Source: Harold J. Noah, "Soviet Education's
Unsolved Problems,"Saturday Review,
August 21, 1965: 54-56, 64-65.
SOVIET EDUCATION'S UNSOLVED PROBLEMS
Perhaps no society places more trust in education to solve its important political, economic, and moral problems than does the Soviet Union. In this sense, of course, Soviet social philosophy peculiarly parallels our own. It is messianic and idealistic. Policy is based on the firm belief that man can radically improve society, and that in this task the school will play a leading role.
Despite fearful difficulties, some of their own making, others imposed on them from outside, Soviet social construction has brought the country a long way forward since 1917. This progress is especially evident in education, as the accompanying charts show. The Soviet government invests between one-seventh and one-eighth of its total budget in formal education, and perhaps 7 per cent of the Soviet national product goes into providing formal education (compared with 3 to 5 per cent spent by the Western, developed countries out of far greater incomes per head).
Yet, despite undoubted quantitative progress and continued massive investment in education, the Soviets face at least three sets of intractable problems when they come to weigh the achievements of their schools. They are problems of ideological training, problems of moral training, and problems in the area of the economics of education. Let us examine each of these in turn.
There can be no doubt that the Soviet system has generated deep political loyalty, particularly among the young people, and some of this, though not, indeed, all of it, may properly be ascribed to the operation of the schools. But the Soviet system demands more than vague, generalized loyalty to the State. Especially from its responsible citizens, it requires a firm Marxist-Leninist world outlook and enthusiastic participation in the building of Communism at home. The political training given in the schools and universities, as well as in the youth movement, is designed to foster these virtues among the young people.
Yet it is a commonplace that the formal political training given in compulsory lecture courses on Party history, historical materialism, and economics are met by only the supreme indifference of most students. They know that satisfactory examination results in these subjects are required for graduation, but they also know that even more important are good grades in their "subject" examinations. Lack of commitment by young people to the tasks of Communist construction is widely and frequently deplored in the Soviet press. Even a society that did not make the all-embracing Soviet claim to total individual commitment to group purposes might be legitimately concerned, but the Soviets feel compelled to regard it as a continuing challenge to do better with their youth.
The total result of the indoctrination effort is impossible to measure, but the observer of the Soviet scene is impressed by the fact that young people in the Soviet Union by no means speak with a single, undifferentiated voice. Many (and especially many of the better educated) are highly critical of Soviet society, and they are critical of it in nonMarxist-Leninist terms. Yet the total political impact of Soviet education has certainly not been a negative quantity. Many young students feel grateful to a system that has given them educational and employment opportunities vastly superior to those their parents and grandparents knew. But, as in the West, young people manage to serve the State and remain loyal to it, often without surrendering their total intellectual commitment to the official political creed, and seeking all the while to adapt its peculiar structures to their personal gain. How to secure total, unselfish political commitment remains one of the unsolved problems of Soviet education.
Paradoxically, the government is at the mercy of its own slogan of "bringing the schools closer to life." Soviet doctrine freely admits that the present society is riddled through and through with what it calls "traces of the bourgeois past." Some of these traces remain obstinately substantial, and the pupils' contact with them by no means helps the school to foster the desired political orthodoxy among the young. How to use the school to counteract the adverse political influence upon the pupils exerted by parents, acquaintances, and the workpeople met in the course of vocational training, while insisting all the time upon the closest contact between the school and the real world outside, is one of those long-wearing problems that provides pedagogical journals in the Soviet Union with topics for decades on end.
Moreover, "life" in the form of the practice of Soviet government itself teaches lessons that few students can entirely ignore. The spectacle last October of the ignominious dismissal of Chairman Khrushchev and the complete silence since imposed upon him confirm the average Soviet citizen in his political apathy. When the country not only is run by a cabal, but even appears to be so, none of the formal lessons given in the schools to promote political enthusiasm and to teach the paramount place in history of objective, material, nonpersonal factors makes much sense.
Consider now the allied set of problems for Soviet education that is to be found in the field of the moral training of Soviet youth. Great emphasis has been placed on the need to raise up a new Soviet citizen. Honesty, courtesy, sexual morality, vigorous intellectual and physical activity are all major elements in the character of these new men. Unfortunately there is little sign that they are emerging in Soviet schools and colleges in any greater number than was previously apparent. Again, it appears that formal instruction has failed to upgrade the general level of Soviet personal and social behavior, and in any case, the line between socially demanded virtue and what the English call "priggish" behavior (a holier-than-thou attitudinizing) is always very thin. However, the problem is not that Soviet moral education has been too successful and is creating wholesale a nation of prigs, but that significant groups of the young people remain immune or, even worse, react negatively.
