The Politics of Soviet Education, by G. Bereday & G.Pennar
Reviewed by G.G.
1961Labour ReviewG.G. Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: words can be misread, and the end of one piece can run into the next. For anything you quote, read the scan.
[p022] The Politics of Soviet Education. Edited by George Z. F. Bereday and Joan Pennar. Stevens and Sons Ltd., £2 Ss. The tremendous success of Russian science, culminating in Gagarin’s space flight, has got the rulers of the capitalist world seriously worried. This book is one of many attempts to find the ‘ secret ’. A series of essays on different aspects of Soviet education by a group of pro-American scholars, it starts with a built-in anti-Russian bias. This leads to a number of ludicrous comments as when, after admitting
[p023] BOOK REVIEWS the superiority of Russian education in maths, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and geography, one writer says that ‘some of these disciplines are subjected to atheistic or materia- listic interpretations.’ The desire to prove that Russiar success is due io ‘authoritarianism ’ and that the West lags behind only because it is ‘free’, prevents a real examination of the structure of Russian education, of its strength and weaknesses. There is, for instance, a hysterical essay on ‘The Anti- Religious Education of Soviet Youth’, which carries hatred in every line. G.G. New Left’s Ancestor