***From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Development of Soviet Educational Policies
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Markin comment on this article:
Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.
A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
*******
Development of Soviet Educational Policies
by Janis Gerrard
Along with the family and the church, the capitalist educational system serves to perpetuate bourgeois ideology. Expensive private schools and elite institutions of higher learning are for the privileged few. Public schools, on the other hand, stress the skills and discipline necessary to prepare the plebeian masses for their future exploitation.
The Bolshevik Revolution, which had as one of its goals the elimination of the distinction between mental and manual labor, took quite a different approach to education. "Every cook must rule," said Lenin. But in order to rule, one must know how to read and write and think. The illiterate person, he said, stands outside politics.
The Bolshevik Party regarded education as both a pledge to the workers and a necessity for workers democratic rule. An illiterate population, steeped in religious superstition, would be a barrier to socialist development.
At the time that the Bolsheviks seized power, the cultural level of the Russian masses was abysmal. Illiteracy, which was the norm for men, was nearly universal among women. The tsarist school system had catered to the children of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes who were preparing for the professions and government posts. There had been trade-school apprenticeships for a lucky few working-class children, but most children of poor families went to work at an early age.
After the 1905 Revolution, despite the general reaction and repression, there was a slight liberalization in the arts and education. Within the tsarist system a layer of educational reformers came to the fore, many of them Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and other right-wing reformers, and outside it communists and anarchists set up their own schools and study circles, which taught workers and peasants the basics of literacy and hygiene along with politics. This tradition of popular education was part of the Russian radical heritage which dated back to the work of the Narodniki in the 1870s.
The academic intelligentsia enthusiastically welcomed the February revolution, which freed them from the repressive restrictions of the autocracy. However, in October most of them proved to be as anti-communist as they had been anti-autocratic.
This preponderance of anti-communism in academic circles added to the difficulties of the Soviet Commissariat of Education—Narkompros. The tasks it faced were monumental, and during the critical period of the civil war only those commissariats immediately necessary for the survival of the proletarian dictatorship—the army, the food commissariat, the transport authority— received much in the way of human and financial resources.
Almost immediately after the October Revolution, teachers joined the municipal workers of Petrograd and Moscow in an anti-government strike. Allegedly financed by the Ryanbushinsky banking family, the strikers were able to hold out all through the bitter winter. Threats to fire the teachers were ineffective since they could not be immediately replaced.
Many leaders and members of the All-Russian Teachers Union (VUS) joined the counterrevolutionary Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, which worked openly for Bolshevik defeat and used the example of the Bolsheviks' unsuccessful negotiations with the striking teachers in its propaganda. V.M. Pozner, an ultra-leftist within Narkompros, led the tiny minority of pro-Bolshevik teachers out of the VUS to form the Union of Teacher Internationalists and argued that the VUS should be forcibly dissolved. One of the main opponents of this position was Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote in Izvestiia (July 1918):
"I, like comrades Pozner and Lepeshinsky, wanted to tear VUS from the influence of its present leaders, but I am an old splitter and thought it more appropriate to break up VUS from within. In my opinion it was necessary to persuade all teachers supporting Soviet power...not to leave VUS, but to attend its Congress as delegates, and there form a compact group and develop their programmed to the full. Then it would have been clear what the real strength of the internationalists was...."
—N.K. Krupskaya, quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightment
The pro-Bolshevik teachers who had left the VUS were not eager to return, preferring the safety of sectarianism to the rigors of struggle. But with the support of Lenin, the "splitters" won against the red unionists and a successful fight was waged inside VUS, resulting in the formation of a broad, independent Union of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture.
Inspired Beginnings...
Despite its shortcomings, Narkompros initially had great authority. Anatol Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, was well-known and greatly admired. During the Bolshevik struggle against the Provisional Government in 1917 his audiences at factories and in the workers' districts regularly numbered in the thousands. His deputy, Krupskaya, was a respected Bolshevik known for her educational work and writing.
From the time the Bolsheviks seized state power they struggled to make education accessible for the first time to the masses. Child labor was abolished and schooling made mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and seventeen. Literacy was made mandatory for everyone through age 50, and a two-hour reduction in the work day was given to those engaged in such study. Tuition was abolished along with all academic titles, tests, degrees and homework. Teachers were subject to dismissal by their pupils. Unfortunately, however, much of this legislation existed only on paper, since the civil war left few funds for its implementation.
