Expelling The Ghosts of Marx and Lenin

By Susan Tifft

His normally fidgety students were riveted when Moscow history teacher Andrei Isayev turned the tables on the Russian Revolution. Isayev first took down all the pictures of Lenin in his tenth-grade classroom. Then he told his students that the 1917 Revolution, which had been taught for decades as holy writ, was not so glorious as their government-issued textbooks had portrayed it. The students proved to be fast learners. "Lenin was a dark personality," one of Isayev's pupils says, when a Western visitor asks him about the founder of the modern Soviet state. He made "big mistakes" and caused "a catastrophe."

Not so long ago, such comments would have been considered a betrayal of socialist ideals and Isayev would have been sacked. Today, with glasnost gusting through the Soviet Union and communism lying in tatters throughout Eastern Europe, teachers and pupils in these countries are experiencing a new burst of intellectual freedom. Exults Jaroslav Bek, an English teacher at Prague's Belojannisova Street School: "At last we can tell the truth to the children."

The state used to decide where and what every child would study. Now private institutes and church-run schools are springing up, and mandatory courses in Marxism-Leninism are a thing of the past, at least in the East European nations. Even the Soviets have relaxed the requirement that university students pass an exam in Marxist ideology, although party officials gamely insist that the philosophy remains central to Soviet society.

In Czechoslovakia teachers can describe the 1968 Soviet intervention as an invasion instead of as a "counterrevolution" to which the Soviets "gave brotherly assistance." Teachers in Hungary can openly discuss the 1956 uprising for the first time since the event occurred. At the elite Moscow Higher Party School, which trains apparatchiks to run local and regional party committees, instructors express thoughts that would have been considered heresy only a few years ago. "I tell the Cuban students, 'Castro is great, but he won't last forever -- learn democratic methods,' " says professor Yuri Aksyutin.

However refreshing the new honesty may be, it does not repair the damage done by decades of dogmatic rigidity. Science and other fact-based disciplines largely escaped politicalization under communism, but economics and the social sciences were systematically reshaped to conform to Marxist principles. Now that ideology no longer governs how such subjects as history and philosophy are taught, professors are unsure what to tell their students -- or even what the truth is. "They are at square one," says Sarah Lawrence president Alice Ilchman, who visited the Comenius Institute of Education in Prague earlier this year. "They want to know how to write textbooks with differing points of view."

Failing economies and a lack of hard currency are the biggest obstacles to educational reform in the East bloc. In Poland poor working conditions and low pay have led to a shortage of 100,000 teachers. Romanian educators are appealing to the West for typewriters, copying machines, computers, calculators and books. They are also seeking funds to rebuild the Bucharest University library, which was badly damaged during last winter's revolution.

Motivated by self-protection as much as by altruism, Bonn has offered more than $590 million to aid East Germany's troubled universities. The plan is to funnel federal money to selected West German colleges, which will then be teamed with East German schools in need of help. Bonn's concern is that East Germans, who are streaming across the border, will strain the capacity of West German schools unless their own higher-education system improves quickly. In West Berlin alone, authorities are bracing for the arrival of some 1,500 East German students. These newcomers are expected to swarm to the city's 13 universities and institutes this week for the start of the summer semester.

Such tensions are mild compared with those in Romania and Czechoslovakia, where new governments have given students a strong voice in how their universities are run. Hundreds of professors have been fired, some because they were Communist Party loyalists, others because students deemed them incompetent or uninspiring. At Prague's Academy of Fine Arts, students have , dismissed all but two of their 39 instructors. They have hired an outspoken new rector: Milan Knizak, 50, a long-haired multimedia artist who sports three earrings in each ear. Knizak has rejected the school's slogan, which said the purpose of art was to help build socialism. Declares Knizak: "The artist is responsible only to himself."

Many of the teachers who remain will need retraining, especially in modern languages. Throughout the East bloc, Russian was often the only foreign tongue taught. There are some 18,000 teachers of Russian in Poland, for instance, compared with just 4,000 for all other foreign languages combined. Russian instructors there and in Hungary have been encouraged to learn English, German and other Western languages, but few seem eager to make the switch. "This is a grave crisis for me," says Gabriella Udvarheyli, 34, a Russian teacher in Budapest. "All those years of study and, suddenly, my subject is swept aside."

American colleges and corporations are offering dollars, scholars and the promise of lucrative research contracts to help bolster the East bloc's fledgling reform efforts. In January the American Federation of Teachers unveiled a project to help East European educators learn how to instill democratic principles in their schools. Hungarians got a taste of free-market theory last fall, when the International Management Center in Budapest, in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, became the bloc's first business school to offer an American M.B.A.

Meanwhile, Corvin University, the first private university in postwar Eastern Europe, is scheduled to open its doors in Budapest next September. Fees will be high -- some $3,000 a year -- but students are already jostling for places. And that, says Istvan Horvath, president of the University Federation of Hungary, is the way it should be: "Competition must be created for the student and the institution in all subjects."

In the short term, however, competition promises to be education's biggest problem. As Gorbachev tries to coax results from perestroika, and the East European nations struggle to revitalize their economies after 40 years of Communist rule, schools will have to vie with industry and agriculture for scarce resources. But for the moment at least, teachers and pupils seem thrilled by their new freedom to think, speak and seek the truth now that the ghosts of Marx and Lenin have been expelled from the classroom.

With reporting by John Borrell/Budapest and Elizabeth Tucker/Moscow