Doing Comparative Education:
Three Decades of Collaboration
Part IV: Communist Education
COMMUNIST SCHOOLING
JOHN I. THOMAS, Education for Communism: School and State in the
People's Republic of Albania. Stanford, Calif., Hoover Institution
Press, 1969. NIGEL GRANT, Society, Schools and Progress in Eastern Europe.
Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1969. WASYL SHIMONIAK, Communist Education: Its
History, Philosophy and Politics. Chicago, Rand McNally, 1970. SEYMOUR M.
ROSEN, Education and Modernization in the USSR. Reading, Mass., Addison-
Wesley, 1971.
There is now a substantial collection of books published outside the Communist countries discussing the origins, nature, structure and purpose of education under communism. The four volumes presently under review are valuable additions to that bibliography.
John I. Thomas' study is the narrowest in focus, dealing with educational developments in tiny Albania, with a population of only 2.1 million in 1970. Relying heavily upon Albanian and Soviet sources, and for the most part eschewing value judgements, Thomas provides a detailed view of how the present Albanian system of education rose on the ruins of Italian, French, Greek, and Turkish imports. He describes the familiar pattern of educational deprivation that still existed in Albania before World War II -- a condition that spurred the Communists' subsequent commitment to extending educational opportunities, especially among women. In the space of less than 30 years, Albania has come a long way educationally -- from a country that had not a single institution of higher education in 1945 to one that is now beginning to provide educational facilities on a par with those of its Greek and Yugoslav neighbors. Thomas' book is invaluable for its detailed account of this process.
Like the other Eastern European countries, Albania reconstructed its educational system in imitation of Soviet models, with only minor adjustments to adapt them to local conditions. Indeed, the strength of the Soviet example in Eastern Europe is nowhere evidenced more clearly than in Albania, notwithstanding the 1961 split with the Soviet Union. The transfer of Albania's allegiance to the Chinese branch of communism apparently did not mean that the usefulness and durability of Soviet models were at an end, at least in education. Although Thomas mentions these events, his book leaves the reader with a definite sense of incompleteness on this score. After all, the really interesting thing about Albania's educational development is that while the regime shifted its political allegiance from Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union, and then from the Soviet Union to China, its adherence to Soviet-based forms of education has endured. Why? That question Thomas does not raise.
Part of the answer is that the Soviet model has, in fact, proven very useful for countries, like Albania, which are seeking to effect extremely rapid transformations of their backward, predominantly agricultural societies, marked by traces of feudalism, into modern, industrialized, and mass-participatory states. This implies that it was not just a matter of the Soviet Union imposing its example by sheer force of military might and political power, but that the countries of Eastern Europe derived genuine assistance from the Soviet framework and philosophy of education. Is there justification for this belief? The conclusion offered by Nigel Grant's book is "Probably yes"; the answer from Wasyl Shimoniak is a resounding "No!"
Grant has written a shrewdly perceptive and on the whole sympathetic book about the countries of Eastern Europe, their turbulent history, their pre-Communist educational development, and the schooling patterns adopted under communism. While tracing the common pattern underlying the changes in education that have taken place in eight countries (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania), he also takes pains to explain how and why local variations have occurred. Writing a multinational, comparative book of this kind is a difficult task, and Grant has succeeded admirably.
The countries of Eastern Europe are in an interesting "love-hate" relationship with the Soviet Union. There is little in their histories (except perhaps for Bulgaria) to make them natural disciples of the Soviet Union; yet their military, economic, and perhaps ideological need for the Soviet Union is so great that, notwithstanding conflicts of varying gravity that arose on occasion in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the allegiance of the East European states to the Soviet bloc has not been seriously in doubt. Writing from the perspective of education, Grant is able to show that the Soviet model does have a genuine functional meaning for countries as diverse as East Germany and, say, Romania. Secularization of education; tying schools more closely to the requirements of planned economic development; widening educational opportunities, particularly for women, rural youth, and the poor; replacing a formal classics-oriented curriculum with one emphasizing mathematics and the natural sciences for all; and introducing strong elements of work-study and practical training into school programs -- all these basic features of the Soviet educational model the Eastern European countries have found exceptionally useful to their own development.
Wasyl Shimoniak addresses an even wider canvas than does Grant, extending the scope of his study to include China, Cuba, the Mongolian People's Republic, North Korea and North Vietnam, although half of his long book is devoted to the development of education in Russia and the Soviet Union. For Shimoniak, the key to what has been going on in the Communist polities lies in the growth and consolidation of personal power in the hands of small groups of men, with education, too, being utilized to serve this purpose. Marxist-Leninist philosophy and sloganizing are seen as verbal cloaks for a powerful drive, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, to extend the sway of the Russian people and their culture and to extirpate (using violence, where necessary) the influence of organized religions. While Shimoniak is prepared to concede that some benefits have flowed from the establishment of Communist forms of government in and around the Soviet Union (emancipation of women, elimination of illiteracy, improvement in the material conditions of life), his judgment is that the price paid has been altogether too high. He also concedes that the Communist rulers of these nations have spent generously on education, but he views their motives as suspect. They needed schools to build economic power as a basis for military might, to facilitate the ideological indoctrination of the masses, and to establish the supremacy of Russian (or Chinese) culture as the only true socialist culture and all this primarily for the sake of consolidating their personal power. Shimoniak concludes:
In brief, the language of communism cannot be trusted.
