Schools Abroad: A Question of Quality

In the wake of the Russian rocketry that launched Sputnik, many a critic of U.S. education assumed that the supremacy of Soviet schools was no longer in doubt. The Russians don't think so. Last month the party's Central Committee and the Soviet Council of Ministers ordered a major curriculum revision to be ready by 1970. Explaining why, Pravda this month published an unusually candid article by Russian Education Minister Mikhail Prokofiev, who charged that the vast Soviet school system is not only seriously deficient in science and math teaching, but is mired in a rigid "bookism" that makes learning a bore and produces an alarming dropout rate.

Prokofiev complained that students spend from 24 to 30 hours a week taking lecture notes, which allows them "far too little time to develop their own initiative, to stimulate creative work." The Soviet Union apparently faces a serious shortage of teachers, especially in physics, mathematics and technical drawing — and the quality is slipping as well. Despite a lowering of admission standards at the teacher-training academies, Prokofiev admitted that more than half of the 116,000 students who entered them last fall "barely passed the entrance examinations." Such teachers cannot and do not keep pace with technological advances. In physics, for example, they give their students "what amounts to a history of the subject instead of bringing them face-to-face with the core of physics itself."

The net result, says Prokofiev, is that many students are convinced "that they are not receiving any profound and lasting education. They want to quit." The dropout rate has reached the point where 30% of the pupils who enter first grade do not finish eighth. In some regions, half of those who finish eighth grade fail to enter the two-year high schools. And of those who finish high school, only 20% are interested enough to go on to universities and the professional institutes.