Nevertheless, by 1920 about 25,000 schools for literacy had been established, many of them organized by Zhenotdel, the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women. Though placards over the entrances said "Children are the Hope of the World," in fact the whole nation was going to school and learning to read and write. And those who learned also taught. The slogan of the campaign against illiteracy was: "Every literate person trains an illiterate one."
Despite the anti-communism of most professors the universities were kept open, and admission was free to anyone over 16 years of age who could demonstrate literacy. Special departments called rabfaks were also established in the universities to bring workers up to the standard of university entrance.
The early years of Soviet rule witnessed heated theoretical debate on the philosophy and methods of education. Once again V.M. Pozner crossed swords with the Narkompros leadership. Unlike Lunacharsky, he emphasized the replacement of the family by the school commune and a full reintegration of education with life, asserting that labor skills would be taught by "life itself" rather than artificially in a workshpp.
While these concepts were not at odds with Bolshevik ideals, they were unrealistic during a period of "war communism." The imperialist war and then the civil war had left thousands of homeless children roaming the countryside. Under these conditions the skills such children "learned from life" were likely to be lock picking and thievery. Lenin intervened in the controversy to have Lunacharsky's "Declaration on the United Labor School" declared a literary document, which meant that it was no longer subject to alteration. Lenin's implicit support gave the document the edge it needed to defeat Pozner's "Statement on the United Labor School."
...Clash With Hard Realities
While struggling against the threat of ultra-leftists who sought to realize communist ideals in a backward and impoverished country, the Narkompros leadership had also to wage a continual fight against a hardened, right-wing, anti-communist bloc of educators who remained loyal to the defunct Provisional Government, and with short-sighted elements within the Bolshevik party, including many trade unionists, who were most susceptible to the pressure to gear education solely to fill the desperate, immediate need for skilled workers. Narkompros consistently defended a policy of long-term polytechnical education as opposed to early specialization in trade schools and free education as opposed to the reintroduction of tuition fees.
Drawing on the only resources available, Narkompros attempted to supply the Soviet educational system with the facilities of the old, tsarist technical and trade schools During 1918 and 1919 two hundred trade schools were dismantled and destroyed under Narkompros direction—a rash act at a time when skilled workers were desperately needed and before new facilities had actually been created. This put Narkompros in a defensive position against the proponents of monotechnicalism, who were already gathering a "technical lobby" around a proposal for a United Technical School—a system in which only primary education would have a general character. This lobby gained a powerful ally at the end of 1919 in Leon Trotsky's Commission on Labor Conscription.
Trotsky's plan to allow a limited reintroduction of private trade to regenerate the ravaged economy had been rejected. This plan was to be introduced two years later in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), but during the period when it was temporarily defeated," Trotsky proposed a quasi-military mobilization of labor as the only alternative. An adjunct to this mobilization to ensure the production of qualified workers was educational conscription, with specialized professional training beginning at age 14. The bloc was short-lived, however. The Controversy which arose over Trotsky's proposal centered on the relationship between the state and the trade unions. Trotsky argued that labor conscription necessitated the transformation of trade unions into a disciplined arm of the state. The trade unionists, who made up the bulk of the "technical\ lobby," while supporting educational conscription, opposed the general plan. Lenin sided with the trade unionists on the question of the unions' right to strike and the threatened infringement of trade-union independence, and with the Narkompros leadership in its defense of polytechnicalism.
Narkompros emerged from this struggle victorious but weakened and with the authority of its leadership damaged. The "technical lobby," although temporarily defeated, was strengthened. The general sentiment that Narkompros, whatever its program, had not been able to organize much of anything was close to the truth.
This lack of confidence in Narkompros reached a crisis when an emergency necessitated an unexpected relationship between Narkompros and the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation and Delinquency in Office— otherwise known as the Cheka.
In 1920-the Soviet Union was terrorized by gangs of starving, homeless delinquent youth. Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky proposed that since the Cheka had well-supplied and efficiently operating branches in many areas, it could take on the task of rehabilitating these homeless youth (bespryzornye)—an idea which sent panic through liberal pedagogical circles.
