Does anyone have information on how the education system worked in the Soviet Union and other socialist states?
I keep hearing this line that you'd take a proficiency test in elementary school and that would determine your career path for the rest of your life and you weren't free to choose what you did for a living or something. What truth is there to this, if at all?
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baboon peoples were screeching all of the time it was horrible
Heavily based on rote learning and memorisation. I haven't heard of your proficiency test.
ascd.org
It was strongly pushed to receive a university education, man or woman. If you didn't get a degree it was understood you will get nowhere in life. None of this "I dropped out of college and now I'm a CEO of a tire company" talk that you hear in America. So there was a strong societal pressure to obtain higher education. Unlike in the universities in Western countries you could technically fail and retake your courses in the universities in USSR, Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia as many times as you want.
I’m a Burger. The proficiency test thing was something told to me many times even by my own parents. I figured it was probably anti-communist propaganda, but I wasn’t sure to what degree it was bullshit and if it was actually based on anything.
Like, I used to play chess when I was younger and remember being told that Soviet children would be pulled aside at a young age if they showed proficiency in chess and would be put in a special program where they would basically just study chess all day.
It was … free? I mean, you need to be more specific.
None.
That's an obvious lie, as Soviets relied on uniform systematic education (the interconnectedness was a big thing: whatever you learned in one class was usually given additional context/use in another) for everyone across the entire Union (students could seamlessly move from school to school, the program was the same everywhere, be it Moscow, Tbilisi, or some godforsaken village in Siberia) and were consistently blamed for not permitting students to specialize until university/college.
While some schools did permit specialization, the same basic encyclopedia-style education was still mandatory for them. I.e. if you wanted to be ballerina or a singer, you still got to learn math, physics, chemistry in school. Same for aspiring engineers: they were still taught literature and biology. Stuff students were interested is was for extracurricular clubs (which, obviously, were free even if they used expensive equipment).
I'm a bit busy right now, but check out the name Lav Vygotsky.
He was a development psychologist (or however you call it in English) and his ideas were similar to the ones of Piaget, but the difference was that unlike Piaget who claimed that only heritage and genes were important factors in development, he added learning and environment.
Also, and now my English will show bad since I have no idea how it was translated really into English.
He talked about the Zone of Next Learning, which basically was that:
You had to push and help children in school with assignments, because even when at one point a child can no longer do some assignments on its own but only with the help of a tutor, this is a good way to widen the child's knowledge and make it ready to be able to quickly and sooner solve some problems.
The career path in elementary school seems like cheap anti-communist propaganda to me. Eitherway, this is actually the case in countries with tiered secondary education. In the last 2 years of primary school in the Netherlands, you are assigned a certain tier of secondary education (ranking from more practical to more theoretically oriented). I had the good fortune of getting the highest which means being able to go to a well-funded public high school where you can go directly to university afterwards. Meanwhile my younger sisters are stuck with lower-tier schools where the teaching staff is inadequate in both quantity and quality. You can climb the ranks and I know many who have done so but it's an enormous pain.
So your performance when you are 11/12 will decide whether or not you'll have to spend an additional 1/2 years in high school to get to university.
I think the germans and austrians have a very similar system.
LOL
my mother went to 5 different schools getting a degree for 5 different professions, from nurse to metalwork, and she left the country going to the west by age 25
if anything there was a problem with too much opportunity
There is a good Jacobin article by Meghan Erikson (unfortunately behind their paywall) about early soviet primary education. Basically all of the progressive education innovations leap-frogged Europe in the early 20th centuries in a lot of ways. American and Soviet Educational theorists had a lot of correspondence in developing a wider breadth liberal arts education for children for their respective country. A lot like what said. Even during the civil war and immediately afterwards, when resources were tight, the Soviet's put a lot of effort into not only ensuring every child an education but a progressive and innovative one. One thing about the whole interdisciplinary education they developed and impressed American visitors was in primary school (grade 3?) the entire curriculum was based around the students creating a play for the town. They chose the subject and the different aspects of humanities, math, and science would be built into their creation of this play at the end of year.
Soviet's also put Sputnik in space which made the US realize their education was really lacking behind. Education was something the Soviets, for the most part, did really well
Thanks guys.
That's interesting. I had notice that this whole theory seemed like an exaggerated version of the Western education system.
That's horseshit. You might not get a higher paying job or the job you wanted but only if you didn't qualify for it, meaning that to be someone like an engineer or physicist you had to have gone through all the steps. I don't think that's a bad thing since even if your just an ordinary worker there is nothing wrong with that.
Far easier than what we do in the USA IMO. It was standardized and you had to pass 1 final exam for each university class. If you did especially well however, you would only have to take 1 final exam instead.
Top kek what rubbish, you wanted to be a chess-master you chose it, no-one did it for you. Source; my own aunt (once removed) was a soviet chess champion.
Free education for all including full higher education (universities and the like). Automatically providing for guaranteed Employment, if you did well in school you would have an endless choice of colleges, and from there, jobs. The 10 grade system was in many ways more efficient than the US 12 grade system. The soviet's concerted effort to bring literacy to the more backwards areas of Russia brought literacy to nearly 100%. In 1983, the United States Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, in which it said that in regards to education, Americans were falling behind Russia. It is self evident that education significantly dropped in the USSR after capitalist reform (starting in 1986).
