Part IV: Communist Education

Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems
Communist Schooling
Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies
The Economics of Education
Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union
The 'Unproductives' Labor of Soviet Teachers
China's Vocational and Technicial Training

Source:  Harold J. Noah, "Education, employment, and
development in communist societies," in E.B Gumbert ed.,
Patriarchy, Party, Population, and Pedagogy (Atlanta:
Georgia State University, 1986),  37-58.

EDUCATION, EMPLOYMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT IN COMMUNIST SOCIETIES

This chapter reviews the educational policies of a score or more of communist countries, focusing on those features of the educational scene that relate most closely to employment and economic development in the communist part of the world.

Once upon a time, not so long ago either, schooling could be sensibly viewed as a private concern, having little or no connection to a nation's political and economic affairs. Obviously this is no longer so. From society's point of view, the business of educating an entire population for long periods of time has become very expensive, typically taking anywhere from 4 to 10 percent of the gross national product (GNP), and even larger shares of government expenditures. From the individual's point of view, career opportunities and employment prospects depend heavily on educational credentials. Some scholars have argued that this is simply artificial: that the credentials do not really signify anything important about the relative productivity of workers.¹ However, most people who wish to participate fully and profitably in the labor market soon discover that increasingly sophisticated technology and ever more complex economic organization demand higher and higher levels of initial education and continued upgrading and renewal of knowledge and skills.

The result has been that in both the communist and the noncommunist parts of the world, education, employment, and economic development are regarded as inextricably intertwined. In particular, the communist countries have taken a strong position about the direction in which the connections should run, so that a hallmark of the communist countries' policies with respect to educational development has been the insistence that the structure, content, and expansion of educational provision should be tied as closely as possible to the economic needs of the country.

The Communist World

Roughly one-third of the world's people now live under communist regimes.² We can count twenty-two such national governments.³ In one of them, China, there are well over one billion people, and in another, the Soviet Union, over one-quarter of a billion. While the communist countries do not produce anywhere near one-third of the world's output of goods and services (it is probably more like a fifth), they are on the whole steadily improving the low standards of living from which most of them started their careers as communist states, and some of them (the German Democratic Republic, for instance, and Hungary) are able to afford their citizens quite comfortable circumstances.⁴

In two years time, the Soviet Union will mark the seventieth anniversary of Communist government in Russia; its East European partners will be celebrating forty years of communism this year and next; China will do so in 1989; and the present Communist regime in Cuba was twenty-five years old last year. So we are talking about states that are clearly well-established. They will not just go away, nor are they to be dismissed as mere historical aberrations. On the contrary, they are significant phenomena, to be lived with, to be reckoned with, and to be understood. One might say of Karl Marx (or Lenin), what was said of Christopher Wren, the great architect: Si monumentuum requiris, circumspice ("If you want to see his monument, look about you").

A brief word on terminology is in order. Although we speak of the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, and so on, as "communist countries," these countries generally prefer the label "socialist," rather than "communist." Communism is what they are aiming toward; meanwhile they are in the socialist stage of development. The classical definition given by Marx is that socialism provides "from each according to his ability, to each according to the work done"; whereas communism is a higher order of society that makes possible the more generous social order: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."⁵ In this chapter I do not observe such niceties, and will use the terms "socialist" and communist" more or less interchangeably.

Commonalities and Disparities

We have fallen into the habit of trichotomizing the world. We talk about the First, Second, and Third World, or the marketoriented, socialist, and developing worlds. This is a convenient shorthand, even though there are obvious pitfalls. Within each category, there are large differences; indeed, in some respects, the within-category differences may be more significant than the crosscategory ones. Among the socialist countries, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union are mature, developed economies, while Ethiopia and Afghanistan are in the earliest stages of economic development. A parallel variety exists, of course, among the market-oriented economies.

Differences among countries in a given category are of two major types. We may call them objective and subjective differences. Objective differences refer to differences in such factors as economic level, demographic structure, geographical location, size, and experience of military defeat or victory. Subjective differences are the consequence of ideological positions taken by strong, charismatic leaders. Thus, while both the Soviet Union and China are located in the socialist world, they differ in demographic composition and trends, and in political, historical, economic, and cultural experience. These objective differences are not easily overcome. They are particularly deep and potent when they are allied to nationalism, as evidenced in the uprising against Soviet power in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest and Poznan in 1956, and in the simmering quarrel between Vietnam and China. Alongside these stand the subjective differences in the communist world over the interpretation of the meaning for contemporary policies of the received Marxist-Leninist canon. Probably the most spectacular of these subjective differences is the quarrel between Moscow and Peking, in which each government has regarded the other over the past quarter of a century with the utmost suspicion, has shunned normal relations, and has publicly made bitter accusations that the other has betrayed the communist cause. Such subjective differences are not unusual within communism, witness the splits between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and between Albania and virtually all its communist fellows, but they can, and do, heal over time as the leaders who fomented the quarrels pass on, taking with them their ideological obsessions.