Russian and Chinese communism are not the types of
communism that were dreamed of for many centuries. As
seen in every country where the Communists came to power,
the individual lost his freedom not to the state, but to
a few dictators, who were power-hungry individuals. There
can be no two political parties, there can be no more than
one representative in an "election," and there
cannot be division of power between God and the ruler.
At the same time the Communists realized that the only way
to stay in power is to educate their own intelligentsia,
their own leaders and their own children. For this reason,
the number of schools has increased in every country they
have occupied.
This interpretation of events and motivations takes the "devil-theory" of communism much too far. While self-serving political behavior, arbitrary rule, oppression of national groups, and the suppression of national and religious aspirations have certainly occurred under communism, they are unfortunately no monopoly of the Communist world. Moreover, the Communist system, especially in the fields of education and social services, does have its positive aspects from the standpoint of harnessing national energies for the tasks of modernization and economic development.
A distinguishing mark of Communist states is their commitment to reforming the ideals and philosophy of their citizens along so-called Marxist-Leninist lines. In this task, the schools, the higher educational institutions, and the youth movement are expected to play major roles. It is not surprising that this is so, for such institutions are ideally adapted to centralized, bureaucratic forms of control and to the inculcation of officially prescribed ideas and norms. Thus, education in the Soviet Union and other Communist states serves a much wider purpose than merely insuring the perpetuation in power of a small clique of rulers. It is intended to be the instrument for bringing into being a new type of citizen as the basis of a new social order. To see Communist education only in the light of the abuses of state power that have taken place, as Shimoniak tends to do, may lead us both to misunderstand the appeal of the Communist system and to underrate its potential for survival.
It is in this respect that Seymour Rosen's book needs to be read in conjunction with Shimoniak's. Though much of what Rosen has to say is not new, it is helpful to have collected in one place details on curriculum, enrollment, and educational structure updated to the end of the 1960's. Useful statistical tables on distinguishing the economy and the educational system are given in an appendix. Moreover, the author is scrupulously accurate in his citations of sources and his transliterations (unfortunately something which cannot be said of Shimoniak), as well as in his facts. Like Grant, Rosen is clear about the distortions and defects of Communist sociocultural policies, but by looking at Soviet educational programs in the context of Russia's 250-year-old drive toward modernization, he achieves an objective analysis that serves as a counterweight to Shimoniak's one-sided interpretation.
Will mass education prove in time to be a Trojan horse in the Communist societies? That is to say, will not a highly educated population eventually become unwilling to tolerate the political and ideological authoritarianism that has characterized the Soviet and other Communist societies? This is perhaps one of the most important questions that confront analysts of the Communist system, but unfortunately it is one to which none of the authors whose works are reviewed here gives any attention.
The evidence to date is, of course, not encouraging. As in the Western countries, the elimination of illiteracy in the USSR did not automatically produce an independently thinking, politically sophisticated electorate. Rather, mass literacy was used to insure that the ideas of the dominant ideology received the widest publicity. Universal primary and near-universal secondary education under communism has proved to be a splendid instrument for the inculcation of an intensely narrow view of the world and the Soviet Union's place in it. Higher education has been developed in a framework of rigorous specialization and is designed not to open young minds but to train them to perform certain well-defined professional tasks. So far, it must be conceded, the Soviet state has been able to reap the economic benefits flowing from its educational system without paying any appreciable price in terms of the emergence of a more intellectually curious and ideologically obdurate citizenry.
What of the future? Here, I am inclined to be more sanguine. Soviet leaders might do well to remember Marx's insistence that the laws of motion of societies can be understood best in terms of men's relationship to the means of production. Everywhere, but especially in Communist states, the amount of public educational investment in the citizenry is becoming so vast that it begins to rival investment in conventional physical capital. Those who embody that educational investment cannot be treated simply as if they were animate tools. Indeed, they begin to assume many of the characteristics of an independent peasantry, seeking to exploit to the best advantage their individual holding of capital -- in this case, education. If so, Communist states may eventually find that they have cast out their agricultural peasantry only to create a replacement class of independently thinking, small-scale "capitalists," the educated professionals.
The path to relaxed controls over intellectual inquiry and freedom of expression will no doubt be long and beset by many twists and turns, but the emergence of a highly educated population seems likely to present a growing challenge to the continuation of authoritarianism in politics as well as in culture.
NOTE
* Harold J. Noah, " Communist Schooling," in Problems of Communism XXII:5 (1973): 71-73.
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