MISTAKEN ENVY

...Perhaps we could risk it if we did not care about the people involved, used dictatorial methods, and would accept shoddy products as the Soviets often do...

...the United States wants to retain world leadership without sacrificing its free way of life...

...In any event, again no Soviet-type procedure seems at all necessary...

...Barring this, there is no reason to embrace the desperate technique of "crash programs," all the more so because other methods of improvement have hardly been tried...

...Until this is generally accepted in the United States, we are liable to overemphasize short-run education gadg-eteering and court failure in our long-run objectives...

...Hence Russia, including its schoolboys, has only a minimum of need, disposition, or people to engage in the kind of independent living, thinking, and politicking which are an American trademark...

...Newspaper readers could detect repeated disagreements even among top American scientists, educators, and specialists on Soviet affairs...

...It is this, together with a dictatorial government whose central slogan is increasingly that of "overtaking America," that molds Soviet education...

...today remains in large measure a late comer society in a great hurry, it has deduced to a minimum the activities—and people—occupied with affairs other than the bare essentials of technology, management, and the Soviet versions of Hollywood and Madison Avenue...

...It remains to be seen whether such methods in the U.S.S.R...

...But so much of this in turn depends on the United States either standing still, or declining, that any effort on our part, even a partial one, will bear much more fruit than statistics or logic might indicate...

...No wonder, then, that such a society could start with vast poverty and vast illiteracy and yet before long end up with a vast number of specialists...

...For these are all specialists in the country's number one item of business—industrialization and material progress...

...So endlessly wealthy and productive is this country that this, too, can be changed without any of the primitive and dictatorial practices on which Soviet advances have been based...

...The Russians are deeply gratified by the material progress their country is making...

...American education indeed requires many improvements, to help make free citizens no less than more and better technicians...

...has twice as many engineering students as the United States, but on the other statistics tell us that the total number of Soviet engineers remains smaller and that in total university enrollment the United States has a per capita lead of two and a half times...

...Much has been made of the financial considerations which keep gifted students out of science, scientists out of the essential non-commercial, "pure" research, and intellectuals in general from doing long-range and high-quality work...

...Success should not cause nearly so much awe and dismay when everything in a huge country with fabulous natural and human resources is geared to one such task...

...Specifically, the educational system of the United States, as well as its science and technology, today remain on a considerably higher level than those of the U.S.S.R...

...The U.S.S.R.'s achievements are attained at so vast a cost and strain on individuals and all society that its present drive can persist only as long as these achievements appear greater than the hardships, and so long as hope exists of "overtaking America," the U.S.S.R.'s present drive is liable to persist...

...Perhaps most important, as long as we want the products of our schools to be not only good technicians but free men as well, we should never even consider stripping the curriculum of all but the bare utilitarian "essentials" as the Soviets have done...

...I shall never forget how full of quick and independent opinions I thought my American schoolmates were when I first encountered them after a decade with Soviet pupils...

...Neither mass production of scientists nor a large number of science courses in any way ensures high quality...

...Since most of them now come to education and the professions from distinctly lower-class backgrounds, the resulting rise of status and income justifies most if not all of the hardships imposed on them and on the rest of the country...

...All these things we should not do, and the sooner we decide not to do them (or to envy a society that does), the better...

...After under-financing and neglecting our educational system, we now want to produce, almost exclusively, Albert Einsteins...

...He is the author of Soviet Opposition to Stalin, and, just published, Russian Liberalism, to be reviewed next month by Justice William O. Douglas.—The Editors In the brief half year since the first Sputnik, most Americans have swerved from disdain for Soviet education to almost defeatist frenzy...

...This does not mean, however, as too many Americans are proclaiming these days, that we are hopelessly handicapped...

...Above all, that the basic difference is one between the countries as a whole, between over-all ways of life and stages of developments...

...Since the U.S.S.R...

...In the realm of morals, Soviet students are either charmingly innocent and primly moral, or uninhibit-edly coarse...

...What we need, instead, is money and support for the gifted students and scientists that America possesses in quite ample numbers...

...In concrete terms, the Soviet drive and political system are reflected in a wholly centralized and one-purpose type of education...

...And statistics, that last refuge of modern polemics, failed to help...

...It also explains why Soviet students are liable to be still more puritan, gauche, provincial, and chauvinistic than their American counterparts usually seem in the eyes of European critics...

...This is unquestionably valid, and large new amounts of money must be made available for each of these purposes...

...To cite a stark example, statistics tell us on the one hand that the U.S.S.R...

...All-important, too, is the absence of a free labor market and geographic mobility, as well as the often-mentioned encouragement and sometimes mollycoddling of scientists and engineers...

...Because— • Under the Soviet system Russia has focussed all its life on one objective: overcoming its position as a have-not, underdog, late comer...

...Nor need this be motivated and manifested by the narrowly utilitarian considerations prevalent in the U.S.S.R...

...will produce a new post-1917 generation of outstanding scientists, of the relatively very few topnotch scientists and engineers that a great society requires...

...These determine how students work, and what they want to be, more than any specific aspects of school itself...

...Although having fun is in no way an American monopoly, the quantity and quality of American athletic, extra-curricular, and social activities would appall even the most sybaritic among Soviet students...

...This is not only impossible but unnecessary...

...Thus the United States need not and cannot insist on a wholly centralized and uniform curriculum...

...Above all, we cannot consider a program of the Soviet type that keeps other parts of the population much poorer and almost eliminates personal choices on careers...

