Why Ivan and Tanya Can Read

Six days a week: drill, drill and still more drill

At General Education School No. 402, in the Perovsky district of eastern Moscow, 30 fourth-grade pupils rise to their feet when their teacher enters. Respectfully, they address him as Alexei Grigoryevich, using his first name and patronymic. The pupils, who wear uniforms (brown frocks and orange neckerchiefs for girls, blue jackets with shoulder tabs for boys), remain standing until their presence is acknowledged by the teacher, a short, bald man in his 50s. Then he turns brusquely to business.

"What do the words futbol, stadion and patriot have in common?" he asks. Hands shoot up across the classroom, but the pupils are silent, and there is no squirming to catch the teacher's attention. Alexei Grigoryevich points to a girl in the third row, who rises to explain that all these words are of foreign origin. The teacher draws back a curtain covering part of the blackboard, disclosing a chart of verbs. Asked to explain where the accent falls in various verb forms, students respond by reciting grammatical rules. Invariably, they answer in complete sentences. Each pupil is graded on his performance in a daybook, a running report that is sent home to be initialed by his parents at the end of every week. The daybook keeps track of misbehavior with notes such as "Created a disturbance in the gym" or "Arrived five minutes late for physical culture."

The pattern of School No. 402--daybook, drill and the use of specialized subject-matter instruction as early as the fourth grade--is repeated in 147,000 "general education" schools across the U.S.S.R. Soviet children go to school six days each week, typically from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The required curriculum generally runs through tenth grade and covers about the same amount of schooling that U.S. students get attending five days a week from kindergarten through twelfth grade. City schools are better than rural schools, but most Soviet students study the same standard curriculum. Usually there is only one current textbook authorized for each major subject, though the 15 republics of the Soviet Union are allowed to have special courses in the history and geography of their regions.

The curriculum is stiff and compulsory. On the average, two mathematics courses are required in each grade (including heavy doses of geometry and algebra, plus a year or two of calculus in the final grades). And 5 1/2 years of biology, five years each of physics and geography, four years of chemistry, one year of astronomy, ten years of shop and mechanical drawing and up to seven years of foreign language (most frequently English and French). Apart from languages, the humanities are largely taken up with the detailed study of Marxism-Leninism. Zoya Malkova, the director of the Institute for General Pedagogy in Moscow, defends the standardized curriculum as "one way toward the equalization of our society."

In theory at least, Soviet schools avoid grouping pupils by ability. Says Malkova: "We are in principle against the IQ theory. We consider that every healthy child is capable of effectively mastering the school program." Even so, a few gifted or privileged students are selected for special schools.

While public schools in the U.S. have swung from open classrooms to back-to-basics during the past two decades, the Soviets, like Europeans generally, have kept fairly steadily to traditional teaching methods. Says Malkova: "In the U.S., you have a tendency to do things in extremes, first one direction, then another. We never had this problem. We are concerned, though, about trying to encourage reasoning about problems rather than rote memorization. A central task of contemporary Soviet pedagogy has been just how to develop independent thinking."

Pupil independence, however, plays second balalaika to the pressure for top marks on the nationwide exams at the end of the eighth grade, which decide the careers of pupils. Top scorers are bound for higher education as scientists, engineers, teachers and economists. The middle-ranked enter four-year schools for technicians. Those at the bottom get vocational training and jobs on the assembly line or in small workshops. In the U.S., 54% of high school seniors go on to some sort of higher education, compared with roughly 20% in the Soviet Union.

The drill and discipline do risk making Ivan a dull boy. In Stalin's time, a pedagogical textbook defined initiative as "the search for the best way to fulfill an order." Today initiative is given more encouragement--but not all that much more. Especially in such humanistic subjects as literature and history, the emphasis on ideology leaves little room for personal interpretation. Recalls Vita Kronik, 42, a Moscow-born academic who emigrated to Detroit in 1976: "If a student is asked to write a composition describing an anticapitalistic hero of a novel, he must underline the political tendency of this hero, not the humanity or the values of this character."

But in science and engineering, the Soviet system does increasingly well. In a report for the National Science Foundation last December, Mathematics Professor Izaak Wirszup of the University of Chicago, an expert on Soviet scientific education, concluded that the Soviets, through "an educational mobilization of the entire population," had far outstripped the U.S. in the quality of scientific and mathematical education at elementary and secondary levels.

Wirszup based his conclusions on a study of Soviet school texts and educational magazines. The Soviet mathematics program he found "modern in content, innovative in approach, well integrated and highly sophisticated." Most remarkable to Wirszup were magazines aimed at students. One, an illustrated monthly on math and science for ninth- and tenth-graders, called Unitechnic Journal, had a circulation of 1.6 million. Among the contents: a serious mathematical article that discussed Einstein's equations and another that presented a complex analysis of the atom and nuclear power. As Wirszup notes, the periodical is more colorful and clearly written than similar materials available, even to advanced high school students in the U.S.

While Soviet schoolchildren are now taught algebra, geometry and some calculus, Wirszup points out that even college-bound U.S. high schoolers usually manage only eight years of arithmetic, one or two of algebra and two or three of science. He estimates that in 1978 and '79 more than 5 million Soviet high school students took advanced calculus, compared with 105,000 U.S. students at the secondary level. Significantly, Wirszup found that more than 56% of U.S. school districts reporting to the National Science Foundation in 1977 required only one or no math course for high school graduation.

The Soviet Union insists on very close ties between parents and schools. First-grade teachers are required to visit the homes of entering pupils during the first eight weeks of school. And schools seek out neighborhood adults to serve as counselors for after-school activities: model building, rocketry, dancing instruction, chess clubs. William Green, 24, a U.S. citizen and a graduate student at the University of Southern California, went to a Soviet middle school for two years while his father was stationed in Moscow as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Green recalls that his parents were required to attend a special classroom session with his teacher at least four times a year: "Parents would sit at students' desks, and the teacher would lay it on the line. It would be very explicit criticism, like 'Your child isn't working hard enough' or 'We don't think you're encouraging this or that development.' " If parents fail to respond, school officials may notify the parents' supervisors at work, who in turn strenuously urge employees to do a better job of child rearing. Many Soviet emigres --no friends of Communism--vigorously defend Soviet education for its seriousness and rigor, if not its ideology. As Emigre Emil Draitser, 42, currently a teaching fellow in the department of Slavic languages at U.C.L.A., puts it, "Frankly, I am in this country just five years, and I see no harm in [the Soviet approach]." Draitser faults the leniency and lack of seriousness of American education. Says he: "This is ridiculous. If a man stops school in the Soviet Union after eighth grade, at least he knows something."

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