Soviet Education

on the World Today

MANY Soviet refugees in Western Europe and America count the Soviet system of education as the best feature of the Soviet social order. Certainly tremendous emphasis is placed upon education both by the rulers and by the ruled. The regime has an immediate interest in the training of specialists to carry out its program of rapid economic, political, and military expansion, as well as a long-range interest in molding the “new Soviet man.” The people have different but parallel interests: to attain the economic and social privileges of the new Soviet intelligentsia and to satisfy their own genuine thirst for knowledge.

Soviet leaders have given no indication that they share the fear attributed to an early nineteenth century tsarist minister of education, that “to teach the mass of people, or even the majority of them, how to read will bring more harm than good.” Despite rapid strides toward popular education in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, 67 per cent of the people of Russia were illiterate in 1914. In 1939 less than 20 per cent were illiterate, and of those more than half were over fifty years of age. With the end of World War II, strong measures were undertaken to combat increases in illiteracy caused by wartime disruptions of schooling.

The reduction of illiteracy has been accomplished largely by the introduction of universal compulsory education through the seventh grade. The school population of Russia in 1914 was under 8 million; in 1939, with a total population increase of about 20 per cent, the school population was over 32 million.

Equally impressive is the increase in facilities for higher education. In 1914 there were in Russia about 90 institutions of higher education, with about 110,000 students. In 1952 there were some 900 institutions of higher education, with about 974,000 full-time students.

A small percentage of Soviet children between the ages of three and seven go to kindergarten, for which a small tuition fee must be paid. Compulsory schooling starts at the age of seven, and continues through seven grades. Those who intend to go on enter so-called ten-year schools, instead of the seven-year schools. The avowed aim of Soviet educators, from the beginning, has been to make the ten-year education compulsory. Nevertheless, in 1940 tuition fees — 200 rubles a year in Moscow, Leningrad, and the capitals of the republics, 150 rubles elsewhere — were introduced for the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades, with exemptions for certain groups, such as children of disabled veterans. Even before this, however, less than 20 per cent went on from seventh grade to “junior high.”

Some—probably less than 8 per cent—of the graduates of the seven-year school go to special four-year professional and technical high schools (technicums), to be trained as junior specialists in some branch of science, industry, the arts, medicine, education, and the like. There the tuition fees are the same as for the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades.

Something like 20 per cent of the graduates of the seven-year school are conscripted into the State Labor Reserves for four years, where they receive free on-the-job schooling.

Soviet colleges

Upon graduation from ten-year secondary schools and from professional and technical high schools (and usually after two years of military training), roughly one out of five enters higher educational institutions for specialized training. Admission is on the basis of nation-wide competitive examinations. Tuition fees are from 300 to 500 rubles a year — again with exemptions for certain groups, including Heroes of the Soviet Union and Heroes of Socialist Labor as well as “A ” students. Stipends are paid to “good” students, who comprise about 80 per cent of the total number.

As in Europe generally, there is no liberal arts college. A higher educational institution falls into one of the following categories: industry and construction, transport and communications, agriculture, public health, teacher training, social sciences, the arts. The emphasis is on the training of specialists— though that training is by no means narrow. Only about 10 per cent of the Soviet colleges are devoted to either the arts or the social sciences.

Moscow University, with over 14,000 students, including those taking correspondence courses, has eleven different divisions and trains students in fifty different specialties. Leningrad University is slightly larger. Other large universities are at Tiflis, Kiev, Riga (once Latvian), and Lvov (once Polish). All told there are twenty-three city universities.

The organization of Soviet schools and colleges is highly centralized. The general pattern is set by the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R., which issues decrees, allocates funds, and determines basic educational policies. Institutions of higher education are directly under the All-Union Ministry of Higher Education. Most of the other schools are under the ministry of education of the republic in which they are situated. Teachers are appointed and given their salaries — which are quite low in the Soviet scale—by the ministry through its local branches.

What they study

The ministries of education implement decisions of the Council of Ministers through detailed instructions which cover every aspect of the curriculum. Each course has its syllabus, from first grade up through postgraduate studies. There is no choice of subjects. From the fourth grade on there are national examinations, written and oral, held at particular times throughout the country.

At the end of the ten-year school, students are examined in the following subjects: Russian language, literature, mathematics (algebra, geometry, trigonometry), physics, chemistry, history (history of the U.S.S.R., modern history), and a foreign language. In non-Russian-speaking areas an examination is also given in the students’ native language. Besides the subjects in which there are examinations before graduation, the ten-year school curriculum includes natural history, geography, Constitution of the U.S.S.R., astronomy, military and physical training, design, drawing, and singing.

Since 1940, either English, German, or French has been required from the fifth grade on. Which language is taught in any school depends on the teacher; in one school it may be English only, in another German. In addition, there is at least one Soviet school where the language of instruction is English, and the students while in school are supposed to converse with each other only in English. Latin, which was reintroduced in the law schools and some other higher educational institutions in the thirties, was in 1952 restored in the secondary schools as well.