...The same is true of the teaching of science...

...Therefore, I would suggest the following approach to the improvements generally desired in the country today: • Pre-college instruction, in the sciences and elsewhere, is much worse today than it need be...

...With more money and a modicum of less indulgence (and blaming each other) by parents and teachers, a change for the better should not be at all impossible...

...Here and there the Russians covet more freedom especially in professional and personal domains...

...When these special privileges for the educated elite are combined with the still strikingly low standard of living of others in Russia, it is no wonder at all that students there will be endlessly more conscientious and grimmer about their schoolwork than Americans...

...Over the years, a few contrasts between Soviet and American education have stood out again and again in my mind: • My Soviet schoolmates were much more studious and conscientious in school work than my American companions...

...These are vastly different goals, and they cannot but be reflected in all aspects of life, including education...

...While we often complain about the tastelessness of American mass culture, life here is not nearly so standardized or gray as in the single-purpose Soviet society...

...The Soviets are advancing more rapidly, and in certain carefully selected areas they have recently outdistanced us...

...Yet our continued over-all lead should remind us that the measures required are not nearly so extreme as pessimists and alarmists have been urging...

...What is required is not one grandiose scientific "West Point" of science but large—not ruinously large—amounts of additional funds to the dozen or more already existing research centers across the country that are outstanding and capable of much more research, and especially more daringly "pure" research...

...Just as naturally the United States, the most prosperous, productive, and powerful society of the Twentieth Century, has engendered a work atmosphere that is at once more chaotic, less single-minded, and leisurely...

...Their American counterparts as often as not will manifest a quite similar chauvinism, but also emphasize doubts, dislikes, cynicism...

...In college, and particularly in graduate teaching, the key lies in a great deal more time and leeway for immersion in a complex specialty...

...But these improvements depend on our own way of life and its continuing greatness, not on imitating or "overtaking" Soviet education...

...In the realm of education, science, and research, such an approach would be little short of fatal...

...This is true, likewise, of advanced research...

...But the American public, the government, the press, and educational institutions can well start giving more approbation to scientists, scholars, and intellectuals than we have in the past...

...Son of long-time Moscow correspondent Louis Fischer and Markoosha Fischer, he spent a decade, 1929-1939, as a pupil in a Soviet public kindergarten, grade school, and high schools and another decade in the United States completing high school and obtaining a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate at Harvard...

...Yet the present population of the U.S.S.R., lacking the prosperity and old culture of the West or its own pre-Stalin Europeanized minority, does not find all this nearly so frustrating or repugnant as Westerners might...

...But the Americans' luxurious trust in drawn-out public disagreements and little regulated human relations is something few Soviet citizens can ever accept or envy, not excluding the "restive" students and writers our press has been making so much of...

...The Soviet Union is geared to telescoped modernization to the exclusion of all else...

...The current Administration proposal for federal aid to education consists of tiny grants to prospective students, and much too little money for advanced research...

...Soviet students are likely to be proud of their country, including the achievements of the Soviet system, to the point of thin-skinned sensitivity...

...Nor have the experts resolved this anxiety...

...Nor can we adopt the old Prussian emphasis on rote learning and rigid discipline which dominates Soviet schools today, or imitate their neglect of independent thinking and broader vistas...

...On the other hand, it may well be that some of our scientists and "eggheads" in general—like so many other Americans —crave more outside love and approval than they need or can ever get, and that some experts' present criticisms might possibly be turned inward...

...A Soviet student's view of his own future is likely to be earnest and determined, an American's casual and not quite crystallized...

...The many millions of words said and written on the subject failed to make clear how Soviet education really compares with American, or what the United States should do...

...If anything, the contrary is more true...

...Young Americans are relatively more sophisticated and outspoken, but also more uncertain about how to behave...

...The fact that scientists will feel less indispensable, and less universally respected, in a society that already has reached high prosperity and power than in one which is seeking these urgently, is hard to avoid or to alter...

...But these attractive features are based on a narrowness which Americans, fortunately, do not possess...

...There is an important contrast between the American's frequent and unself-conscious chatter about material goods and his liking of them, and the Soviet schoolboy's attitude—a priggish disdain about discussing such things but, in fact, much more avid preoccupation with them...

...m In sum, my personal experience only confirms that we are mistakenly envying Soviet education for things wholly out of step with both our free society and our actual needs...

...For the past 10 years he has been an associate of Harvard's Russian Research Center and currently combines this assignment with a professorship of history at Brandeis University...

...What conclusions can we then draw from these inferences about Soviet and American education...

...These traits appear to be counterbalanced by attractive traits in Soviet youth: determination and absolute certainty about their own future, a high degree of pure idealism, an uncomplicated faith in many of the old verities that Americans either scoff at or inwardly doubt...

...But they did spread and deepen the country's concern...

...Crash program" has become a favorite term in current American discussions...

...Why do Soviet students appear to be so much more studious, earnest, determined, puritan than American students...

...Sweeping, pointed, sharply clashing judgments and attitudes seemed to pour out at a rate that was completely unknown to me in Russia...

...This is all the more true since a majority of our students will not be scientists anyway, and to impose a heavily scientific curriculum on them would be a waste of their time and their country's money...

...On the crucial elementary and high school levels, this might well call for the establishment in all larger communities of special publicly supported schools for the scientifically gifted, as New York has done with the Bronx School of Science...

...We can do this without centralizing education, adopting Prussian methods, or sacrificing either non-scientific subjects or the student's individuality...