Soviet vs. U.S. Education
KLINE, GEORGE L.
Soviet vs. U.S. Education This is the Challenge. By William Benton. Assoc. College Presses. 254 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by George L. Kline Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Columbia...
...By including tekhnikum students, he swells the Soviet "college" population to 140 per cent of the U.S...
...We are given graphic instances of the Soviet rewriting of schoolbook history and an excellent account of the workings of the editorial machinery of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (tellingly compared with Benton's own Britannica...
...Benton says that Lenin's revolutionary movement "destroyed the Czars," and thus with a stroke he expunges the February Revolution from Russian history...
...The actual U.S...
...Coming closer to home, Benton has caustic things to say about our annual expenditure of $14.5 billion for tobacco and alcohol as against $12 billion for elementary and secondary education...
...There are other minor inaccuracies: The maximum age for Komsomol members is given as 23, instead of 26 (with extension to 28 in special cases...
...population, and under .95 per cent of the Soviet population, are currently enrolled in institutions of higher education...
...He speaks feelingly of the Party's intrusion into the "most personal and private matters of human existence...
...Such discrimination would almost certainly have a demoralizing effect upon teachers out of all proportion to its possible benefits...
...and, unhappily, many of Benton's facts and figures are wrong...
...The Soviet school system has long been geared to train a scientific-technical elite...
...Reviewed by George L. Kline Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University WILLIAM BENTON'S collected reports on Soviet strength and American weakness in scientific and technical education are forcibly written and exude a sense of urgency...
...Still, the volume as it stands offers much of value: vivid descriptions (spiced with eloquent statistics) of the immense channeling of Soviet energies into a total propaganda effort...
...He notes that 76 per cent of Soviet doctors are women but fails to mention that there are three women to every two men in the adult population, or that Soviet doctors generally enj oy scant prestige and meager economic reward compared to their American counterparts...
...colleges...
...He makes misleading claims as to quantitative and qualitative superiorities of Soviet scientific and technical education...
...This one is choppy, uneven and needlessly repetitive...
...This equation is no less inaccurate for having been often repeated...
...In the 1930s a country with an unprecedentedly high-proportion of well-eduoated scientists and technicians proved distressingly receptive to the politics of Hitlerism...
...We learn that the Soviet Union spends about $114 million a year (more than the entire budget of the United States Information Agency) merely to jam foreign radio broadcasts, and that new anti-jamming techniques are under study in the West...
...Khrushchev's educational "reforms" will give an enormous impetus to this elitism...
...an army of 375,000 full-time and over two million part-time propagandists in 1953...
...Yet the backbone of the book is its facts and figures...
...Such claims have long seemed dubious to Western specialists...
...figure is a bit over 3 million, that for the USSR a bit under 2 million...
...He sees Soviet propaganda as striving to condition Soviet citizens to "think of their personal freedom, and their ambitions, as identical with the purposes of Soviet society...
...in fact, the Candidate's degree stands between the American MA (or MS) and PhD In politically sensitive disciplines like history and philosophy, Soviet Candidate's "dissertations" are grotesquely inferior in scholarly worth to American master's essays...
...Benton also reports that "about 70 per cent" of the relevant age group graduate from ten-year school...
...One wishes that either Benton or the editor of the volume, Dean Edward W. Barrett of the Columbia School of Journalism, had taken time to hammer these speeches, articles and dictated memoranda into a single connected account...
...He describes the USSR, in a vivid (and only mildly hyperbolic) phrase, as a "vast technocratic Sparta...
...A New York Times advertisement for Benton's book goes so far as to assert that "Russia's total college student 'body is 10 million—4 times that of the U.S...
...Much less reasonable is Benton's proposal to pay teachers of mathematics and science more than their colleagues in other fields...
...He is well aware of the "Communist propagandist's trick of first appropriating, and then debasing and bastardizing, the great words of Western civilization...
...He advocates an ambitious program of Federal aid to education, including scholarships and loans...
...But a compilation of occasional pieces hardly makes a book...
...As to graduate study, Benton assures us that the first Soviet advanced degree, that of "Candidate of Sciences," "calls for a level of training roughly equivalent to that of the PhD at a good university in the United States...
...Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself has now publicly admitted their falsity, announcing that no more than 80 per cent of firstgraders complete seven-year school...
...30 million Soviet loudspeakers in public places...
...Looking to the Soviet future, Benton finds himself sharing Allen Dulles' "cautious hope" that "it is impossible to educate men and women to think about mathematics, physics and biology without opening their minds to the possibility of thinking about politics and disarmament—and even about justice and freedom...
...And he suggests that we should in the near future send as many as 250,000 American college students abroad to study each year—partly to stretch their minds, and partly to ease the mounting pressure on U.S...
...total...
...To begin with, he asserts that Soviet education is "nearly as universal as our own" and speaks of the "nearly 100 per cent enrollment" in Soviet sevenyear schools, citing Pravda's 1955 claim that "obligatory seven-year education" had already been achieved...
...Komsomol membership is put at 10 million, instead of 18 million...
...This is a comforting thought, but history offers little evidence to support it...
...In fact, the figure is closer to 30 or 35, as Khrushchev has indirectly admitted...
...Established Soviet physicians in general practice earn less than Soviet mechanics...
...Balancing these factually erroneous or misleading claims are passages of genuine insight: Benton offers a penetrating and original analysis of the fourfold function of Soviet advertising...
...The Soviet tekhnikum, as Bqnton recognizes only in some cases, is a secondary school rather than a college, the vast majority of students entering it having completed only seven grades...
...This, of course, is sheer myth...
...Benton's comparative figures for American and Soviet college enrollment are also misleading...
...Benton mentions the large number (41,000) of Soviet teachers of English, but fails to note that most of them are unable to speak English, having been systematically deprived of opportunities to study or travel in English-speaking countries or even to meet Englishmen or Americans...
...The more significant statistical difference, which Benton fails to stress, is that a majority of American college students take "liberal arts" degrees, while some 95 per cent of Soviet graduates have scientific or technical specialties...
...Since the respective population figures are 175 million and 210 million, it turns out that over 1.7 per cent of the U.S...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 7