A further reason why our usual categories need to be used with caution is that nations located within one category are rarely if ever pure examples of the type; more often than not their institutions exhibit significant admixtures of elements characteristic of other categories. Is Sweden capitalist or socialist? The answer must be that it is capitalist with large admixtures of socialist institutions. Similarly, Hungary and Yugoslavia have each moved significantly apart from the centralized direction of economic affairs that has been a hallmark of Soviet-type communism. And the Chinese Communist government's current eager embrace of free-market and profit-oriented principles to energize its rural population, even extending now to some segments of industry and the service sector, underlines in dramatic fashion the extent to which our convenient categories may fall.

Having said all that, the title of this chapter, "Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies," nevertheless assumes that we can use the category, communist societies, with fair assurance that the problems of within-category differences and across-category overlaps are not so serious that they destroy the utility of the category itself.

What are the substantially common elements of economic development, employment, and education across the many extant communist societies in today's world? Or, to use a term that I have found convenient for such purposes: What are the "stylized facts" of communist policies and practices? Note that these stylized facts should speak to the problems encountered by communist nations, as well as to their successes.

Stylized Fact Number 1: The Leading Role of the Soviet Union

It comes as no surprise that East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria have all adopted educational systems that mirror substantial features of Soviet practice. After all, the regimes in these countries are very much the original creations of Soviet military power. But other communist countries that are less dominated by a Soviet presence, for example, Cuba, Vietnam, and China have also borrowed heavily from Soviet models of education. Their schools have, among others, the following characteristics in common: they are overwhelmingly secular in orientation; a common school is provided through at least grades seven or eight; little or no tuition charge is made; schools are mostly coeducational; the curricula are tightly prescribed, as are the textbooks, to reflect communist orthodoxy; students are offered few electives; the ideal of polytechnical education is supposed to guide the content and practice of teaching and learning; and a good deal of use is made of youth organizations, such as Octobrists, Young Pioneers, or Young Communists, working closely with the schools. Among the communist nations, only China (and, of course, Albania) have formally stated their intention to veer away from the Soviet pattern of schooling. The other nations show variations from the Soviet model, but these tend to be minor or, as in the case of Poland and Hungary, necessary concessions to the popularity of the Roman Catholic Church.

Stylized Fact Number 2: Educational Effort and Success

The second stylized fact is that the communist nations have made prodigious efforts to develop their educational systems, and they have many substantial achievements to their credit. China now has over a million schools and more than 200 million students enrolled. The Soviet Union enrolls over 40 million young people in more than 100 thousand schools. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe have vastly expanded the school systems they inherited from the pre-World War 11 governments. In Cuba, the government's efforts in education have paid off impressively in terms of raising literacy levels, especially in the rural areas, and in opening what was formerly a highly class-bound, selective system to the entire population.⁶ In 1979, fully 71 percent of the Cuban population aged twelve to seventeen were reported to be attending secondary school (up from 22 percent of the twelve to eighteen year-olds in 1970); and 19.2 percent of those aged twenty to twenty-four were in higher education (up from 3.7 percent in 1970).

Exhibit I provides some of the basic data of expansion between 1960 and 1981. In contrast to the much-publicized difficulties of the communist countries on the economic front -- problems of increasing labor productivity, of modernizing the processes of production, of introducing and adapting new techniques, of improving the quality of goods and services, and of expediting the wholesale and retail distribution of goods and services -- education by comparison emerges as the big success story of communist governments, at least in terms of quantitative expansion. The communist nations are raising the schooling level of their populations at a very fast rate, so fast in fact that in the Soviet Union there exists a surplus of the most highly educated alongside a shortage of workers with middle-level technical qualification. In China, too, college graduates are having difficulty in finding jobs commensurate with their qualifications.

It is important, of course, not to overrate the specific contribution of communism to these educational successes. First, many of the communist nations did not start from a zero baseline, though that is the impression generally given in their publications, both official and scholarly. Speaking of China, two U.S. observers have written:

Although Communist officials have continually denigrated the quality, size and offerings of the system they inherited, their legacy was far from trivial. According to their own statistics, there were 340 thousand primary schools, 4 thousand middle schools and 200 universities and colleges at the time of 11 national liberation." These schools, and many teachers trained before 1949, are the heart, as well as the foundation, of the present educational system.⁷

A similar point can be made with respect to the Soviet Union. By 1914, Imperial Russia had 8 million young people enrolled at all educational levels; 112 thousand students were enrolled in ninety-one institutions of higher education; there were reckoned to be 12,586 public libraries in Russia with 8,900,000 volumes; and the daily circulation of newspapers equalled 2,729,000 copies. In 1920, 73 percent of the urban population and 44 percent of the total population (aged nine to forty-nine) were literate. Although the events of World War 1, the revolutions of 1917, foreign interventions, and civil war between Whites and Reds all imposed huge costs in terms of loss of life and property, by 1925 there still remained millions of persons with primary education and hundreds of thousands with secondary education.⁸ Thus, while there is no gainsaying the formidable expansion that has taken place in the Soviet period, it is important to recognize the substantial base from which it all began.