The Cheka proceeded to organize rehabilitation colonies along the lines laid out by Commissar G.F. Grinko of the Ukrainian Narkompros, a long-time foe of the Russian Narkompros' child-centered theories of education. The work was headed by Grinko's protege, Anton Makarenko. Although Makarenko's methods, which included military discipline and hard labor in addition to instruction, were highly unorthodox by Soviet standards, he was successful in rehabilitating seemingly incorrigible delinquents with police records ranging from petty theft to manslaughter.
Each of his collectives was a carefully constructed unit with a built-in stratified, hierarchical and democratic structure calculated to create an atmosphere of intense social pressure to curb the anti-social tendencies of the bespryzornye. Discipline was collective and often self-imposed. Transferred from Narkompros to the Cheka, Makarenko continued to run this operation throughout the 1920's.
Retreat
Under the pressure of the "technical "lobby," Narkompros was forced in 1920 to the conclusion that the shortage of qualified workers made it necessary to temporarily reduce the labor school from nine to seven years and to begin specialized training at age fifteen. This time, even Krupskaya gave in. Since the nine-year school did not exist in any case, except on paper, the real task was to construct the seven-year school.
Narkompros emphasized that this was a regrettable and temporary expedient, and Lenin fought for a reaffirmation of the principle of polytechnical education which he correctly viewed as being in danger during this period of retreat.
The introduction of the New Economic Policy halted the few advances that Narkompros had achieved. The end of food requisitions and the introduction of the tax in kind meant a drastic reduction in state funds available for education. All departments were urged to take advantage of the limited free market and become self-sufficient. Narkompros, however, had nothing to market but theater tickets and literature. At the same time, costs skyrocketed, since public services such as sewage, electricity, fuel and transportation now cost money. In February and March of 1922 an acute financial crisis led to a large number of Soviet employees being taken off state supply. The number of teachers receiving or even entitled to salaries fell drastically, leading to a wholesale closing of schools.
After reaching a peak of 82,000 in 1921, primary schools were driven down to 49,000 by October 1923. Those schools which did survive the removal of central funding initiated local self-taxation in kind, making teachers directly dependent on the kulaks (rich peasants) for their most immediate needs.
Narkompros initially forbade the reintroduction of tuition fees but was soon forced to allow it as a temporary expedient. Krupskaya called this decision, which once again made education a privilege of those who could afford it, a vulgar retreat from the party program.
Stalinist Education
Many Narkompros members became involved in the oppositional struggle against the rise of Stalinist bureaucratism which followed Lenin's death in 1924. Krupskaya initially fought with the joint opposition but was seduced back into the fold by the ultra-left policies of Stalin's "third period." But although she remained a figurehead in Narkompros, she was stripped of all real influence. Lunacharsky avoided the political struggle, apparently hoping to defend the gains of Narkompros in the arts and education against the general social retrenchment.
Although Narkompros now entered a period of demoralization and relative inactivity, it continued to wage some agitational campaigns. In 1925, the League of the Militant Godless, an organization dedicated to the replacement of superstition with scientific knowledge, was founded with Narkompros support. The campaign to combat illiteracy was also pursued vigorously, despite the inability of schools to accommodate students.
The defeat of the Left Opposition meant the defeat of Leninism. However, in education this void was not immediately filled by Stalinist policies. Instead, the crackpot theories of "pedology" and "spontaneous education" became popular during the middle and late twenties. The adherents of these theories predicted the "withering away of the schools," perhaps in an effort to justify the unfortunate reality—there were not enough schools!
The first All-Union Congress of Pedology boasted 2,500 participants.
From 1929 on, Stalin attempted to give programmatic justification to the temporary and unavoidable retreats in the field of education. The old tsarist educators returned to the classrooms, degrees, titles and pedagogic discipline were reinstituted and the schools again were devoted to instilling labor discipline and servility. A major pedagogic text of the early Stalinist period was entitled I Want to Be Like Stalin!
Stalin found his perfect educational theorist in Makarenko. After his successes in the twenties with the besprizornye, Makarenko could argue in the thirties with the authority of an enlightened and successful pedagogue for militarism, discipline and patriotism. With Makarenko at the head of Stalin's campaign against "pedological perversions," the popular theory served as a straw man to guillotine the whole concept of education for individual development. And since Makarenko's old foes in Narkompros, including Krupskaya and Lunacharsky, were tainted by their association with pedology, the campaign served both as a scapegoat for the failure of early Soviet educational policies and as a screen for the turn from the earlier prevailing approach to education.