Apart from the dishonesty indicated by reports of minor and major black-market activity the persistence of juvenile delinquency worries the authorities. Official doctrine has taught that this phenomenon was merely temporary, occurring in Soviet society as a direct consequence of the wartime disruption of families. But that familiar phenomenon of modern urban life, the teen-age gang, has proved to be no respecter of state boundaries or different social systems. As in the West, in Africa, and in Asia, there are young people in the Soviet Union who see in their society nothing for themselves. They reject its goals. its values, its forms, its institutions, it dress, and even its conventional language; and they invent or borrow from abroad styles and interests that express that rejection.
Of course, as in the West, because these groups are themselves vocal and are loudly condemned by the organs of society, they receive more than their fair share of publicity, and one must guard against a tendency to exaggerate their typicality. Yet even if it is only a fringe of Soviet youth that attracts official attention because of its overt "antisocial" behavior, it is nevertheless a fringe that the Soviets count in increasing rather than declining numbers each year. The gap between the predictions of Marxist-Leninist social theory and what happens in the real world presents them with a challenge and a problem.
Paid production practice by pupils and students has raised problems connected with the proper Communist attitude to monetary reward for socially useful labor. It is generally agreed that the young students should be paid for their work, so that they learn the value of money and develop a proper pride in their ability to earn honest money in the service of society. The difficulty arises about how much the young people should be allowed to earn, and what to do if the desire for gain overshadows the real pedagogical and moral purposes of providing the opportunity to engage in productive labor.
Some schools have tried to avoid the dangers of fostering the selfish desire for personal gain by having the children work in groups or collectives, pooling their earnings in order to accumulate a specified sum for a collective project. The commonest types of collective project are excursions or school journeys, or some addition to the equipment of the school. However, the purists find something to object to even here. It is pointed out that the real purpose of the exercise in socially productive labor gets lost in the collective scramble to amass the sum necessary to meet the group target fixed, just as much as it does in a system based on strictly individual rewards.
There are also the ethical problems posed by the occasional young member of the collective who does not pull his weight in the joint effort. What is to be done with him when it comes to spending the joint earnings? Should the collective follow the sound Communist principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat"; or should it recognize that it is, after all, dealing with a child who may not be fully responsible for his actions, and hope that the good example set by the rest of the group will gradually have its beneficial effect?
That the philosophical bases of Marxism-Leninism offer no guarantees of easy success in moral training is also shown by the history of atheist education and antireligious propaganda in the schools during the Soviet period. The crude antireligious campaigns that marked the 1920s and much of the 1930s are now out of fashion. Instead, the main approach taken in the schools is to emphasize the superior quality of the answers which science, as opposed to religion, can give to the basic questions of human existence. Yet even those children who in the officially approved manner reject with open contempt the symbols of religion are by no means automatically to be counted as champions of the scientific, materialistic, and rationalist explanation of the great philosophical concerns of mankind. More than likely they are merely indifferent, or simply puzzled. It worries the Party authorities that nearly fifty years after the Revolution, lessons in atheism are needed as desperately as ever.
However impressive the quantitative figures and the rates of increase of schooling may be, the Soviet authorities are preoccupied by a number of intractable problems connected with the economic returns to their educational investment.
First, there is the difficult matter of quality. The headlong expansion of the Soviet period has often meant the establishment of new educational institutions and the growth of existing ones in circumstances that could only result in the graduation of students of below average skills. This is especially true in teacher training.
Second, there is abundant evidence (not least from Soviet sources) that curricula and methods of instruction too often foster old-fashioned ideas and useless formal knowledge, and serve only to develop unimaginative, routine-minded operatives.
