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Soviet Union [USSR] Quality, Reform, and Funding
A "report card" for Soviet education in the 1980s based on
comments from government leaders, educators, and rank-and-file
teachers, as well as from the public at large, indicated the
schools were failing in serious ways. The picture that emerged from
articles published in the Soviet press revealed inadequate
facilities, crowded classrooms, and schools operating on two- and
even three-shift schedules. Shortages of school materials and
equipment were serious. The quality of teaching was often low.
These deficiencies were particularly acute in rural areas and in
the Soviet Central Asian republics. Abuses, such as cheating by
students and grade inflation by many teachers, were widespread as
well. The schools were failing to meet the nation's labor needs:
shortages of adequately skilled workers existed in almost every
sector of the economy, and, although institutions of higher
learning were graduating large numbers of engineers and
specialists, their training was theoretical and narrow and lacked
practical applicability. These limitations, together with excessive
bureaucracy, led to poor performance
(see Soviet Union USSR - The Administration of Science and Technology
, ch. 16). Industrial accidents, most notably
the Chernobyl' nuclear power plant accident, were openly attributed
to inappropriate training and technical incompetence.
The schools were failing as well in the task of inculcating
youth with Marxist-Leninist ideals and socialist morality. Young
people were becoming increasingly cynical about official ideology;
they were motivated more and more by the pursuits of material
things, personal comforts, societal status, and privilege.
Moreover, the school system's emphasis on uniformity and
conformity, rote learning, and memorization squashed students'
creativity and the development of critical thinking and individual
responsibility.
The 1984 reform of the general and vocational schools together
with the 1986 reform of higher and specialized secondary education
aimed at fundamental perestroika (restructuring) and
demokratizatsiia (democratization) of the education system.
The Soviet leadership saw the role of teachers as central to this
endeavor; in addition to increased wages, they promised that
teachers would have greater autonomy and flexibility and that the
"command mentality, formalism, and overbureaucratization" produced
by the multilayered administrative bureaucracies would be
eradicated. Articles in the official Soviet press called for the
"teacher-creator" to take the "path of freedom," with a "freely
searching mind . . . tied to no one and to no thing."
Implementation of these reforms would require major increases
in funding, which in the mid-1980s was about 12 billion rubles for
general secondary schools. The state spent about 1,200 rubles per
student for higher education and 780 rubles for secondary
specialized study. Calling allocation of less than 8 percent of a
nation's income to education a sign of societal degradation, Soviet
education specialists expressed alarm that the country was
currently allocating only about 4 percent of its national income to
its schools. But the greater, and perhaps insurmountable, obstacle
to genuine reform of education in the 1980s remained the overriding
importance assigned to ideological purity in all aspects of
schooling.
Data as of May 1989
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