The Red Schoolhouse
KLINE, GEORGE L.
The Red Schoolhouse The Politics of Soviet Education. Edited by George Z. F. Bereday and Jaan Pennar. Praeger. 217 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by George L. Kline Associate Professor of Philosophy and...
...Bereday distinguishes between the "class tensions" which arise in egalitarian societies and the "mass ferment" which characterizes inegalitarian societies...
...The inadequacy of present-day Soviet language instruction is due primarily to the poor preparation of teachers...
...But Bereday also notes a series of strongly anti-egalitarian factors which operate within the Soviet school system...
...The paper on "polytechnical" {i.e., vocational) education by Richard Rapacz, like that on Party control of the schools by Jaan Pennar, is straightforward and informative, but offers no new facts or interpretations...
...Despite its shortcomings, The Politics of Soviet Education contains much of interest and importance...
...The circle of imperfection is vicious and self-perpetuating...
...William Medlin's paper on the teaching of history is prolix and a bit pretentious...
...to interfere in school affairs...
...and similar claims are made elsewhere...
...As might be anticipated, the quality of the contributions is far from uniform...
...Field's paper sketches a broad background of Parsonian sociological theory against which to set the facts of Soviet higher education...
...Norton Dodge and Burton Rubin contribute businesslike accounts of the training of secondary school teachers and the organization of Soviet higher education...
...In consequence, living languages were treated as though they were dead, i.e., as material for "mental exercise...
...But Field quotes with approval Adlai Stevenson's more accurate assessment: "Student interest in Communist ideology and in the required indoctrination courses is languid at best...
...But some of their generalizations and predictions concerning the future direction of developments in Soviet educational policy and practice will have to be re-examined in the light of the school reforms as they crystallize over the next five years...
...Reviewed by George L. Kline Associate Professor of Philosophy and Russian, Bryn Mawr College THIS BOOK OF 11 essays grew out of a seminar on Soviet education held in Munich in July 1958...
...The editing of this volume is generally careful and conscientious, but a few inconsistencies of form and discrepancies of substance remain...
...Ramazan Karca's introductory essay makes several valid, but by now familiar, points—e.g., that higher education is the only avenue of upward social mobility for Soviet youth, that the desperate thrust toward higher education drives many Soviet students into fields of study "remote from their interests and inclinations...
...The fact is that in 1956 the boarding school system was sharply expanded and assigned a new and crucial role in Soviet education as a whole...
...The tension and ambivalence of the official Soviet attitude toward foreign language instruction continues today, although in a somewhat mitigated form...
...The most substantial contributions, those with the broadest theoretical perspective, offering the most interesting (if sometimes controversial ) interpretations, are Bereday's article on class tensions, David Burg's report on foreign language teaching and Mark Field's sociological essay on access to higher education...
...But other contributors repeatedly—and correctly—emphasize the powerful "interference" of influential parents in getting their academically undistinguished children admitted to Soviet institutions of higher education...
...Education," he writes, "develops the capacity to achieve . . . medicine conserves this capacity...
...Thus Karca asserts that political control of Soviet education "makes it impossible for the public...
...Burg efficiently disposes of several misconceptions about language teaching in the Soviet Union: Russians, he says, are not especially gifted—as is often assumed—but the Tsarist gymnasium did have first-rate, often native, foreign language teachers...
...Korca also permits himself some questionable generalizations about the superior efficiency of totalitarian regimes and the high quality of Soviet natural science instruction...
...His conclusion appears to be that a new period of increased egalitarianism is now beginning...
...In particular, the papers of Bereday, Burg and Field will repay close study...
...Its contributors include American, West European and East European (refugee) scholars...
...On the one hand, knowledge of foreign languages was essential to the cultivation of science and technology: but on the other hand, it provided an avenue of access to dangerous "alien ideologies...
...Paradoxically, under Stalin, "a foreign language was to be taught but not learned...
...The transmission of social status involves "transmission of access to education...
...Irene Mareuil offers detailed information concerning Soviet after-school activities, and throws fresh light on the shortcomings of summer camp (Pioneer) facilities...
...This prediction strikes me as doubtful: but the question cannot be finally settled until the current school reforms have run their seven-year course...
...Bereday speaks of the Soviet boarding schools as "newly created" (in 1956), although Karca rightly notes that they had a long past...
...Father Alessio Floridi's essay on anti-religious education is rather thin, and includes the dubious claim that "everyone in Leningrad knows that [contrary to the official Soviet account] Pavlov was a deeply religious man...
...All the essays have been revised—some extensively—to take account of the drastic shifts in Soviet educational theory and practice which followed Khrushchev's "school reform" announced in fall 1958...
...In this context...
...All societies, he argues, require a dual "maintenance" mechanism, which takes the form of education on the one hand and medicine (including psychiatry) on the other...
...The egalitarianism of the Soviet educational system, he argues, draws its support from three elements—"the comprehensive school structure, common curriculum, and coeducation...
...Again, Bereday speaks of the "pervasive hold of Soviet ideological preachings" upon Soviet students...
...Evidence running counter to both these claims is supplied by several other contributors...
...Field predicts an increased equalization of access to Soviet higher educational institutions, together with increased emphasis upon public health—including especially mental health—in the years to come...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 38