Second, as a comparison of the figures in Exhibit 2 with those in Exhibit 1 shows, a nation does not have to be communist to open the doors of educational opportunity to its citizens. Noncommunist nations, too, have made large strides in the development of education. If poor Communist Mozambique nearly doubled its primary enrollment ratio between 1960 and 1981, similarly poor noncommunist Nepal went from 10 percent to 91 percent. If not-so-poor Communist Romania nearly tripled its secondary enrollment ratio, a comparable noncommunist nation, Egypt, for example, expanded its effort from 16 percent to 52 percent. If highly industrialized Communist nations, such as the Soviet Union and Hungary, doubled their higher enrollment ratios, noncommunist Japan and Norway did even better.

Stylized Fact Number 3: Intractable Problems

We are all aware of the distortions of reality (not to speak of the downright untruths) that governments the world over publish about their progress in meeting official goals for the economy and education. Communist governments are by no means the only culprits in this respect. Nevertheless, the claims made on behalf of communist educational advance, particularly as it is alleged to serve development, have been especially pretentious. For example:

There is no more apposite time than this, the eve of a historical day -- the sixtieth anniversary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- to generalize and analyze scientifically the experience this country has had in resolving some crucial societal problems of social develop- ment. Among the societal problems solved by the Communist party and the Soviet government in a manner without histori- cal precedent is that of public education.

"Using educational terminology, one may say that history -- the most exacting of teachers -- has given our country the highest possible grade in the subject of 'public education....' And indeed, mankind has never known such a soaring ascent to the pinnacle of knowledge and culture as that made by the Soviet Union." [L. I. Brezhnev, Leninskim kursom. Rechi i stat'i, v. 2 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1973), 221-222].

This tremendous success in education and culture has resulted from the radical changes that have been made throughout the education system which was inherited from the old world.... This new system of public education has actually succeeded in fusing learning, upbringing, and education.⁹

Such statements are as regularly accompanied by comparisons to the detriment of the noncommunist world. The following is typical:

Socialist countries, having overcome the illiteracy and cultural backwardness of the previously disenfranchised strata of the population, have given working class children the right and real opportunity to acquire knowledge at a level corresponding to the requirements of contemporary society.... An entirely different picture is observable in the capitalist countries. In no capitalist country do the laboring masses have access to knowledge and culture.... Schools for working class children orient pupils toward the acquisition of a minimum amount of knowledge. The educational reforms of the 1960s generated by the demands of the progressive forces of society introduced virtually nothing new into the educational system of the capitalist countries, and the bourgeoisie retained its monopoly on education.... While acknowledging the fact that the school of the capitalist countries is in a deep crisis, bourgeois pedagogy does not view the crisis in education as a component of the general crisis of capitalism and does not reveal its social roots.... In their fear of the revolutionizing force of knowledge, the ideologues of capitalism foster reactionary ideas and concepts -- nationalism, chauvinism, racism -- in young people in the educational system, and attempt to educate youth in a spirit of fear and aggressiveness.¹⁰

From such statements we are meant to conclude that communism has provided a swift and sure solution to some of the most vexing problems of educational policy and practice. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Twenty years ago, in an article entitled, "Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems," I pointed to continuing difficulties with regard to ideological and moral training, and in the broad realm of the economics of Soviet education.¹¹ Under the latter heading, I identified problems with the quality of education, the persistence of old-fashioned, routinized pedagogy, the allocation of resources among the various subject specializations and levels of education, the concept and practice of polytechnical education, and the allocation of young people to jobs following graduation. A review of the latest comprehensive Soviet document on the development of education in the years ahead -- "Basic Guidelines for Reform in the General-Education and Vocational Schools" - shows that all of these long-standing problems remain alive in the Soviet Union and in continued need of serious attention.¹²

In China, too, the Great Proletarian Revolution was supposed to have dealt with the problems of society and education once and for all, yet they are now revealed by the party leadership itself as having been more exacerbated than solved during the decade after 1966.

Stylized Fact Number 4: Regulation, Fiat, Coercion

The fourth stylized fact of economic development, employment and educational policy and administration, is the imposition of top-down central direction, guided by the Communist party and typically reaching into quite minute particulars. Market forces and indicators have been subordinated to the central planners' commands. The managers of industrial enterprises and state and collective farms may not simply produce the products and sow the crops they consider the most useful and profitable. Communist planning entails the setting of specific, often highly detailed, targets for the output of intermediate and finished products; the specification of detailed plans to achieve those targets; the allocation of capital resources, raw materials, and labor by permits and licenses; and the establishment of comprehensive price schedules reflecting the planners' preferences, rather than actual cost of production and distribution.

