The Education Race

Sounding occasionally like an announcer watching a three-legged horse win the Belmont Stakes, U.S. educators back from Russian tours report with awe and alarm that the Soviet schools are in some ways very good indeed. More strident cries rise from home-based critics, who demand that the U.S. get into the education race without delay. A more thoughtful reporting job is offered in The Big Red Schoolhouse (Doubleday; $3.95), a new book by Fred M. Hechinger, who helped write the Rockefeller report on U.S. education, The Pursuit of Excellence (TIME, July 7).

Hechinger, onetime education editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and now associate publisher of the Bridgeport Sunday Herald, traces the history and analyzes the present state of U.S. and Soviet schools in a manner that might unsettle educationists of either nation. Particularly fascinating is the author's account of the rise, and the abrupt, inglorious fall of progressive education in the U.S.S.R. When the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, Hechinger reports, they inherited a system of schools, serving only the children of the upper classes, that was as good as any other in Europe. But in a period when Russian diplomats proved themselves good proletarians by not wearing neckties, such schools were doomed.

Learning by Anarchy. The leveling force was a brand of progressivism far wilder than anything ever dreamed of by U.S. life adjusters. While progressive educators in the U.S. talked of learning by doing, the Communist line became virtually learning by anarchy. Says Hechinger: "Schools were run by student-elected committees. Even elementary school pupils had a voice equal to their teachers. Book learning was discredited. Communist youth leaders not only spied on the teachers but could countermand their orders and free pupils from classroom work. Examinations were labeled the marks of bourgeois reaction. Homework was prohibited."

For roughly the decade of the 1920s, the Young Pioneers held sway in the schools, and students learned biology through such "socially useful works" as anti-cockroach campaigns in the slums. Then, abruptly, the party line changed; hard learning returned to favor, and the progressivists were kicked out.

It is Hechinger's notion that the entire progressive period was cynically calculated chaos, begun "consciously and purposely in order to eliminate the power of the old school and undermine the domination of the pre-Revolution intellectuals." U.S. educationists who regarded the Soviet cockroach-hunting interlude as an honest experiment will find Hechinger's theory of planned school-wrecking hard to believe. But plan or happenstance, the effect was of a school system softened to pulp, then reshaped to the form it has had, with some variations, ever since.

Opportunity to Flunk. Hechinger's carefully drawn comparison between the present U.S. and Soviet school systems shows flaws in each. For all Russia's talk of mass education. Soviet schools--at least the sort to which visiting educators are taken--are planned for an elite class of students. In recent years only about 12% of Soviet students have graduated from the nation's ten-year (college prep) schools. And when Premier Khrushchev's learning-and-labor edict (TIME, Jan. 5) takes effect, the proportion probably will drop. In the U.S. 55% of the children who begin first grade go on to finish high school. American students most often are promoted automatically--although some schools, notably those in New York City, have begun flunking dullards again. In Russia a frightening series of 26 examinations sift students at intervals, shunt unsuccessful scholars off to work or to one of thousands of "technikums"--vocational schools.

For Russian students who escape the frequent opportunities to flunk, the ten-year school can be an efficient factory of learning. Children start when they are seven, go through only four years of elementary school. The next year--their fifth--they begin a stiff, six-day-a-week secondary school program. By the time a Russian child reaches the eighth year, he is assumed to have a thorough knowledge of grammar--a subject most U.S colleges find it necessary to pound into freshmen. By graduation, he has studied one foreign language for six years, has been exposed to 4 1/2 years of mathematics and almost six years of science.

The Soviet secondary school teacher is expected to be "a scholar in his field and not, as is frequently the case in the United States, merely a college graduate with a rudimentary knowledge of his specialty." Pay, privilege and status of Soviet teachers are far above U.S. levels.

Hard-Working Parrots. But the flaws in the Russian system are huge. Dogma is injected into almost all subjects. Teachers may be scholars, but they are expected to follow rigid syllabuses, have far less freedom to interpret their subjects than U.S. instructors. Rote learning, abhorred by some U.S. educators, is carried to extremes. Class discussion, perhaps overemphasized in the U.S., is absent in Russia, and students are not encouraged to think beyond lines laid down by teachers. Cramming for exams swallows a large proportion of the students' time, and since questions are drawn by lot from lists circulated weeks beforehand, it is possible for a hard-working parrot to have huge scholastic success. For panicked patriots who insist that the-U.S. look abroad for an educational model--something he does not suggest--Hechinger reports that Norwegian academies teach more math and physics than Soviet schools, and that "any French high school graduate would find the Russian [final] exam a breeze."

Yet if America's educational framework is sound, the body of elementary and high school learning is far from healthy. U.S. schools still send graduates to college grossly unprepared for higher education, and many schools are still run. Hechinger reminds his readers, by such administrators as the Florida school official who said recently, "The training of our youth in sound practices in the operation of motor vehicles is as important as learning to read.'' Hechinger suggests some reforms well worth debating:

P: Lop off some of the years now given to elementary and junior high schools, fill them with high school level courses. P: Legislate widespread and continuous federal aid to education. P: Keep local control of curriculum, but strengthen schools by the establishment of national minimum standards. Hechinger suggests a National Board of Education Advisers, appointed by the President, from citizens of widely varied occupation. The board, apparently, would determine only the minimum attention given to each subject; Hechinger would rule out "any interference with matters of personnel, curriculum, teaching methods and the selection of textbooks."

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