Dewey in Russia

With education as with almost everything else of importance in Soviet society, it has not always been so. Soviet education in the twenties and early thirties was dominated by radical ideas similar to those which have caused a stir in the United States. Emphasis was on “spontaneous education,” “learning from life”; the classroom was conceived as a kind of laboratory in which the teacher organized the work around projects, many of which were left to the pupils’ own initiative. Instruction was played down. Special subjects were not taught, but instead were supposed to be learned incidentally, by “doing.” American educational experiments, such as the Dalton Plan evolved by Helen Parkhurst in Dalton, Massachusetts, and others undertaken by the followers of John Dewey, had a great influence on this first phase of Soviet educational development.

Characteristically, Soviet extremism made our reforms seem modest. The Soviets anticipated the gradual “withering away” of the school altogether.

Hy a series of sweeping decrees starting in 103*2 and continuing through 1949 and 1914, Soviet progressive education has been almost entirely scrapped. A 1992 decree abolished the Dalton Plan and the project method, and introduced the three IPs. In 1994 a decree on the teaching of history ordered “the observance of historical and chronological sequence in the exposition of historical events,” and stated that facts, names, and dates should receive due emphasis. In 1997 “polytcchnism” — that is, the organization of the curriculum around labor — was under heavy fire.

Research in problems of polytechnics was abandoned, and subjects of the conventional type came to prevail in the curricula. Iiy 1999 polyteehnism was out, though the name crops up from time to time.

In 1943, separate schools for boys and for girls were introduced in eighty large cities, and later elsewhere. “Coeducation,” said the then People’s Commissar for Education, “makes no allowance for differences in the physical development of boys and girls, for variations required by the sexes in preparing each for their future life work.” However, coeducation was not completely abolished, and there has been a frank and vigorous debate in the Soviet press on the relative merits of the two systems.

The new discipline

The proponents of separate education have stressed the practical desirability of military training for schoolboys and of special training for girls in homemaking and motherhood; more fundamentally, however, the argument has been that separate education promotes better discipline. A few weeks after the decree on separate education, the education authorities promulgated twenty “Rules for School Children,” imposing obligations of conscientious study, good behavior in school and after school, neatness, respect for teachers, and so forth. Rule 9 states that pupils must rise when the teacher enters or leaves the room. Rule 12 requires that upon meeting a teacher in the streets students must give a polite bow, and the boys must remove their hats. A “pupil’s card,” on the back of which the rules are printed, must be carried at all times.

Punishments may now be administered, including admonition, ordering the delinquent to rise from his seat or to leave the room, and expulsion from sehool “The absence of punishment demoralizes the will of the school child,” Pravda stated in 1944. However, corporal punishment is forbidden— though it is apparently sometimes practiced.

The changes in educational policy in the past fifteen to twenty years represent a new philosophy not only of education but of human nature itself. A 1936 decree of the Central Committee of the Party, which attacked psychological testing of school children, established the basic premises of the new educational policy by emphasizing the power of man, by training and self-training, to overcome both his heredity and his environment. Man can lift himself by his bootstraps. More than that, he is responsible for doing so — and for failing to do so. The new policy stresses the responsibility of the pupil. He is no longer an end in himself. His sense of duty must be actively directed and developed.

The schooling of patriots

The political implications of this philosophy are not concealed. The schools are required “to educate the youth in the spirit of unrestrained love for the Motherland and devotion to Soviet authority.” The Young Communist League (Komsomol) with 16 million members between the ages of fourteen and twenty-six is supposed to “show the way” in combating “ideological neutrality.” “The most important task of the Komsomol organization,” states a handbook of 1947, “is to instill into all the youth Soviet patriotism, Soviet national pride, the aspiration to make our Soviet State even stronger.”

The patriotic, military, and moral emphasis of Komsomol and school activity is implemented by indoctrination in Marxist theory, as redefined by Lenin and Stalin. Political propaganda permeates the curriculum. School children are taught the superiority of the “Soviet” biology of Michurin and Lysenko over “bourgeois” biology. In studying Shakespeare, students are taught Marx’s views of the development of English capitalism; Hamlet is seen in part as an exposure of a decadent court aristocracy.

“Marxism-Leninism" is a required course in all Soviet institutions of higher education. Doctors’ dissertations in all fields must be ideologically correct, and there is even some indication that degrees may be revoked years later if “mistakes” in them are discovered.

In many fields, education is open to talent. But “pull" is also an importanl factor: the son of a high Party official gets many privileges in education as elsewhere. Also any indication of dissent from Party doctrine can have serious consequences extending even to imprisonment. For the student without high Party connections, the main criterion in admission to engineering schools or law schools or agronomist schools or teachers colleges is ability, as shown in examinations— including, of course, the examination in Marxism-Leninism.