The planning procedures vary in detail and reflect the style of economic direction in each of the communist countries. There is a perceptible difference between the way, for example, Hungary and Czechoslovakia go about ordering these things. The Czechs still copy slavishly the Soviet modes of highly detailed and authoritarian planning, while the Hungarians have opened significant avenues for managerial initiative. But in all cases, the basic instruments continue to be those of command and coercion, embodying an unapologetic and largely unselfconscious exercise of governmental power. These coercive aspects of the communist model of economic development are what is fundamentally characteristic, irrespective of the particular modifications that have been made from nation to nation and from time to time in the communist world.

As far as employment policies are concerned, the same reliance on regulation, administrative flat, and ultimately coercion prevails. The citizen may not freely choose either his place of work or his occupation. The key word here is mobilization. While capitalist societies have largely relied on market forces to shift labor supplies from low to high productivity sectors, communist societies have typically used command techniques to promote the desired changes. Command techniques were in evidence in Stalin's forcible expulsion of peasant farmers, in Khrushchev's campaign to open the Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan, in the propaganda designed to mobilize workers and students to give extra hours of labor to build the Moscow subway system, and in Mao Zedong's sending off to the remoter areas of China those whom the Cultural Revolution singled out for "re-education."

In the West, we remark on the absence of freedom of speech, of religion, and of the press in communist societies. But an equal evil may be the absence of freedom of choice concerning work. The constitutions of the communist nations affirm that to be socially unproductive is a crime. Work is regarded not simply as an opportunity or a right, but as a duty, and it has to be work that accords with the requirements of the state. The Soviet Union presents the spectacle of the most powerful of the socialist countries, in which the individual is not free to work wherever he can persuade an employer to offer him a job to do whatever his knowledge and experience would naturally qualify him for. Rather, he must do the work deemed necessary by his government.

In a quite characteristic exercise of coercion, communist states have severely limited freedom to choose one's first job. On completion of secondary school, technical institution, tekhnikum, or a higher education program, each graduate is obliged to work for several years in the specific location and at the specific enterprise to which he or she has been assigned. Other, less-qualified young people entering employment are directed to occupations determined by the local authorities. No other occupation is open to them legally. If they try to choose some other occupation, they may be refused permission to reside in the locality of their nonapproved work. If an engineer, teacher, technologist, or construction worker nevertheless arranges to work outside the specialty noted on his diploma, he will be penalized (at least in the Soviet Union) by having his wages reduced below the standard rates.

The novelist may not write books on themes of his own choice; the artist may not paint or draw his subjects according to his own perception; the scientist may not research problems that he considers of most interest, or concentrate on those fields in which he considers himself most qualified. Creative workers must work for the profit of the state.

"Volunteer" work, outside of one's occupation, is often required. For example, every year 15 percent of Soviet workers, engineers, teachers, doctors, and students are sent to the countryside for extended periods to do agricultural work. In the summer of 1983, half of the surgeons in the Vishnevskii Neurological Institute in Moscow were sent off to state farms, to help bring in the carrot and potato harvest. Or again, for four months the First Railroad Hospital was closed so that the nurses and the younger doctors could be mobilized for agricultural work.¹³

In part because women have represented a large underutilized source of labor power, communist employment policies have extended to women not merely the right, but also the duty, to work. Vigorous efforts are directed to mobilizing ethnic groups shut out of the precommunist economy into state-organized production, though not always successfully, as the Chinese government's experience with respect to the Tibetans gives evidence. Most important of all, and central to the concern in this chapter, young people are mobilized in communist societies to serve the economic development purposes of the state. With this aim in view, educational policy becomes a significant instrument of economic development strategy, and cannot be understood outside of that strategy.

Stylized Fact Number 5: Planning Education to Fit the Economy

Perhaps because of their tighter control over demands coming from below, communist regimes have been able to expand educational provisions in a much more deliberate and cost-effective manner than have most of the noncommunist developing nations. It has been a characteristic feature of communist educational policies that a very low priority is given to satisfying individual or family demand for education at the upper secondary and higher educational levels. In comparison, African and Latin American countries have found it difficult to avoid overdevelopment of the secondary and higher sectors at the expense of elementary education.

Nevertheless, despite the evidence of many successes of communist development of education, employment, and the economy, these societies are a long way from effective use of the educated and skilled labor force they have created. Instead, the resources poured into education too often run to waste, as workers find that the economic system is not able to make efficient use of their knowledge and skills. The irony here is that communist countries have typically made special efforts to tie education and training closely to carefully calculated manpower needs, yet the outcome of these exercises in terms of the most appropriate use of labor is not particulary encouraging.

