Soviet Education for Science and Technology, by A.G. Korol

[p022] Soviet Education for Science and Technology, by A. G. Kero] (Chapman and Hall, 68s.) THE first Soviet sputnik came as a profound shock to the American people. For two generations they had been told incessantly that the USA stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world in scientific knowledge and technical xnow-how. No human activity on this planet could, they were informed, be better performed than by the Americans. Moreover the American people believed this comfortable ilusion. No one was more surprised, therefore, than the American man in the street when Russia strikingly dis- iHusioned him by sending up the first sputnik—to be followed by a series of American flopniks. The American public, however, was sufficiently educated in science to know what sputnik I meant to them. They had fought two major world wars without a single bomb falling on their cities. Now they knew for certain that in the event of a third world war Russia could accurately drop large H-bombs on any target in the USA which had been ‘named’ for obliteration. America jumped overnight from being a comfortable strategic base to being in the front line—and this one fact is today playing a very important role in international affairs. v How had this ‘terrifying’ change come about? What secret weapon had enabled the Russians to race ahead in rocketry, nuclear energy and even automated production? A number of leading American scientists, even before the spuiniks, had already concerned themselves with studying the rapid advance of technology in Russia and had begun to discover their answer—Russian superiority in technical and scientific edu- cation. And in part, of course, this is the right answer. For, in spite of numerous distortions of educational methods and principles which the present bureaucratic rulers of the Kremlin have foisted on Soviet education, the Russian edu- cational system remains one of the most powerful and pro- gressive achievements of the October Revolution. By this means, the culturally backward Russian workers and peasants of tsarist times have been replaced by workers and peasants with relatively advanced scientific and technical training. By and large, in spite of its defects and shortcomings, the present-day Russian educational system is the most advanced in the world. In the USSR for example the child is taught, from his earliest years, to look directly at the world in which he lives without being trammelled with reactionary, religious and idealist notions concerning natural processes. He gains an idea of the progressive, humanist role which science can play in a rational society. In addition (though this is where Stalinist distortions play most havoc) in Russia all children are regarded as eminently educable. Funds have been made available on a lavish scale for advanced secondary technical and scientific training with the result that today there are pro rata twenty times more advanced science students in Russia than in advanced, ‘liberal’ Britain. Korol has done a great service to educationists in produc- ing this comprehensive book about Soviet educational methods and organization. Though he is sometimes ponder- ous he is always factual. One gathers that Korol is not a socialist and is even hostile to communism. This only serves to make his case more impressive—though it prevents him, finally, from understanding WHY the Russians take educa- tion so seriously in comparison with the ‘advanced’ West. Korol’s survey quite properly pays more attention to higher education than to the earliest years—but he does not make the mistake of regarding the education of the seven-year-old as of no importance for technological education. This book should be read by every progressive teacher in schools and universities. JOHN DANIELS In Rakost’s Jail