The Dark Side of the Moon

Is Soviet education as alarmingly successful as their artificial moons make it appear? In a carefully documented new book, Soviet Education for Science and Technology (Technology Press of M.I.T. and John Wiley & Sons; $8.50), Russian-born Engineer Alexander Korol, who left Russia in 1920 and is now a senior researcher at M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies, answers no. While paying just tribute to the Russian system's virtues, Korol also presents a picture of its defects, culled from official papers and statistics, stories in the Soviet press, the observations of foreign travelers and students, and statements by the Russians themselves. Examples:

P: Though the level of secondary school mathematics and science is high, teaching in general is unimaginative and suffocating. "The accounts of many German students who studied in the Soviet Union after the war agree in stating that, in a typical class lesson, the teacher would start the class by calling on two or three students to repeat the material of the previous lesson almost verbatim, and that the second half of the hour would be occupied by the teacher delivering the next section of the textbook, again following the text almost or actually verbatim."

P: While nonscience textbooks must be repeatedly revised to keep up with the changing party line, some science and mathematics textbooks have become so "stabilized" as to be "ossified." The most widely used algebra text, for instance, was published in 1888, has undergone only minor revisions since. Even Soviet experts have publicly protested that "the book fails fully to reflect modern science," yet it is still in use.

P: Though Russia has twice as many engineering students as does the U.S., her educational record in general is far less impressive. Although 183,800 were graduated from schools of higher education other than correspondence schools in 1955, only 10% of these were graduates of the five-year universities. "Soviet resident enrollment, including part-time evening students, in the last few years has been averaging less than half the number enrolled in American universities and colleges . . . Moreover, the fact that the number of resident students matriculated in the fall of 1955 showed a decrease of 5% over the previous year, while the number admitted to correspondence courses showed an increase of nearly 28%, suggests an increasing pressure forcing the Soviet government to channel the greatest possible number of the student-age population into the labor force."

P: In spite of all the talk about giving the children of the proletariat first crack at higher education, those actually getting it are the children of "Party officials, civil servants, officers of the armed forces and other elite groups ... A French student who attended Moscow University in 1948 and a German student who enrolled at Leningrad University in 1953 estimated that some 50% of the student body were of such background while well under 10% were distinctly of working-class origin."

P: Since all courses are prescribed by the Ministry of Education, teachers seldom dare to deviate from the official syllabus. "Not even the university itself--let alone an individual professor--can change the syllabus of any course except as the change may be authorized by the Ministry." The result, according to one Soviet physicist: "The lectures of many teachers are transformed into an exposition of the syllabus, including every detail, and factual data which obscure the basic scientific core of the discipline."

P: Though the average physics graduate of a university is on a par with or, within his specialty, superior to the average American with one year of graduate work, the engineer has had such a narrow, vocational course that "in terms of basic engineering preparation, he does not achieve in his five years of training a higher level of competency than his American counterpart does after a four-year course." Furthermore, only 3% of all university graduates take postgraduate work.

P: Since almost all research aims at solving some specific problem posed by the state, most major research is performed not in the universities but in special research organizations usually associated with a particular industry. Thus education "has been much further divorced from research than the theoretical model of an effective graduate training program would call for."

Such shortcomings, says Korol, should not for a moment blind Americans to the impressive gains of Soviet education--or to what must be done to strengthen the U.S. system. But for those who might go overboard in their awe of the Soviet, he poses these two questions: "When we talk about the vast Soviet efforts in the schools, colleges and universities, are we talking about education as we and the other free peoples conceive of education? Or are we talking about training--a far narrower concept?"

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