Well before the Revolution, a number of Russian scholars had studied the relation between the general education of workers and their productivity in work, and in the early 1920s economists and planners in the Soviet Union picked up this theme and extended its implications. They asserted that there existed a close connection between educational provision on the one hand and the potential for economic development, and hence employment, on the other.¹⁴ Using quite comprehensive data, and with evident conviction, they argued that public investment in the education of the population would yield handsome returns to the Soviet state. With some justification, Soviet writers claimed that the administrators and economists of this period virtually invented manpower planning on a national scale and showed for the first time how educational provision might be explicitly formulated to serve detailed manpower requirements. This manpower-planning approach has been followed widely in communist and noncommunist nations alike. Indeed, after about 1955 it became a standard recommendation of the international aid agencies, as the developing nations were urged by aid experts to base their educational plans on manpower forecasting models, which were in turn derived from plans for economic development. The results have not been strikingly positive. However admirable as pencil-and-paper exercises, the plans have hardly assisted the nations involved along the path to successful development. In many cases, indeed, they were quite harmful, both to education and to the economy -- but that's another story.¹⁵

In support of the planned manpower approach in communist countries, courses of study have typically been drawn narrowly and rigidly, leaving little room for electives. As industry and commerce have developed, the need for new specializations has emerged, and additional narrow courses of study in higher education have been introduced. There is great faith in specific training of students in higher education to conform to the overall central direction of the economy. The policy is designed to conserve scarce educational resources by equipping young people with only what it is thought they need to know, but no more. There is apparent confidence that future lines of development can be forecast in some detail, and that the consequent requirements for specific types of specialized man and woman-power can also be forecast with acceptable precision. Communist planning finds it difficult to entertain the notion that many of the jobs its graduates will be occupying in ten to fifteen years time simply do not exist at present, or that the content of those jobs will have so radically altered that the best training to give today is in broad fundamentals, rather than in narrow applications.

Procedures for tying upper secondary, secondary specialized, and higher education to the needs of the economy are most advanced in the Soviet Union, so it is profitable to examine them more closely. In the Soviet Union, the several ministries (chemical, oil, machine construction, and so forth) formulate their requests for additional skilled and trained personnel on the basis of the requirements of the enterprises that report to them. In turn, the planning organs of the Soviet Union receive requests from the ministries for the preparation of specialists who will complete their higher education in five or six years time.¹⁶ However, it is not unusual to find that when the graduates who have been requested five or six years earlier are eventually sent to the enterprises that originally requested them, there is no work for them to do. This may happen for any number of reasons: the necessity for specialists with the specified training has vanished; the enterprise may have been able to hire specialists from another source; the planning authorities may have stopped production of the products for which the specialists were needed; or the ministry may have reduced the authorized number of personnel. Most of the ministries figure their needs for specialists on the basis of the often transitory requests coming from the factories. They don't really have any alternative. Even the annual output plans will change several times during the course of a year, causing changes in input requirements of raw materials, tools and machinery, and of course, labor. Hence, the enterprises can have no certainty concerning which and how many graduates they will need in five or six years time, and how many of what types will be actually allocated to them.¹⁷

Moreover, the job mobility of engineers and planning personnel in the enterprises remain at a very high level. The enterprise planner who draws up and submits the request for graduates knows that within a year or so, he or she may be gone to some other enterprise, even to some other ministry. Under such conditions, no one can be held accountable, no one bears responsibility.

It sometimes happens, though perhaps rarely, that the graduates requested earlier really are needed by the enterprise. But five or six years later when they arrive, ready for work, the enterprise may find itself unable to take them on, because no living quarters are ready for them. Meanwhile, the majority of new graduates are trying their very best to change assignments to something that suits them better. In these ways, the complex procedures -- designed to insure that enterprises get just the numbers and types of trained worker they need -- fail, and all the work of estimating and forecasting goes for naught.

Stylized Fact Number 6: The Centrality of Polytechnical Education

According to communist educational philosophy, a good, modern education is one that is "polytechnical." Central to such an education is teaching about production and providing labor training and work experience to youngsters while they are in secondary and higher education. Marxist interpretations of the duty of the school include the job of teaching young people the leading role of material conditions of production in shaping social and political events. Young people should be given an understanding and some experience of the way production processes are organized; the social consequences of different ways of organizing production; and the importance of technological change.

These pedagogical ideals are by no means always achieved. In practice, somewhat less ambitious interpretations are adopted, content with inculcating in children a sense of the worthiness of socially useful labor, or even simply engaging the students in manual labor as part of the regular study experience.

