Education Abroad: The Uninfected

EDUCATION ABROAD The Uninfected They wear tight blue jeans or pants that bell at the bottom. Their hair flows in ringlets over shirt collars. They strum cowboy tunes on guitars, favor English phrases such as "Hello, baby" and "Love me, do." They claim to be alienated from their elders and resist any form of ideological indoctrination. In short, many students in Eastern Europe are surprisingly like U.S. campus rebels. In Prague a fortnight ago, 400 educators, including a dozen Westerners, met in a conference sponsored by Czechoslovakia's Red regime to talk about why the Communist culture fails to grab the kids.

Utter Pessimism. In part, the answer is that many Eastern European students are bored with propaganda, restricted literature and limited travel. "We are young and cannot always think only of building socialism," says a Rumanian youth. "It is a fact," says a Czech student, "that the only attractive currents for our generation are coming from the Western part of the world. Here they tell us we are a new generation building a new world; then they insist we dance a folk dance two centuries old." As a consequence, Eastern European girls prefer the watusi, the jerk, and big-beat music.

"Our youth feel a sense of utter pessimism, a rejection of any kind of political commitment," complains one Communist elder. "They doubt the meaning of positive effort. Their only real interest is sex." Youthful Yugoslav Author Mihajlo Mihajlov recently wrote President Tito that any fears that reading Western literature could "infect" Mihajlov with a "foreign ideology" are unfounded. His proof: "I have been reading Communist literature since childhood, and I still fail to find any sympathy for Communism."

Well-Educated Watchmen. Such cynicism stems partly from students feeling that their education is put to little use by Communist societies, which tend to reserve the best jobs for party favorites. "They encourage us to study engineering and medicine," complains a young Pole, "and then they expect us to join a farming community and to make less money as a doctor than a common laborer. I didn't study ten years for that." A Czech student complained that university graduates are being "offered jobs as night watchmen—we have the best-educated night watchmen in the world."

To stem such discontent, Eastern European countries are making it tougher for students to get into college and are channeling more of them into trade schools, which often lead to better-paying jobs. When Polish children complete their new, eight-grades schooling, one-fifth go on to four-year academic high schools, the rest to trade schools. After that they can take competitive exams for university training, but only 33,000 out of 80,000 applicants made it last year.

Communist indoctrination in schools has perforce turned soft-sell. Polish universities dropped compulsory—and widely scorned—cram courses in "Rudiments of Marxism-Leninism," now offer more flexible discussion courses on "Main Problems of Marxist Philosophy." Grade schools offer a new course called "civic education" directed at convincing children of "the superiority of the socialist system over the capitalist system," mainly by studying the party organization and local government in action.