FIVE YEAR PLAN FOR EGGHEADS
Chase, Stuart
FIVE YEAR PLAN FOR EGGHEADS By STUART CHASE EDITOR RUBIN is in Russia as I write this. I wish I were with him, to compare the Soviet state in 1956 with the one I saw in 1927, and to view the...
...The latter number more than 700, with an enrollment of 1,825,000...
...There are reports that consumer goods are flowing a little faster since Stalin died...
...Public property is forcefully protected, and there is "energetic suppression of every manifestation of hooliganism...
...Considering the way Russian history has been manipulated and rewritten to conform to the party line, why would any self-respecting student want to make history a career...
...If one were a spaceman from out beyond Sirius, uncontaminated by the national rivalries which plague bur planet, one might judge impartially a kind of vast and fascinating laboratory experiment...
...A special ukase had to be passed forbidding the assignment of home work for Sunday, so the youngsters would have a little time to play...
...I saw Russia (from Leningrad to Odessa) before Stalin had consolidated his power...
...To change one's job after assignment is difficult, but apparently not impossible...
...It is new, for one thing—a much more flexible and experimental policy than Stalin would have tolerated...
...But are not the heads stuffed with propaganda, doctored history, with the quaint principles of "Marxian physics," and Lysenko's even quainter biology...
...Examinations are many and stiff...
...graduated income tax...
...Well, there it is in brief outline...
...Russian science, we must remember, was always very good at the top, and the tradition continues—as Western scientists learned at Geneva when discussing atomic physics...
...Benton also found that most bright students were excused from the draft...
...This shift is recent, to be sure, but is now the order of the day...
...to escape service to the state...
...concludes that "Russia may be stronger in producing numbers of trained engineers than in over-all engineering competence...
...Editor Rubin is seeing Russia in a different phase...
...the leanest are in history...
...Benton watched students in the great science library at the University of Leningrad...
...Whatever the reason, Russian youngsters are studying undoctored physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, engineering, medicine, and geography, most of the time...
...Students of all ages receive about 10 per cent of their instruction in political indoctrination...
...With this five-year blueprint, Russia hoped to remedy some of her alarming material shortages, especially of capital goods...
...are racing neck and neck for world leadership...
...this is the truly alarming part of Benton's report...
...The sharpest minds stay in the universities—still on scholarship— for post graduate work...
...The Russian plant is steadily going uphill with better equipment and better opportunities for teachers...
...Again, university professors lack tenure, and can be fired at will— which is very bad for faculty morale...
...Russia, with hardly a ruble of cash in the Western sense, proceeded to erect a vast capital establishment of mines, mills, and transport systems...
...Any material challenge was ridiculous...
...All Russian children must attend what are called Ten-Year-Schools, starting at the age of seven, and continuing through the equivalent of our senior high school...
...Wild boys, orphaned by war, were running everywhere in wolf packs...
...All post-high school students, if parents cannot afford their support, receive scholarships from the state, and ninety per cent of students are so aided...
...Among his many books probing the impact of technology on human lives are "The Proper Study of Mankind" (recently revised) and "Roads to Agreement...
...I spent several days in a great, bare barracks of a building near the Kremlin, investigating proposals for the first Five Year Plan...
...Students, as in Czarist days, wear a school uniform supplied by their parents, and discipline is strict...
...The Soviet State is graduating 120,000 scientists and engineers every year to our 70,000...
...The educational policy now in force in Russia, observes Benton, "as it increases in effectiveness, poses a most serious threat to the West, dangerous in war because of its efficiency, and ominous in any form of competitive co-existence we can envisage...
...A student, if he makes the grades, need never worry about financing his education, or about getting a well-paid job which fits his specialty...
...Russia allows no single high I.Q...
...But the augmented flow of consumer goods, so brightly promised in 1927, never materialized...
...The idea, you will note, is to develop brains, not automatons...
...restricts freedom, to a degree, but screens out every good mind in the nation and puts it to work...
...After it was in place, then food, shelter, clothing, and even a few modest luxuries would begin to flow...
...The output of the new plant was fun-neled into ever more plant and military outlays...
...The U.S.S.R...
...There was a good harvest in 1927...
...D. degree, and for a still higher degree, Doktor Nauk, which demands an original contribution to science, a degree we do not have at all...
...which allowed considerable freedom to private enterprise, was in force, and some flexibility was apparent...
...The "Gosplan" formula I saw in embryo was actually followed...
...A substantial number go into teaching...
...We must now compete with a system "that literally forces its smartest boys and girls to get all the education they can absorb...
...I have just been reading William Benton's report on his visit to Russia in the fall of 1955...
...they lack laboratory training and first hand experience...
...The fattest ones are in professions like aeronautics and mining, where brains are in great demand...
...Many people were living on the margin of subsistence...
...Half our American brain power lies buried in garages, clerkships, kitchens, beauty parlors, and gadget-selling careers, without ever getting adequate college training...
...The United States and the U.S.S.R...
...Instead of going into movie houses, juke boxes, and TV sets, it went into schools...
...Schoolhouses for the "liquidation of illiteracy" were also prominent in the plan...
...plant was being built...
...Many graduates still emerge stuffed with book learning...
...returns, will throw more light on this crucial problem...
...Practical education for practical problems seems to be the present goal...