In China, enthusiasm for arranging practical work experience as part of the curriculum has waxed and waned. The question was partly reflected in the slogans "red," or "expert," or better yet, "red and expert." Paradoxically, the nadir of labor training came during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, during which there was a surfeit of labor and a dearth of training in most students' education. In both schools and colleges, "practical experience" was substituted for academic material, to such an extent that educators in China now speak about a "lost decade" in which the schools graduated thousands of students who were barely literate. The Chinese have since upgraded the standing of formal, academic education vis-à-vis labor-oriented training, but these things can no doubt change again.

East Germany has also embraced the polytechnical ideal, but has done so on a steadier and better-ordered basis. An official brochure states:

Attending the ten-year polytechnical school is both a basic right and a basic duty of all children.... A major feature of the ten-year school is its polytechnic character which is reflected in all subjects taught, special importance being attached to mathematics and the natural sciences. A wide range of contacts with work and working people is fostered through specific subjects (e.g., industrial arts, gardening, "introduction to socialist production"), and, above all, through the pupils' own productive work in enterprises (in the upper level grades).¹⁸

This well states the ideals pursued under the banner of polytechnic education in communist countries, whatever the compromises made in practice. Serious efforts have also been made in the other East European countries and in Cuba to swing education away from its precommunist concentration on academic, school-centered activities.

In the Soviet Union, the ideals of polytechnical and labor education were in great favor in the early years of the Revolution but were downplayed from 1931 until about 1958, when they were revived with great fanfare under Khrushchev. After the latter's ouster, requirements for work experience for students declined again but are currently experiencing something of a revival in the changes announced in April 1984 for Soviet education.¹⁹

It is difficult to estimate how much of this general movement to a more "practical" content of education is inspired by the need to train more young people for work in the national economy and how much is the result of principled support for the Marxist critique of academic studies. No doubt both motivations are implicated, but to a different degree in different countries at different times. When Khrushchev announced his major reform of schooling to include labor experience for all young people in school, observers in the West tended to point to the demographic situation in the Soviet Union, characterized by a shortfall in the number of young people entering the labor market.²⁰ Soviet scholars on the other hand have pointed to pedagogical, rather than labor-market, reasons for the changes.²¹

In the 1930s, the principal role of the secondary school was to prepare young people to enter higher education. The output of VUZ (higher education) graduates steadily increased to satisfy demand. However, by the end of the 1950s a growing need for trained labor in the industrial and construction trades at middleskill levels had appeared. It was decided that these needs would be met by education and training in both the general education secondary schools and in the vocational-technical institutions. The 1958 reform of education established compulsory polytechnical preparation of secondary school pupils, so that after completing seven or eight years of schooling (at ages fourteen or fifteen), young people could be employed as workers.

The results fell far short of expectations. Productive labor practice could be organized only in limited parts of the country. There were not enough buildings, instructors, machines, and tools; nor was there adequate experience in the organization of polytechnical education on the scale of the entire country. The school authorities tended to view labor training as an intrusion into their academic work and certainly as a reduction in the time available to them to teach the already heavily loaded academic curriculum. Factory and enterprise personnel resented the injection of large numbers of often unruly and unwilling young people onto the shop floor, making the achievement of the monthly output quotas that much more difficult. In addition, student motivations were not high. They were not permitted to choose their own type of labor training to suit their aptitudes and proclivities; instead, they were simply assigned to various enterprises by order of the school (another instance of the use of coercion and the absence of choice).²²

By the beginning of the 1980s it was clear that the Soviet Union was again facing a crisis of labor supply. The annual intake into vocational training institutions was dropping, as were the numbers demobilized from the armed forces. There was virtually no reserve of women left to be mobilized into work, and the attempts to induce pensioners to continue in employment had largely failed. The authorities decided that a solution could be found by reorganizing the first nine years of education into a vocationally oriented school. At the same time, the vocational-technical institutions were to be reorganized as senior secondary vocational institutions in which, along with the study of vocational material, it would be possible to gain a certificate of completion of secondary education.

The current school reform was launched in April 1984, although the trial results from the previous years were not very encouraging. In 1963 the secondary schools of the Soviet Union graduated 900 thousand students. About 400 thousand of these had actually received a vocational training. About half of all the graduates went on to study in higher education, and about a third entered tekhnikumi and other secondary technical institutions for further training. Thus, less than a third of the total graduating class of the secondary school went directly into productive employment. Moreover, only about one-tenth of the graduates from the secondary schools entered either further study or work in the particular specializations for which they had been prepared in the general secondary school.²³ The successive polytechnical reforms have thus failed to provide the economy with a large number of young people ready and trained for lower- and middle-level work.

Nor was this all. A certain price in academic achievement has been paid for the increase in time devoted to polytechnical labor training. The level of academic education of young people entering higher education has fallen, so that VUZ's have even begun special remedial courses to help freshmen get up to the standard required for the first-year courses in higher education.

