education

1917–30

After the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Party proclaimed a radical transformation of education. Guided by the principles of Karl Marx and influenced by the contemporary movement of progressive education in the West as well as in Russia itself, the party and its educational leaders—Nadezhda K. Krupskaya and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky—tried to realize the following revolutionary measures as laid down in the party’s program of 1919: (1) the introduction of free and compulsory general and polytechnical education up to the age of 17 within the Unified Labour School, (2) the establishment of a system of preschool education to assist in the emancipation of women, (3) the opening of the universities and other higher institutions to the working people, (4) the expansion of vocational training for persons from the age of 17, and (5) the creation of a system of mass adult education combined with the propaganda of communist ideas. In 1918 the Soviet government had ordered by decree the abolition of religious instruction in favour of atheistic indoctrination, the coeducation of both sexes in all schools, the self-government of students, the abolition of marks and examinations, and the introduction of productive labour. In 1919, special workers’ faculties (rabfaks) were created at higher institutions and universities for the development of a new intelligentsia of proletarian descent.

During the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–27), when there was a partial return to capitalistic methods, the revolutionary spirit somewhat diminished, and the educational policy of party and state concentrated on the practical problems of elementary schooling, the struggle against juvenile delinquency, and the schooling of adult illiterates. When the policy of five-year plans began in 1928 under the slogan of “offensive on the cultural front” and with the help of the Komsomol (the communist youth league), the campaign against illiteracy and for compulsory elementary schooling reached its climax.

The Stalinist years, 1931–53

In connection with the policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of farmers and with the concentration of political power in the hands of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet educational policy in the 1930s experienced remarkable changes. Starting with the decree of 1931, the structure and the contents of school education underwent the following process of “stabilization” in the next few years: (1) four years was laid down as the compulsory minimum of schooling for the rural districts, and seven years for the cities, (2) the new system of general education embraced the grades one to four (nachalnaya shkola), the grades five to seven, which continued the elementary stage on the lower secondary level (nepolnaya srednyaya shkola), and the grades eight to 10, which provided a full secondary education (polnaya srednyaya shkola), (3) the new curriculum was to provide the students with a firm knowledge of the basic academic subjects and was to be controlled by a system of marks and examinations, (4) the decisive role of the teacher within the educational process was reestablished, while the Pioneers and Komsomol organizations (for youth aged 10 to 15 years and 14 to 26 years, respectively) were above all to instill a sense of discipline and an eagerness for learning, and (5) manual work disappeared from the school curriculum as well as from the teacher-training institutions. In addition, the ideas of progressive education were rejected, and older Russian traditions began to be cultivated. During World War II the idea of Soviet patriotism emerged fully, penetrating the theory and practice of education. The principles of the outstanding educator Anton S. Makarenko, with their emphasis on collectivism, gained ground upon the former influence of Western educational thought.

The institutions of higher learning were reshaped in the 1930s, too. The number of students in institutions providing secondary specialized education, usually called tekhnikumy, rapidly grew from one million in 1927–28 to 3.8 million in 1940–41. The number of students in institutions of higher education (vyssheye uchebnoye zavedeniye) grew from 168,554 to 811,700 in the same period. The main characteristics of higher education that developed in this period remained unchanged for the next decades: the paramount task of higher learning was to provide specialized vocational training within the framework of manpower policy and economic plans; strict control of the student’s program was to be imposed by the central authorities; and the system of evening and correspondence instruction on the level of higher and secondary specialized education (vecherneye i zaochnoye obrazovaniye) was to parallel full-time studies.

During the 1940s, “labour reserve” trade schools and factory schools for skilled and semiskilled labour were filled by drafting youths between the ages of 14 and 17. In the period 1940 to 1958, an average of 570,000 persons were annually subjected to such recruitment. The draft first affected those students who were unsuccessful academically in regular secondary schools and could not achieve even the seventh grade. For youngsters of this kind and for people who could not continue general secondary education, schools for the working youth (shkoly rabochey molodyozhi) and schools for rural youth (shkoly selskoy molodyozhi) were established in 1943–44 as part-time institutions. The main features of education policy, developed in the late 1930s, remained in force after the war: the orientation of all kinds of schooling and training to the paramount necessities of the economic system; the inculcation of communist discipline and Soviet patriotic attitudes; and finally a rigid control of the whole educational system by party and state administration.