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The New York Times, Friday, November 21, 1958

Stevenson Tells How Ivan Studies
Finds Scholarship Values, Rewarded and Centrally Controlled in Soviet
New Turn is Described
Aim Is to Direct More Pupils Into Labor Force, Fewer Into White-collar Class

This is the tenth article in a series by Adlai E. Stevenson on his visit last summer to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
By Adlai E. Stevenson
North American Newspaper Alliance, Inc.
© 1958 by Adlai E. Stevenson

Ruled by the Kremlin  'Here WE Decide'  Tehcnicums for Some  
80% Get Allowance    A Turn to the Factory

Soviet education became an object of respectful curiosity for many Americans when the first sputnik jolted us out of our national complacency.

What we discovered was that education is a mighty serious business in the Soviet Union, that learning is highly valued, that scholarship commands the highest salaries, that the hunger for knowledge is great and that reading and self education are the universal pastime of Russians.

And we also discovered that the Soviet Union had made astonishing progress. Not only had this vast backward country, in which only half the people speak Russian as their native tongue, become almost totally literate in barely a generation, but it had overtaken or surpassed the rest of the world in the physical sciences.

And so I was surprised to learn in Russia this summer that the Soviet leaders are dissatisfied with their education system, and plan to give it a radical overhauling. While here in the United States we are debating whether Johnny gets enough solid intellectual work, in Russia, they are concerned whether Ivan is being prepared for life and work in the Soviet Union or just for the university.

Ruled by the Kremlin

Education, like most everything else in Russia, is controlled by the Government and the Communist party. The Ministry of Education in Moscow controls the elementary and secondary schools, and the Ministry of Higher Education the general institutions of higher learning.

The Government research organization is the great Academy of Science in Moscow, and it has a branch in each republic. It is the top academicians who get the big salaries, the big automobiles and the country homes, which make them the most favored people in Russia.

Since Stalin’s death, the scientists have been enlisted to help plan the nation’s development. Some thirty commissions of scientists and Government officials have worked out the economic plans for 1959-65. They decide what resources are to be developed, what industries enlarged how many engineers, doctors, teachers, researchers, linguists, etc., will be needed and where. And then it is up to the education ministries to fill the planners’ prescriptions through the system of efficient academic factories.

‘Here WE Decide’

Yevgeni I. Afanasenko, the personable young Minister of Education in Moscow, frankly and firmly stated the basic difference between our systems: “Her we decide what they are to learn.”

The Ministries choose the textbooks and determine the curriculum. American experts say that standards of academic and research work are high, probably generally higher than ours, because, no “local” interference is permitted.

Service to the state, in short, is the objective of the entire intellectual and educational apparatus of the Soviet Union. It is in sharp contrast to our conviction that the fullest, freest development of each individual’s potential will yield the best service to his fellow man.

The control and direction of education and training begins at the cradle, in day nurseries, followed by kindergartens where in group work and play children learn the collectivist way of life and that the party and the state are all-wise, all-good, all-powerful.

I was impressed everywhere by the obvious competence and devotion of the personnel, and by the equipment and efficiency of these institutions. And as a grandfather, I also observed that Russian babies seldom cry, and the very young children are quiet and well behaved.

The Russians believe that age 6 is too young to begin formal education, and their schools commence at 7. Schooling is obligatory for only seven years in the country and ten years in the city, although Mr. Khrushchev has lately revealed that 20 percent of the Soviet children do not complete even the seven-year program.

While intellectual and ideological development is being attended to in the schoolroom, the children’s leisure is not neglected. From 7 to 26, Soviet young people are expected to join a series of youth organization – the Little Octobrists, the Young Pioneers, finally the Young Communist League – which provide carefully balanced programs of athletic activities, the arts, vocational training, and ideological indoctrination. And if you are a Young Pioneer, you’d better be careful about going to church with Grandma!

We visited a better-than-average Palace of Young Pioneers in Sverdlovsk in the Urals. It was housed in a huge old mansion, once owned by a mining magnate. There school children occupy leisure hours with sports, the arts of sciences, photography, handicrafts and building models of everything from coal mines to atomic energy plants.

In the surrounding park we saw a children’s experimental garden plot and orchard, and a first-rate puppet theater where children were performing their own plays.

And their own newspaper, Pioneer Pravda, was telling the 10-to-15-year-olds exactly what the adult Pravda was telling their elders about the “American aggression” against Lebanon.

Technicums for Some

AT the end of the compulsory schooling period those who “haven’t proved themselves” go to work. The better qualified ones (or those better situated in society) may go on to one of the 3,500 technicums for training as a technical specialist.