Third, there is the problem of the internal distribution of the total resources devoted to education among the various branches of education. Large though the expansion of semiprofessional and vocational training has been, it has by no means met the needs of the economy. This means that while the Soviet economy still has plenty of unskilled labor and an increasingly sufficient supply of university-trained personnel, it lacks large enough cadres of semiprofessional and skilled middle-range personnel for the implementation of modern techniques throughout the whole range of industry. trade, and agriculture. Consequently, while it is quite possible for Russia to startle the world with triumphs in Sputnik technology, to show significant achievements in some branches of basic science, and to undertake monumental projects in civil engineering and housing, the quality of work in many vital sectors of the economy is generally exceedingly low. Best Soviet theory is too often startlingly different from average Soviet practice, which gives rise to the suspicion that the "head" of Soviet education may be too large while the "tail," or perhaps, better, the "abdomen," is too small.
The fourth unsolved problem of Soviet education in the field of the economics of education has to do with the practice of "polytechnical education." The reform laws of 1958-59 marked the high point of polytechnical thinking in Soviet educational legislation. The most spectacular feature of the reforms was the requirement that all pupils in the three senior grades of the secondary school were to be occupied for one-third their school time (two whole days out of six) working in Soviet factories or on the farms. It was laid down that pupils would generally be expected to acquire qualifications in two different trades during the three-year period, and could not expect to obtain their school-leaving certificates without these qualifications. At the same time, it was emphasized that most young people of fifteen to sixteen years of age would be expected in any case to cease full-time schooling after finishing the eighth grade and complete their secondary education by part-time (evening or shift) studies after work was over each day. In order to accommodate the extra demands upon the curriculum made by practical labor-training, the period of complete secondary education was extended by one year to eleven years. This not only raised direct ruble costs of education for the State budget, but delayed for one year the entry of young people into full-time production. At first, Soviet enterprises had to bear the entire financial burden of providing the practical training and work experience for pupils, even to the extent of requiring the enterprises to pay the wages of the training staff, but this policy had to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the enterprises still have to provide and pay for special clothing, materials, tools, machine time, and space used to train pupils.
But the most serious burden on Soviet industry and agriculture is probably the disturbance of regular routines caused by the incessant invasions of factories and farms by young trainees. Luckless managers who react defensively and try to insulate the operations of their factories from the disruptive effects of polytechnical labor-training are roundly denounced for uncooperative attitudes and branded as unwilling to have the trainees do anything except routine and non-educational tasks around the factory. Conflicts of this type seem to be built into the system, making vocational training much more the responsibility of industry than of the schools. The factory manager will usually want either to use pupils in tasks where regular workers are hard to find, or to hold training costs down by keeping pupils working at a particular job once they have become reasonably proficient. The educational staff, on the contrary, will want the pupils to enjoy the highest level and the most varied assortment of work experience that it is possible to give. The pupils may well have an assortment of other ideas, shared neither by the factory management nor by their teachers. Some are bored by the whole affair and look for all kinds of easy assignments, especially those which involve them in just watching a skilled man at work. Others are interested in high pay for their two-days-a-week work, approve of any arrangement the factory can make for them to work steadily at one particular well-paying job, and regard with dismay their teachers' interest in moving them about the factory in search of new polytechnical experiences.
After five years of this experiment in work-study organization for the senior secondary schools, the 1964-65 school year opened with the abrupt announcement in mid-August by E.I. Afanasenko, Minister of Education of the RSFSR, that the senior secondary school course was to be cut back from three years to two years, and that the time allotted to production practice would also be cut. The official explanation was that the growing efficiency of Soviet pedagogy now enabled pupils to master in two years what bad previously taken three. In fact, it has become increasingly evident that production training has turned out hundreds of thousands of rather poorly skilled young carpenters, lathe operators, and other relatively low grade, semi-skilled personnel whose training costs were completely wasted in the economic sense because very few of them would later in life be engaged in those trades in which they had been trained. Whatever may have been the ideological returns to practical vocational training of secondary school children, its economic returns have been slight. Vocational training of all Soviet youth has not yet been abandoned, but the writing is on the wall for another of N. S. Khrushchev's educational and economic panaceas.