In 1940 the imminent danger of a German invasion motivated a switch to quick vocational and military training ranging from six-month factory courses to two-year vocational schools. Tuition fees for education beyond the eighth grade made the factory courses the only real option of the poor. By 1942 vocational schools were introduced for children as young as ten years of age, and military training was instituted.
In 1943, separate education for boys and girls was re-introduced on the grounds that co-education had served its purpose—smashing the vestiges of the tsarist oppression of women. The liberated Soviet woman, it was argued, needed a separate education to better prepare her for her special Work in life—not the least of which was marriage and motherhood.
The contradictions generally inherent in Stalinism were duplicated in the Stalinist educational system. The Stalinist bureaucrats achieved their privileged position by politically expropriating the working class, yet they maintained their rule only by defending collectivized property, which is in the historic interests of the workers. These property forms demand technological and scientific development, which is dependent on individual human creativity possible only in the context of a generally high cultural level. Thus, the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to return a high proportion of the national surplus to mass education. It created an educational system which supplied necessary scientists and technicians and at the same time indoctrinated the young with a misplaced loyalty to the bureaucracy and its programs.
The self-serving bureaucracy is at times its own worst enemy. Disastrous consequences often result from the attempt to bolster the reactionary program of "socialism in one country" with Utopian, anti-materialist theories. Thus, Lysenko's crackpot genetic theories applied to agriculture led to the destruction of vast tracts of arable land. But Soviet education nevertheless achieved great leaps in science, industry and even sports. In a matter of decades the Soviet Union was transformed from a backward, largely feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial state and a major military power. The appearance of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, and the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb put a spotlight on Soviet education, producing in the U.S. a flood of books with such titles as: What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, and The Challenge of Soviet Education.
The achievements not only of the USSR but of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and China show what socialized property and centralized education can achieve even without enlightened policies. Only a political revolution based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, however, will restore intellectual and artistic freedom and unleash the unknown capacities of the human mind. With the victory of the reforged Fourth International, EVERY COOK WILL RULE!
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Markin comment on this article:
Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.
A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
*******
Development of Soviet Educational Policies
by Janis Gerrard
Along with the family and the church, the capitalist educational system serves to perpetuate bourgeois ideology. Expensive private schools and elite institutions of higher learning are for the privileged few. Public schools, on the other hand, stress the skills and discipline necessary to prepare the plebeian masses for their future exploitation.
The Bolshevik Revolution, which had as one of its goals the elimination of the distinction between mental and manual labor, took quite a different approach to education. "Every cook must rule," said Lenin. But in order to rule, one must know how to read and write and think. The illiterate person, he said, stands outside politics.
The Bolshevik Party regarded education as both a pledge to the workers and a necessity for workers democratic rule. An illiterate population, steeped in religious superstition, would be a barrier to socialist development.
At the time that the Bolsheviks seized power, the cultural level of the Russian masses was abysmal. Illiteracy, which was the norm for men, was nearly universal among women. The tsarist school system had catered to the children of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes who were preparing for the professions and government posts. There had been trade-school apprenticeships for a lucky few working-class children, but most children of poor families went to work at an early age.
After the 1905 Revolution, despite the general reaction and repression, there was a slight liberalization in the arts and education. Within the tsarist system a layer of educational reformers came to the fore, many of them Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and other right-wing reformers, and outside it communists and anarchists set up their own schools and study circles, which taught workers and peasants the basics of literacy and hygiene along with politics. This tradition of popular education was part of the Russian radical heritage which dated back to the work of the Narodniki in the 1870s.
The academic intelligentsia enthusiastically welcomed the February revolution, which freed them from the repressive restrictions of the autocracy. However, in October most of them proved to be as anti-communist as they had been anti-autocratic.
This preponderance of anti-communism in academic circles added to the difficulties of the Soviet Commissariat of Education—Narkompros. The tasks it faced were monumental, and during the critical period of the civil war only those commissariats immediately necessary for the survival of the proletarian dictatorship—the army, the food commissariat, the transport authority— received much in the way of human and financial resources.