Stylized Fact Number 7: The Ideological Role of Education

The Leninist transformation of Marxism claims not only that capitalism is a chronically inefficient and heartless mode of economic progress, but that communism can accomplish the tasks of capital formation, capital exploitation, and elevation of standards of life for the mass of the population markedly better. Indeed, some observers view communism as being essentially a "Western heresy that ironically has been embraced by some of the less-developed economies that historically have not formed part of the West.²⁴ According to this view, communist societies are even more dedicated to materialist goals, and they are even more caught up in the pursuit of capital accumulation than are the traditional capitalist societies. In effect, they are trying to beat capitalism at Its own game, while excoriating capitalism as the source of all the world's social and political problems. However, it is probably not entirely accurate to say that capital accumulation for economic development is the overriding goal of communist policy. My own view is that while economic development is certainly an important goal of communist nations, it must be ranked alongside two other priority goals: that of raising a new generation of individuals, for whom the work of building a new society will be a joy; and that of liquidating the differences of status and privilege between urban and rural life, and between manual and intellectual labor.

It is probably fair to say that communist regimes have been prepared to sacrifice much potential for economic development in order to pursue these other two goals, utopian though they may be. This was obviously true in China for at least ten years during the Cultural Revolution, and it has now been true in Albania for nearly forty years. The most vicious example is that of Kampuchea, where the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot devastated the physical and human resources of the country in its attempt to root out every vestige of the old society and build a new human and social type. But these are the extreme examples. More typical is, say, Czechoslovakia, where development prospects have suffered because of ideological concerns, but not catastrophically so.

The schools and the youth organizations so closely associated with them in their ideological work bear a heavy burden of indoctrination. If communist societies pay a lot of attention to schooling, the reasons are not hard to find. Communism is a utopian movement. It teaches that men and women are perfectible, given the appropriate environment, especially in their youth. Schools are the chosen instrument to counteract undesirable legacies of the past carried over by families into the present. There has been great confidence that schools would be a major instrument for building the New Communist Man. Such a person would work steadfastly for the good of all, would have a clear insight into the dynamics of social change, would combine an intense love of Fatherland with an all-encompassing international outlook, and would understand and be skilled in modern technology, while appreciating those aspects of the cultural heritage of his nation that had furthered its Communist revolution.

The high priority for education has scarcely weakened. This is true not only for the giant nations of the communist world, but also for the smaller ones. The regimes in Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Mozambique, for example, are explicit in their expectations from educational growth. There is continued faith that knowledge is power, continued respect for scholarship, continued willingness to accord elite status to those with higher academic credentials, and continued confidence that truly objective knowledge will lend support to the communist interpretation of reality. Above all, there is continued belief that an education system that is open to the masses; uniform through its first eight years; weighted toward science, technology, and labor experience; closely linked to youth organizations; and planned as tightly as possible in its upper levels to conform to manpower requirements rather than to individual choices will admirably serve the cause of communism.

As the communist societies have grown older, there has been some retreat from the utopianism that characterized their early years, along with increased recognition that the schools alone are not able either quickly or completely to create the New Communist Man. Nevertheless, the basic faith in schooling as the chosen instrument for the consolidation of ideology and the promotion of economic development (in that order of priority) remains as strong as ever and is likely to endure for the foreseeable future.²⁵


Exhibit 1: Development of Education in Fifteen Communist Countries: 1960 and 1981, or Nearest Year Available

		Enrolment as Percentage of the Age-group
	Year	Primary	Secondary	Higher
Countries listed in descending order of 1982 population size
---------------------------------------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------
China	1960	109%	21%	na
	1981	118	44	1
Soviet Union	1960	100	49	11
	1981	107	96	21
Vietnam	1960	na	na	na
	1981	113	48	3
Poland	1960	109	50	9
	1981	100	77	17
Ethiopia	1960	7	na	*
	1981	46	12	1
Yugoslavia	1960	111	58	9
	1981	99	83	22
Romania	1960	98	24	6
	1981	103	68	11
North Korea	1960	na	na	na
	1981	116	na	na
Agfhanistan	1960	9	1	*
	1981	34	11	2
German Democratic Republic	1960	112	39	16
	1981	95	89	30
Czechoslovakia	1960	93	25	11
	1981	90	46	18
Mozambique	1960	48	2	na
	1981	48	2	na
Hungary	1960	101	23	7
	1981	99	42	14
Cuba	1960	109	14	3
	1981	107	75	20
Madagascar	1960	52	4	*
	1981	100	14	3

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Exhibit 2: Development of Education in Ten Noncommunist Countries: 1960 and 1981, or Nearest Year Available

		Enrolment as Percentage of the Age-group
Country	Year	Primary	Secondary	Higher
---------------------------------------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------
India	1960	61%	20%	3%
	1981	79	30	8
Japan	1960	103	74	10
	1981	100	92	30
Greece	1960	102	37	4
	1981	103	81	17
Chile	1960	109	24	4
	1981	115	57	13
Jordan	1960	77	25	1
	1981	103	77	27
United States	1960	118	86	32
	1981	100	97	58
Norway	1960	100	57	7
	1981	100	97	26
Nepal	1960	10	6	*
	1981	91	21	1
Egypt	1960	66	16	5
	1981	76	52	15
Philippines	1960	95	26	13
	1981	110	63	26

---------------------------------------------------------------
Key.- na: Not available; * Less than 0.5%

Note: The differences in country practices in the ages and duration of schooling are reflected in the ratios cited. Ratios may exceed 100% mainly as a result of over-age enrollments.

