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12
November, 1948
of School Life, George S. Counts says, "On coming to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks established an open and avowed dictatorship under the banner of the proletariat and con' verted the entire educational system into an instrument wholly and un' reservedly committed to the achieve' ment of the purposes.''
Bolstering this opinion are the words of a recent official pronounce' ment, ''Education in the U.S.S.R. is a weapon for strengthening the Soviet state and the building of a classless society." Such a conception of func tion gives the work of organi^d edu' cation a seriousness that certainly is not matched in the United States. This seriousness is given practical ex' pression in the huge expenditures on education which, in terms of propor' tion of national income, amount to two or three times the American ex' penditures. It is also revealed in the fact that, at the present time, one out of every four of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union is attending a school or class of some kind.
Soviet children, moreover, are made to feel the significance of their school work beyond anything known in the whole history of American education. The members of the entire younger generation are being subjected to an extraordinarily severe regimen in the institutions of organized education. The first of 20 rules adopted in 1943 to govern the conduct of school children runs as follows, "It is the duty of every school child to strive with tenacity and perseverance to master knowledge.'' The spirit of this rule permeates the entire system of Soviet
education. Special medals for superior work, as measured by school marks, are regularly awarded to the best students.
Education in the United States does not cater to any one form of politics, but gives its students a well-rounded
background of history of all political parties which have molded the form of government we know as democracy. The resulting opinions are left up to the student, whereas Russian poHcy designates that its students have no choice other than to believe in only one form of poHtics — Communism.
Education in the Soviet Union is extremely broad in scope. Mr. Counts states that in both conception and practice it is by no means limited to the work of the school system. In addition to that system, which embraces a vast network of institutions from the nursery school and kindergarten to the universities and scientific institutes and academies, it includes all the organized agencies capable of molding or enlightening the minds of both young and old — the family, the factory, the collective farm and the cooperative, the societies for children and youth, labor unions, the organs of government and the Red Army, the book press, the newspaper, the