Soviet School System Research Articles

Our Study and Discussion of the [New Secondary School Geography] Curriculum

Abstract The Fundamental Directions of General Education and Vocational School Reform state that the Soviet school system's crucial and enduring challenge is to provide the rising generation with a deep and sound mastery of basic knowledge, to elicit habits and the ability to apply them in practice, and to shape a materialist worldview. The next step will be to coordinate academic syllabi, curricula, textbooks, and visual teaching aids with the requirements of scientific, technological, and socioeconomic progress and the age-related characteristics of pupils. I would like to note that to my recollection-as an educator with 27 years' experience-never before have so many collectives participated in such an active and interested give-and-take during the creation of school curricula. The new geography curriculum is the collective brainchild of scholars and scientists, methods experts, and classroom teachers, in creative contention and periodic discussion.

Editor's Introduction

New curricula for the subject disciplines are being introduced in the Soviet secondary school as part of the educational reform that was initiated in 1983. Issues of this journal on the adoption of that reform by the Soviet government between June 1983 and April 1984 and on the countrywide mobilization for its implementation, which took place in 1984 and 1985, have chronicled the reform process in its earlier stages. The major structural changes within the reform policies are the enrollment of six-year-olds in first grade for the first time and the vocational training of all youth in secondary school, goals that were articulated in order to bring the Soviet school system into the overall socioeconomic reform program of the Gorbachev administration. Curriculum reform lies at the pedagogical heart of the educational reform process; cyclic changes in Soviet school curricula since World War II have been linked to the priorities of national economic growth.

Editor's Introduction

Sex education is a new and important priority in the Soviet school system. While it has been long ignored as a topic held unfit for classroom discussion, such social problems as the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy and a high national divorce rate that is concentrated in the population contracting early marriages are the reasons behind this recent interest. The increased incidence of venereal disease among young people and the widespread use of abortion as birth control in the USSR are other reasons, although little attention is given to these subjects in the material translated herein. Underlying the rationale for incorporating sex education into the school curriculum for the first time is the falling national birthrate. As pointed out by the Russian demographer V. I. Perevedentsev in last month's issue of Soviet Education, the current birthrate is insufficient to meet national manpower requirements, and three-child families will have to become the norm in the Soviet Union—in contrast with the zero-and one- or two-child families that prevail today—in order to compensate for present and projected shortfalls in the manpower supply. Public responsibility for educating new generations of young people for their future roles in family life, as married couples and parents, is being placed upon the school, and the response made to date by the public education sector to this charge is a useful illustration of how change is introduced into Soviet education.

Editor's Introduction

No question is more crucial to the future of the Soviet school system than that of the curriculum for the fourth through tenth grades of compulsory secondary education.

Editor's Introduction

Abstract A sharply declining national birthrate is the central explanatory fact in Soviet educational policy making. Elsewhere in Europe declining school enrollments have turned priorities of educational development away from the quantitative expansion that marked the 1950s and '60s toward new emphasis on the quality of schooling. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Soviet Union, where the national birthrate dropped from 5.3 million births in 1960 to 4.1 million in 1969. At a time when the Soviet school system is about to reach a plateau in its quantitative development — the achievement of universal ten-year education for all young people aged 7 to 17 — the question of how best to prepare the increasingly scarce resource of the nation's youth for their lives at work in the national economy is the foremost concern of educational planning.

The New Curriculum of The Soviet Ten-Year General Education School

The highest priorities of the Soviet education system in recent years have been the transition to universal ten-year education and the implementation of a comprehensive school-curriculum reform. These two goals are closely interrelated. The curriculum revisions were undertaken as the basis for the extension of compulsory schooling through the secondary level. The mass Soviet school system is one of the largest in the world; it enrolls almost fifty million pupils and employs almost three million teachers.

On the Efficiency of the Soviet School System∗

∗ Summarized from a revised version of a paper presented to the VII International Conference at Rockville, Maryland, U.S.A., arranged by the Conference on European Problems, October 7‐10, 1971.

Recent changes in Soviet Secondary Schools

Change in the structure of educational systems is now an international commonplace; but in the U.S.S.R., where the system is more centralised and sensitive to government policy than most, changes can take place with a rapidity often startling to western observers. The latest develop? ment was in August, 1964, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. adopted a resolution altering the length of the secondary school course. This, in the words of E.I. Afanasenko, Minister of Education of the R.S.F.S.R., "will bring about many changes in the work of the secondary school" l) which proves to be a considerable understatement. In order to examine these latest measures, it is necessary to put them in context by outlining briefly the Soviet School system as it was before and after the changes of 1958, known generally as the "Khrushchov reforms,\ Under the old system, compulsory schooling began for all at the age of seven, when children went to general educational schools. These were of three types 4-year, 7-year and 10-year schools. They differed only in length of course, not in content or standard; one could proceed directly from a 4-year school to the fifth form of a 7-year school, and so on. By 1958, it was claimed, no child had to make do with 4-year schooling only. The 7-year school was standard for most Soviet children. Before the war, the aim of the authorities was to make 10-year schooling compulsory for all eventually, and although a host of practical difficulties (notably the terrible losses during the war 2) made this impossible, there was considerable expansion, especially in the major cities. The 10-year school and its shorter versions were comprehensive, unstreamed and unified, with no major break at 11 or 12. There was a transition from general primary to specialist secondary teaching at about the age of 11, but this took place within the school, and did not involve seiection and transfer after the fashion of the English "11 plus". The curriculum taken by all children was formal and academic, with a heavy emphasis on the sciences. Pupils who successfully completed the 10-year course were awarded the school certificate or "Attestation of Maturity", and could then seek admission to institutions of higher education. Winners

Training of chemists and metallurgists in the USSR

Describes the Soviet school system and the training of undergraduate and postgraduate students.