Almost immediately after the October Revolution, teachers joined the municipal workers of Petrograd and Moscow in an anti-government strike. Allegedly financed by the Ryanbushinsky banking family, the strikers were able to hold out all through the bitter winter. Threats to fire the teachers were ineffective since they could not be immediately replaced.
Many leaders and members of the All-Russian Teachers Union (VUS) joined the counterrevolutionary Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, which worked openly for Bolshevik defeat and used the example of the Bolsheviks' unsuccessful negotiations with the striking teachers in its propaganda. V.M. Pozner, an ultra-leftist within Narkompros, led the tiny minority of pro-Bolshevik teachers out of the VUS to form the Union of Teacher Internationalists and argued that the VUS should be forcibly dissolved. One of the main opponents of this position was Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote in Izvestiia (July 1918):
"I, like comrades Pozner and Lepeshinsky, wanted to tear VUS from the influence of its present leaders, but I am an old splitter and thought it more appropriate to break up VUS from within. In my opinion it was necessary to persuade all teachers supporting Soviet power...not to leave VUS, but to attend its Congress as delegates, and there form a compact group and develop their programmed to the full. Then it would have been clear what the real strength of the internationalists was...."
—N.K. Krupskaya, quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightment
The pro-Bolshevik teachers who had left the VUS were not eager to return, preferring the safety of sectarianism to the rigors of struggle. But with the support of Lenin, the "splitters" won against the red unionists and a successful fight was waged inside VUS, resulting in the formation of a broad, independent Union of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture.
Inspired Beginnings...
Despite its shortcomings, Narkompros initially had great authority. Anatol Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, was well-known and greatly admired. During the Bolshevik struggle against the Provisional Government in 1917 his audiences at factories and in the workers' districts regularly numbered in the thousands. His deputy, Krupskaya, was a respected Bolshevik known for her educational work and writing.
From the time the Bolsheviks seized state power they struggled to make education accessible for the first time to the masses. Child labor was abolished and schooling made mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and seventeen. Literacy was made mandatory for everyone through age 50, and a two-hour reduction in the work day was given to those engaged in such study. Tuition was abolished along with all academic titles, tests, degrees and homework. Teachers were subject to dismissal by their pupils. Unfortunately, however, much of this legislation existed only on paper, since the civil war left few funds for its implementation.
Nevertheless, by 1920 about 25,000 schools for literacy had been established, many of them organized by Zhenotdel, the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women. Though placards over the entrances said "Children are the Hope of the World," in fact the whole nation was going to school and learning to read and write. And those who learned also taught. The slogan of the campaign against illiteracy was: "Every literate person trains an illiterate one."
Despite the anti-communism of most professors the universities were kept open, and admission was free to anyone over 16 years of age who could demonstrate literacy. Special departments called rabfaks were also established in the universities to bring workers up to the standard of university entrance.
The early years of Soviet rule witnessed heated theoretical debate on the philosophy and methods of education. Once again V.M. Pozner crossed swords with the Narkompros leadership. Unlike Lunacharsky, he emphasized the replacement of the family by the school commune and a full reintegration of education with life, asserting that labor skills would be taught by "life itself" rather than artificially in a workshpp.
While these concepts were not at odds with Bolshevik ideals, they were unrealistic during a period of "war communism." The imperialist war and then the civil war had left thousands of homeless children roaming the countryside. Under these conditions the skills such children "learned from life" were likely to be lock picking and thievery. Lenin intervened in the controversy to have Lunacharsky's "Declaration on the United Labor School" declared a literary document, which meant that it was no longer subject to alteration. Lenin's implicit support gave the document the edge it needed to defeat Pozner's "Statement on the United Labor School."
...Clash With Hard Realities
While struggling against the threat of ultra-leftists who sought to realize communist ideals in a backward and impoverished country, the Narkompros leadership had also to wage a continual fight against a hardened, right-wing, anti-communist bloc of educators who remained loyal to the defunct Provisional Government, and with short-sighted elements within the Bolshevik party, including many trade unionists, who were most susceptible to the pressure to gear education solely to fill the desperate, immediate need for skilled workers. Narkompros consistently defended a policy of long-term polytechnical education as opposed to early specialization in trade schools and free education as opposed to the reintroduction of tuition fees.