The fifth problem is reflected in the view of the Soviet government that young men and women who have enjoyed a higher education at society's expense owe the State a few years' service in locations which may not be quite of their own choosing. The Soviet Union has a quite extraordinary number of somewhat unpleasant (or at least unpopular) and remote places to which young graduates may be assigned. The difficulties encountered by the authorities in persuading young graduates to take up jobs in these areas and to stay at them for the two or three years of the assignment are legion. But such difficulties are only part of the larger problem of the "correct," or "rational," allocation of the Soviet Union's reserves of skilled labor among all the alternative patterns of employment that are theoretically possible. However successful the schools and colleges may be in training millions of young people to work in the national economy, much of the profit to society is in jeopardy if there is widespread misallocation of trained personnel. Except for the armed forces, and for the postgraduation assignments just mentioned, the Soviets have rejected conscription of labor as a method of allocation. They prefer to rely upon a "managed-market" technique, in which the central planners are supposed to manipulate the relative monetary and non-monetary rewards and advantages of occupations and jobs to ensure that skilled labor goes where the planners want it to go, and stays there until the planners decree otherwise. But there is great dissatisfaction among Soviet planners and economists about the operation of the present system of labor allocation, and the suspicion is growing that there is significant waste of the trained manpower that has been produced at such great public cost.
Finally, a word about the costs of education. The Soviet state has a more than usual interest in these costs, for in the Soviet Union the State budget bears almost the full burden of the direct costs of teachers' salaries, building expenses, instructional materials, and so forth. Even insofar as Soviet enterprises or collective farms share the financial burden, the economic and financial planners must take these expenditures into account when drafting the all-important overall economic "balances" of the plan.
During the 1950s, enrollments in schools of general education fluctuated widely, yet throughout all the variations in enrollment, costs per pupil enrolled rose remorselessly. Indeed, between 1950 and 1961 money costs per pupil in the schools of general education rose by 56 per cent, and this at a time of generally falling ruble prices. In terms of constant rubles,expenditures per pupil in general education schools rose by no less than 79 per cent. Only in higher education was the financial picture brighter, because of the widespread introduction of correspondence and evening study. In higher education, in terms of constant rubles, costs per student actually declined by about 10 per cent during the decade.
The economies of scale that larger enrollments create (mainly by bringing down the teacher-pupil ratio) may help a little in restraining per pupil costs, but last November the underpaid Soviet teachers received their first general salary increase since 1948. The raises are considerable, amounting to between 20 and 25 per cent of most salaries in teaching. The Soviet school system is more "labor-intensive" than most (that is, the fraction of total costs spent on wages and salaries is still quite high), and increases in salaries have great and immediate impact on costs. Also, the main "cost-raisers" in the Soviet system are the small, so-called dwarf, rural schools with a dozen pupils or so. They are likely to remain a tough problem for any cost-conscious Soviet educational administrator, at least until the necessary billions of rubles are invested in construction of rural highways which alone will make rural school consolidations possible.
Another probable result of the cost problem in general education has been the apparent failure to reach the target of 2.5 million boarding-school places set by Khrushchev for the end of the current Seven-Year Plan in 1965. If ordinary general education has been somewhat expensive, boarding-school provision costs a fortune. In 1960, boarding-school costs per pupil were no less than seven times more than day-school costs, and average contributions from parents amounted to no more than 7 to 8 per cent of the total. Construction costs in boarding schools are generally about four times higher per place than in day schools. Little wonder that the expansion of boarding-school provision, so loudly proclaimed from 1956 to 1960, has since been less stridently advertised.
After all, the Soviet Union is not a country with resources to squander; in trying so hard to reach and overtake the West the planners have created a host of competing demands upon its wealth. Education secures a formidable slice of those scarce resources, and is therefore expected to make the best use of what it is given and help solve some of the pressing economic problems of Soviet society. The Soviets themselves seem to have come to a belated recognition of the existence of some of these problems. Last October it was announced that, for the first time in the Soviet Union, a research institute into the problems of the economics of education has been established at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute in Moscow. One can safely forecast that it will have much work to do, for despite the Soviet insistence on planning education and economic development, the study of the economics of education has been as neglected in the Soviet Union as it has been until recently in the West.
None of the problems of Soviet education reviewed here is new. Nor are they peculiar to Soviet society. In the West, too, we have our difficulties with juvenile delinquency, lack of commitment to high social and moral purposes, rising costs of education, and the inflexibility of the school system in the face of rapidly changing social and economic demands. But the Soviets have always claimed, and continue to claim, that their Marxist-Leninist approach to the problems of social institutions (including, of course, education) provides them swiftly and surely with the solutions to difficulties that continue to plague the West. At the very least, these hopes appear to be over-optimistic. Marxism-Leninism may have done much for the Soviet Union. What it has not done is to wipe away the intractable problems of education and Soviet society.