Source: The World Bank, World Development Report 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 266-277

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NOTES

1. Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs The Great Training Robbery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); Ronald Dore, The Diploma Disease (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976). [BACK]

2. These and following data are taken from The World Bank, World Development Report 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 218-219. [BACK]

3. The twenty-two countries are as follows (mid-1982 population in millions): Afghanistan (16.8), Albania (2.9), Angola (8.0), Bulgaria (8.9), Kampuchea (8.4 in 1977; 1982 figure n.a.), China (1,008.2), Cuba (9.8), Czechoslovakia (15.4), Ethiopia (32-9), German Democratic Republic (16.7), Hungary (10.7), Laos (3.6), Madagascar (9.2), Mongolia (1.8), Mozambique (12.9), North Korea (18.7), Poland (36.2), Romania (22.5), South Yemen (2.0), Soviet Union (270.0), Vietnam (57.0), Yugoslavia (22.6). Total: 1,586.8 million persons. [BACK]

4. Data on the economic situation in the communist countries are provided in Josef Adamek, Centrally Planned Economies: Economic Overview, 1984 (New York: The Conference Board, 1984). [BACK]

5. Karl Marx. "Critique of the Gotha Programme," in Karl Marx: Selected Works, ed. V. Adoratsky, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1942), 566. See also, V. I Lenin, The State and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1933), 72- 74. [BACK]

6. A compact survey of Cuban educational development can be found in R.Cowan and M. McLean, eds., International Handbook of Education Systems, vol. III, "Cuba" (New York: John Wiley, 1984). [BACK]

7. Thomas Fingar and Linda A. Reed, An Introduction to Education in the People's Republic of China and U.S.-China Education Exchanges (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China and the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, 1982), 3. [BACK]

8. Central Statistical Board of the U.S.S.R., Council of Ministers, Cultural Progress in the U.S.S.R.: Statistical Returns (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 12, 14. [BACK]

9. L. N. Kogan, ed., Narodnoe obrazovanie v razvitom sotsialisticheskom obshchestve (Frunze: "Kyrgystan," 1982). English language translation in Soviet Education XXVII, nos. 3-4 (1985): 6-7. [BACK]

10. M. A. Sokolova, E. N. Kuz'mina, and M. L. Rodionov, Sravnitel'naia pedagogika (Moscow: "Prosveshchenie," 1978). English language translation in Soviet Education, XXI, 7-8, 203- 205. [BACK]

11. Harold J. Noah, "Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems," Saturday Review, 21 August 1965, 54- 65. [BACK]

12. Pravda, 13 April 1984, 5-6. [BACK]

13. Izvestiia, 25 October 1983. [BACK]

14. A. Kahan, "Some Russian Economists on Returns to Schooling and Experience," in UNESCO, Readings in the Economics of Education (Paris: UNESCO, 1968), 399-405. Also, S. G. Strumilin, "The Economic Significance of National Education", ibid., 413-450. [BACK]

15. Ingemar Fägerlind and Lawrence J. Saha, Education and National Development: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), 163-166. [BACK]

16. Nicholas DeWitt, "Educational and Manpower Planning in the Soviet Union," in The World Year Book of Education 1967: Educational Planning ed. Mark Blaug (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 219-239. [BACK]

17. Written communication from Professor Isaak Kaplan, formerly director of the USSR Laboratory for the Economics of Education, Moscow. [BACK]

18. The German Democratic Republic (Berlin: Panorama DDR, 1983), 178-179. [BACK]

19. Pravda, 13 April 1984, 5-6. [BACK]

20. Nicholas DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment in the U.S.S.R. (Washington D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1961), 45-52. [BACK]

21. S. G. Shapovalenko, ed., Polytechnical Education in the U.S.S.R. (Paris: UNESCO, 1963) contains a collection of Soviet discussions of polytechnical education. [BACK]

22. Noah, "Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems," 56-57. [BACK]

23. I. Kaplan, O putiakh sokrashcheniia tekuchesti kadrov (Moscow: Profizdat, 1964); I. Kaplan, Rabochii klass SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 186. [BACK]

24. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). Abridgement of vols. VII-X by D. C. Somervell, 148-9. [BACK]

25. I acknowledge the valuable research assistance of Dr. Isaak Kaplan. [BACK]