To Serve the State

Whatever else can be said about Soviet education, it serves the Communist purpose more efficiently each year. Last week Nicholas DeWitt, of Harvard's Russian Research Center, shed fresh light on a sweeping reform of the Soviet school system that is intended to put education unblinkingly at the service of the state. "The Russians were, are and will be training an army of scientists and technologists," wrote DeWitt in School and Society. "They want no generalists--only specialists."

Under the new system most youngsters will only get eight years of regular school, will then be sent out to work at a specialized trade. Only the brightest will be permitted to attend the Russian equivalents of high school and apply to universities. Even they will get part-time vocational training in field or factory to learn "the delights of labor"--and incidentally, hedge the state's bet on their brains. The universities and top technical institutes are so overcrowded that they can admit only about one in four secondary school graduates. Result: a potentially dangerous class of frustrated aspirants who are "useless" to the state, especially since World War II cut the Soviet birth rate so sharply that Russia faces a shortage of skilled labor throughout the 19603.

The new scheme solves the problem neatly. It produces a bigger child-labor pool, and makes sure that everyone has a state-approved specialty. For youngsters permitted to study fulltime beyond the eighth grade, the ten-year school system is being lengthened to eleven years with the bulk of the gain in vocational training (1,454 hours), science and math (a total of 395 more hours). As for humanities, says Expert DeWitt, "the ax will fall." There is little room for humanities in managing an industrial state.

Those who go on to universities will study as before and come pouring out as specialists at a faster rate than in the U.S.

P: Engineers now number 974,000 in Russia and will be graduating at the rate of 125,000 every year, three times as many as the U.S. produces.

P: Medical graduates total 383,000 (onefourth more than the U.S.) and will come off the line at the rate of 28,000 a year, four times more than in the U.S.

P: Schoolteachers already number 1,800,000 (v. 1,500,000 in the U.S.), half of them in secondary schools, where 340,000 specialize in science and math. This year the U.S. produced 13,000 graduates prepared to teach high school science and math; the Russians produced 25,000.

U.S. educators dispute the quality of Soviet training in such fields. American education is superior, they argue, because it is free of the rote learning, Marxian indoctrination and pressure for applied research that characterizes Soviet schooling. Yet the U.S. is short of engineers, physicians and teachers--and Russia is not. Concludes DeWitt, noting that Russia now spends as much on education as the U.S., though it is less than half as wealthy: "We will have to do much more for the betterment of our own education before it is too late."

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