connected with it. This is the reason why I decided to write a theoretical article about authorial schools myself. You should also mind that the English version of this article is not a word-to-word translation of its Russian version that is because there are very few articles in English about authorial schools and the topic is less known to Western readers. I hope that Russian readers will understand and forgive me for this. (Whatever you say, there are some privileges of being Editor-in-Chief of this journal.)

The purpose of this article is to introduce the readers to the results of the author’s earlier long-term research of humanistic authorial schools in the 20th century. Considering an authorial school a specific phenomenon of the educational reality allowed the author to analyze its main characteristics, to point out primary definitions and tendencies of its development; it also permitted to build some classifications and typologies of such schools. In a way this article is meant to become an introduction to a number of descriptions of different authorial schools presented in this journal issue, starting with the papers of some school founders such as Olga Block and Jack Mc Gurgan, moving further to those who have been implementing authorial concepts in practice (Yael Barenholtz, Kathy Slawson and Betty Disney), and finally introducing researchers of some famous authorial schools of the past (Mikhail Boguslavsky, Richard Scheuerman and Arthur Ellis, Rosa Valeeva).