Education

Commissar Lunacharsky, Minister of Education, spent three whole hours in Moscow last week, impressing the Central Executive Committee of the urgent need of the intellectually starved masses for education.

Since 1922, he said, a great decline in the general level of education has set in. Before the War, Russia had 62,000 elementary schools and 4,500,000 pupils. Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, there were 76,000 schools and 6,000,000 pupils. But, in 1922, there were only 49,000 schools and 3,500,000 pupils. He drew a like picture of the secondary schools.

In the rural districts, he said, schools are sparsely attended because the buildings are badly equipped and unheated, and because parents are too poor to buy shoes for their children to walk to school in and too poor to buy textbooks, etc.

The Central Executive adopted a 21-point resolution calling for higher wages for teachers and the consolidation of elementary and secondary schools.