I visited a typical technicum in Siberia. Attached to a big machine-building plant, it trains youngsters age 15 and up. Its 800 students, taught by a staff of thirty teachers and aided by specialists from the factory, receive some general education in history and the Russian language along with technical training during the first year and a half. But the rest of the five-year curriculum is strictly technical, and 30 percent of the time is devoted to production practice in the factory.

Evidently “comradely competition” to go on to higher education is pretty fierce among secondary school students. On completion of a full ten years of schooling the lucky ones selected by competitive testing may enter one of 700-odd specialized institutions or thirty-five universities.

I say “lucky” because last year over 700,000 ten-year graduates were not admitted to higher education. Only 450,000 freshmen were admitted each year, half of whom study in the day and half at night.

The struggle intensifies up the ladder. I was told, for example, by Mme. Mariya D. Kovrigina, Minister of Health, that there are more than fifteen applications for each vacancy in the medical schools in Moscow, and eight to ten elsewhere in the country.

80% Get State Allowance

The poor boy struggling for an education is unknown. More than 80 percent of the college students receive stipends from the state of 400 to 600 rubles a month ($40 to $60 at the tourist rate of exchange), according to their ability. And the favored position of the intellectual in Soviet society insures that after graduation the best ones stay in education or research.

There is no rush to industry, as in this country, because the salaries in education and research are higher than industry is permitted to pay.

Most faculty members do not belong to the Communist party. And I got the impression that student interest in Communist ideology and in the required indoctrination courses is languid at best. If true, that is quite a change from the excitement of the young people about Marxism and the world revolution which I saw in Russian in 1926. Now they are interested in efficiency, production, a better life and more contact with the outside world.

I was also struck by the large role women play in education. A third of the university faculties and half of the students are said to be women. In the medical schools, Mme. Kovrigina told me, two-thirds of the students are women. And she freely expressed misgivings about women doctors, because their first interest was usually mariiage and a family and not the profession.

A Turn to the Factory

But I began by saying that the Soviets were overhauling their educational system. From what Mr. Afanasenko and other officials told me, I gather that the trouble is there are too many applicants for higher education and not enough labor, and this will be aggravated in the next few years when the age-groups born in the baby-lean war years enter the economy.

Evidently too many young people in the “workers” state prefer to join the white-collar professional people, specialists and administrators. And the planners’ solution is to make the school system job-oriented rather than college-oriented.

To do this they propose to replace the present ten-year school system with a basic eight-year school, which will give all Soviet children a “general polytechnical education” and a thorough grounding in science. The pupils, Mr. Afanasenko stressed, will be taught not only good work habits but also that “human life is unthinkable without labor.” They will be prepared psychologically for a life of work.

After the eight-year period, specialized high schools will admit those young people who have disclosed extraordinary promise. But the great majority will go from the eight-year school, at the age of 16, into industry and agriculture. Those who want to continue studying can do so on a part-time basis while working. And they may enter college later if they show real ability – and if the trade union or Young Communist League recommends them.

The result, said Mr. Afanasenko, will be that Soviet youths will not grow up to be “idlers” or “white-handed ones.”

The new system will be introduced in 1960. And it is a safe prediction that the competition for advanced education is going to get more intense in the Soviet Union, and with it the standards of technical proficiency will rise still higher.

One aspect of Soviet education I cannot leave unmentioned is languages. The older academics are not much better than we Americans at languages. But the young people are getting five years of foreign languages and four more at the university level. The choice of half is English; German and French follow.

And it won’t be long before the Russians will have a great advantage in every exchange – cultural, political and propaganda.

Another formidable fact that must be added to the enthusiasm and emphasis on qualitative achievement is the large Soviet expenditure for education. Some American experts estimate that the Russians value it at least twice as highly as we do; they spend twice the percentage of their national income that we spend on ours.

But with all of its strengths, its amazing achievements and bold plans, Russian education falls far short of what we want. The soviets have a passion for black and white, for a single solution for every problem – the official solution. They do not understand choice. Hence the curriculum is rigid and does not encourage individual creative thinking and originality.

Soviet education is a tool for the achievement of the state’s purposes. It may besuccessful in preparing youth for a life of service to the Soviet state. But it would not prepare youth for our society, where the goal of education is the harmonious development of the individual in and for himself.

There was hope after Stalin for greater intellectual freedom, but the world recently suffered a stunning blow from the old iron fist of Soviet conformity.

Boris Pasternak wrote: “What has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed attraction of its example.”

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