...In interviewing escapees on the Russian-German border, Kluckhohn's staff found young people increasingly bored with dialectical materialism, and eager for more interesting careers in science, technology, and the arts...
...I wish I were with him, to compare the Soviet state in 1956 with the one I saw in 1927, and to view the changes reported by such observers as William Benton...
...You and I are sure that our system is bound to win out...
...Not only has death removed power from the grip of Stalin, but he is being damned by the present elite for his administration of it...
...The country was desperately poor, however, in food, shelter, and clothing...
...Now, after a generation of one-man rule, there is again some flexibility...
...It fits in with Clyde Kluckhohn's work at the Russian Research Center in Harvard...
...Krushchev promised Burma last year to build and equip a technical institute in Rangoon as a gift to the Burmese people from the Russian people, staffed complete with Russian engineers and administrators...
...I am very much afraid he is saying: "You Americans have by far the better basic systems, but you neglect its application...
...The Russia I saw posed a misty kind of ideological challenge to the Western democracies, with the Czar and his nobles out, and workers and peasants on top—at least theoretically...
...Scholarships are pro-rated, like the U.S...
...Well, I hope Editor Rubin, when he...
...Said his host Yelutin, Minister of Higher Education: "In admitting students, we don't ask who the father is, we want a clear head...
...They go six days a week, ten months in the year, and probably work on the average a good deal harder than American children...
...Russia cannot match us in producing Chevrolets and IBM machines, at least not yet, but she proposes to beat us in producing ideas and trained manpower—a large part for export...
...Russia now has, says Benton, 4,300,000 students in post-high school institutions of learning, as compared with 2,500,000 in the United States...
...Ivan can keep learning at state expense "as long as he can make the grades...
...The American educational plant seems to be going steadily downhill, as we wrangle about the morality of federal aid...
...The Kulaks had not been run off their lands, slave labor camps were unknown, purge trials were years in the future...
...But is that character from Sirius so sure...
...The amount of the scholarship increases every year...
...It will be interesting to hear whether Editor Rubin finds Moscow as shabby and depressing as I found it—not the architecture so much as the people...
...There are of course some cracks in it...
...Benton estimates that where less than 50 per cent of bright youngsters in America get to college, in Russia the figure is 100 per cent...
...One can't pilot a jet bomber at 600 miles an hour on class-struggle navigation...
...I want to discuss the Senator's findings presently...
...Gone are the warring gangs and the stoning of trains...
...The former Senator and State Department official inspected schools, "Technicums," universities, and interviewed top officials in education, for an article in the 1956 Britannica Book of the Year...
...The Moscow propaganda machine, the Center concluded, was outsmarting itself on the home front...
...Children who make high marks go on from the Ten-Year-Schools to either the Technicums, vocational and engineering schools where 2,500,-000 are now enrolled, or to the universities...
...Some received a kind of ROTC training, built around their technical specialties...
...Belts continued tight year after year as the gray-shawled queues wound around state stores...
...The entire population in consequence would have to pull in its collective belt and go easy on consumer goods while the STUART CHASE, one of America's foremost social analysts, has worked as a special consultant to i.-dustry, labor, and government...
...This frightening document indicates where a sizable chunk of that forced capital went...
...They compete for the equivalent of our Ph...
...A recent report by M.I.T...
...Haven't you a proverb about a hare and a tortoise...
...The other 90 per cent is unvarnished science, technology, and general knowledge...
...Nowhere in the entire city did I see people as well clothed as, say, automobile workers coming out of Detroit factories...
...It is arguable, even probable, that the policies of 1956 present more headaches to the West than any policies since the ten days which shook the world...
...What Karl Marx wrote is unchanged, but Moscow's interpretation of it is always subject to revision...
...As an accountant and economist, I noted in considerable astonishment the formula whereby capital goods— factories, power plants, mines, railroads—were to be built, and a foundation thus laid for more food, shelter, and clothing at a later date...
...Lysenko is in the doghouse, and every effort is made to keep up with the latest technical papers in Western science...
...Finally, the necessity to work where one is told to work can become a serious handicap to a genuinely creative mind...
...A Brooklyn boys gang presumably would be broken up in 24 hours in Leningrad or Kiev...
...Their courses in economics, history, and philosophy are undoubtedly scrambled, but not the technical subjects...
...The shift in the schools away from politics does not altogether surprise me...
...the New Economic Policy (N.E.P...
...You let your schools run down, fill your teachers with frustrations, and give little thought to finding and pushing those creative brains that you are so everlastingly congratulating yourselves upon...
...With all due allowance, the Benton report remains frightening...
...Gone are the days of ultra-progressive theories...
...No, touched but not stuffed, says Benton...
...In the end, the picked crop is placed by the state in industry and other strategic occupations at good salaries...
...he was in the process of ousting Trotsky, but the latter was still in Moscow...
...The United States gives students more freedom to develop what's in them, if their parents can finance their education...
...Every seat was taken and one could hear a page turn, so profound was the concentration...
...Russian leaders, of course, had no such cash reserve, but with their control of manpower they proposed to channel a high fixed proportion of workers and managers into the construction of capital goods...
...The changes since 1927 must be great...
...Capital in the West comes largely from the money savings of the people...
Vol. 20 • July 1956 • No. 7