Drawing on the only resources available, Narkompros attempted to supply the Soviet educational system with the facilities of the old, tsarist technical and trade schools During 1918 and 1919 two hundred trade schools were dismantled and destroyed under Narkompros direction—a rash act at a time when skilled workers were desperately needed and before new facilities had actually been created. This put Narkompros in a defensive position against the proponents of monotechnicalism, who were already gathering a "technical lobby" around a proposal for a United Technical School—a system in which only primary education would have a general character. This lobby gained a powerful ally at the end of 1919 in Leon Trotsky's Commission on Labor Conscription.
Trotsky's plan to allow a limited reintroduction of private trade to regenerate the ravaged economy had been rejected. This plan was to be introduced two years later in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), but during the period when it was temporarily defeated," Trotsky proposed a quasi-military mobilization of labor as the only alternative. An adjunct to this mobilization to ensure the production of qualified workers was educational conscription, with specialized professional training beginning at age 14. The bloc was short-lived, however. The Controversy which arose over Trotsky's proposal centered on the relationship between the state and the trade unions. Trotsky argued that labor conscription necessitated the transformation of trade unions into a disciplined arm of the state. The trade unionists, who made up the bulk of the "technical\ lobby," while supporting educational conscription, opposed the general plan. Lenin sided with the trade unionists on the question of the unions' right to strike and the threatened infringement of trade-union independence, and with the Narkompros leadership in its defense of polytechnicalism.
Narkompros emerged from this struggle victorious but weakened and with the authority of its leadership damaged. The "technical lobby," although temporarily defeated, was strengthened. The general sentiment that Narkompros, whatever its program, had not been able to organize much of anything was close to the truth.
This lack of confidence in Narkompros reached a crisis when an emergency necessitated an unexpected relationship between Narkompros and the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation and Delinquency in Office— otherwise known as the Cheka.
In 1920-the Soviet Union was terrorized by gangs of starving, homeless delinquent youth. Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky proposed that since the Cheka had well-supplied and efficiently operating branches in many areas, it could take on the task of rehabilitating these homeless youth (bespryzornye)—an idea which sent panic through liberal pedagogical circles.
The Cheka proceeded to organize rehabilitation colonies along the lines laid out by Commissar G.F. Grinko of the Ukrainian Narkompros, a long-time foe of the Russian Narkompros' child-centered theories of education. The work was headed by Grinko's protege, Anton Makarenko. Although Makarenko's methods, which included military discipline and hard labor in addition to instruction, were highly unorthodox by Soviet standards, he was successful in rehabilitating seemingly incorrigible delinquents with police records ranging from petty theft to manslaughter.
Each of his collectives was a carefully constructed unit with a built-in stratified, hierarchical and democratic structure calculated to create an atmosphere of intense social pressure to curb the anti-social tendencies of the bespryzornye. Discipline was collective and often self-imposed. Transferred from Narkompros to the Cheka, Makarenko continued to run this operation throughout the 1920's.
Retreat
Under the pressure of the "technical "lobby," Narkompros was forced in 1920 to the conclusion that the shortage of qualified workers made it necessary to temporarily reduce the labor school from nine to seven years and to begin specialized training at age fifteen. This time, even Krupskaya gave in. Since the nine-year school did not exist in any case, except on paper, the real task was to construct the seven-year school.
Narkompros emphasized that this was a regrettable and temporary expedient, and Lenin fought for a reaffirmation of the principle of polytechnical education which he correctly viewed as being in danger during this period of retreat.
The introduction of the New Economic Policy halted the few advances that Narkompros had achieved. The end of food requisitions and the introduction of the tax in kind meant a drastic reduction in state funds available for education. All departments were urged to take advantage of the limited free market and become self-sufficient. Narkompros, however, had nothing to market but theater tickets and literature. At the same time, costs skyrocketed, since public services such as sewage, electricity, fuel and transportation now cost money. In February and March of 1922 an acute financial crisis led to a large number of Soviet employees being taken off state supply. The number of teachers receiving or even entitled to salaries fell drastically, leading to a wholesale closing of schools.
After reaching a peak of 82,000 in 1921, primary schools were driven down to 49,000 by October 1923. Those schools which did survive the removal of central funding initiated local self-taxation in kind, making teachers directly dependent on the kulaks (rich peasants) for their most immediate needs.
Narkompros initially forbade the reintroduction of tuition fees but was soon forced to allow it as a temporary expedient. Krupskaya called this decision, which once again made education a privilege of those who could afford it, a vulgar retreat from the party program.
Stalinist Education
Many Narkompros members became involved in the oppositional struggle against the rise of Stalinist bureaucratism which followed Lenin's death in 1924. Krupskaya initially fought with the joint opposition but was seduced back into the fold by the ultra-left policies of Stalin's "third period." But although she remained a figurehead in Narkompros, she was stripped of all real influence. Lunacharsky avoided the political struggle, apparently hoping to defend the gains of Narkompros in the arts and education against the general social retrenchment.
Although Narkompros now entered a period of demoralization and relative inactivity, it continued to wage some agitational campaigns. In 1925, the League of the Militant Godless, an organization dedicated to the replacement of superstition with scientific knowledge, was founded with Narkompros support. The campaign to combat illiteracy was also pursued vigorously, despite the inability of schools to accommodate students.
The defeat of the Left Opposition meant the defeat of Leninism. However, in education this void was not immediately filled by Stalinist policies. Instead, the crackpot theories of "pedology" and "spontaneous education" became popular during the middle and late twenties. The adherents of these theories predicted the "withering away of the schools," perhaps in an effort to justify the unfortunate reality—there were not enough schools!
The first All-Union Congress of Pedology boasted 2,500 participants.
From 1929 on, Stalin attempted to give programmatic justification to the temporary and unavoidable retreats in the field of education. The old tsarist educators returned to the classrooms, degrees, titles and pedagogic discipline were reinstituted and the schools again were devoted to instilling labor discipline and servility. A major pedagogic text of the early Stalinist period was entitled I Want to Be Like Stalin!
Stalin found his perfect educational theorist in Makarenko. After his successes in the twenties with the besprizornye, Makarenko could argue in the thirties with the authority of an enlightened and successful pedagogue for militarism, discipline and patriotism. With Makarenko at the head of Stalin's campaign against "pedological perversions," the popular theory served as a straw man to guillotine the whole concept of education for individual development. And since Makarenko's old foes in Narkompros, including Krupskaya and Lunacharsky, were tainted by their association with pedology, the campaign served both as a scapegoat for the failure of early Soviet educational policies and as a screen for the turn from the earlier prevailing approach to education.
In 1940 the imminent danger of a German invasion motivated a switch to quick vocational and military training ranging from six-month factory courses to two-year vocational schools. Tuition fees for education beyond the eighth grade made the factory courses the only real option of the poor. By 1942 vocational schools were introduced for children as young as ten years of age, and military training was instituted.
In 1943, separate education for boys and girls was re-introduced on the grounds that co-education had served its purpose—smashing the vestiges of the tsarist oppression of women. The liberated Soviet woman, it was argued, needed a separate education to better prepare her for her special Work in life—not the least of which was marriage and motherhood.
The contradictions generally inherent in Stalinism were duplicated in the Stalinist educational system. The Stalinist bureaucrats achieved their privileged position by politically expropriating the working class, yet they maintained their rule only by defending collectivized property, which is in the historic interests of the workers. These property forms demand technological and scientific development, which is dependent on individual human creativity possible only in the context of a generally high cultural level. Thus, the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to return a high proportion of the national surplus to mass education. It created an educational system which supplied necessary scientists and technicians and at the same time indoctrinated the young with a misplaced loyalty to the bureaucracy and its programs.
The self-serving bureaucracy is at times its own worst enemy. Disastrous consequences often result from the attempt to bolster the reactionary program of "socialism in one country" with Utopian, anti-materialist theories. Thus, Lysenko's crackpot genetic theories applied to agriculture led to the destruction of vast tracts of arable land. But Soviet education nevertheless achieved great leaps in science, industry and even sports. In a matter of decades the Soviet Union was transformed from a backward, largely feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial state and a major military power. The appearance of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, and the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb put a spotlight on Soviet education, producing in the U.S. a flood of books with such titles as: What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, and The Challenge of Soviet Education.
The achievements not only of the USSR but of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and China show what socialized property and centralized education can achieve even without enlightened policies. Only a political revolution based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, however, will restore intellectual and artistic freedom and unleash the unknown capacities of the human mind. With the victory of the reforged Fourth International, EVERY COOK WILL RULE!
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