Before the Revolution, 76% of the people were illiterate, including 88% of the women. Virtually complete illiteracy prevailed among the indigenous populations of Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Indeed, more than 40 languages had not been reduced to writing at all. Prior to the revolution, only 290,000 Russians possessed any kind of higher education, whereas the 1959 census reported that more than 13 Million citizens had some higher or specialized secondary education, and more than 45 million people had 7-10 years of education….Raising the literacy rate from 24% to 98.5% within the span of a single generation for more than 200 million people would be an achievement in itself if only one language were involved, to say nothing of the severe problems posed by a multilingual society…To detail the massive character of the Soviet educational effort in Central Asia, the Uzbek Republic, which is the most advanced of the Central Asian areas today, as it was in pre-Revolutionary Russia, provides an apt illustration. Before the Revolution, only 2% of the population was literate. There were no native engineers, doctors, or teachers with a higher education. In short, Central Asia was no different in this respect from most of the colonial dependencies of the European powers, and worse off than many.Today, in the Uzbek Republic alone, there are 32 institutions of higher learning, more than 100 technicums, 50 special technical schools, 12 teachers' colleges, and 1400 kindergartens. Nearly 2,500,000 children attend school, and more than 50% of its teachers have had some higher education…The rate of literacy is over 95%. The Republic before the Revolution possessed no public libraries: today there are nearly 5,000. The number of books printed in the Uzbek language in 1913 was 118,000; today it approaches 19 million. When this record is compared with that of Iran, Afghanistan, the Arab countries, the states of Southeast Asia, or even Turkey, all of which were at a comparable or more advanced level of educational attainment in 1914, the achievement is impressive…” - Vernon V. Aspaturian, Modern Political Systems: Europe
The education system in the USSR was focused on helping every child master the curriculum and to expand their future prospects. It was a teacher's responsibility to find and make use of whatever resources, methodologies or techniques necessary to deliver knowledge and have it settled in a pupil's head. They were authorized to enforce learning, and most children indeed had quite equal opportunities after school (with countless clubs). Schools put all their effort to 'produce' a sufficiently educated individual, who'd be of value to society, and who'd be able to adapt and find his own way and career. That is, the society was the education system's client, and schools were producing a variety of educational 'products', of which 85-90% were exceeding the minimum quality requirements. Today's 'revised' system, based on consumerist values, or rather metrics, is different. The child is now considered the client, and it and its parents have the right to decide what disciplines they do or don't want, what teacher they do or don't like, etc. Schools and colleges merely 'deliver educational services' and have no real authority: if a kid is lazy (and its parents are not concerned), then the education system merely goes idle and lets it sit around through the prom and then merely 'terminates the contract', that is, kicks it out into the world unprepared, useless, unfit, raw material for unemployment and crime.
This actually is what it's like in Eastern Europe
I'm not saying this is true, but people in general act like this here.
user in trades here, how were Soviet trade schools? How much training did students receive and how did apprenticeship work? Was it like most other countries or did it differ?
I can't say for back then, but a lot of Eastern European tradeschools used to have similar systems.
Not sure where you're from, but in my country you start a trade school as eh i guess in the US you call it Highschool, rest of Europe a Gymnasium.
Well instead of Gymnasium students went to tradeschools where they usually had practice for a number of weeks during both semesters of the year in, I could you can use the word factory (Since I only know about the mechanical engineering school).
They usually got the students ready to work right after they finished with their schooling, even now, with the system run down, the schools turned to shitholes and the program basically destroyed, some students still find work like this.
I don't know much about the Soviet Education system, but what I find funny about OP's post is that this "proficient test" that is made to sound bad or whatever, is a very important part of American education, and German education for that matter. So it's another case of American propaganda calling the kettle black hahaha.
I've heard of the phrase "без бумажки ты какашка", which apparently means "without a degree you're shit." I'm a burger so I don't know how prevalent this attitude is in Russia, but if there's a saying for it then that must mean something
NYC is like that. If you score high on an Autism Level test (that parents have to pay for) when you're 5 you get into a gifted program. Then there's tests for special middle schools and then tests for special high schools. If you don't get in you have to go to your zoned school which amounts to little more than day care (but I know people who went to zoned schools and did well in life).
I think most US cities are the same way. Detroit has three high schools even worthy of the name, if you don't get into one just give up and go to prison.
Meanwhile rich suburban kids all go to nice well funded schools and all graduate with good grades regardless of their aptitude.
The US is fucked up, schools are paid for by property taxes, rich areas have very well funded schools while poor areas get shit.
One of my teachers grew up in the Russia and she said that their exams are going to the chalk board and getting asked a random question and then answering it for your teacher.
Is that true? It sounds intimidating but probably better than bubbling in a scantron.
I'm Italian and we have oral exams like that in school, so it's nothing special really.
Depends really, we do have a lot of oral exams.
Honestly I loved those, throughout my school years and uni later I felt more at home just talking then writing, I guess because I had more freedom to work around a question.
While in socialist countries they made sure quality education was available even in rural areas. Really makes you think.
Was she a defector or something? Or was it the fall of SU?
>>>/marx/
Babased boon poster!
It is the situation in Eastern Europe right now. In communism, even if you didn't have a degree, you actually had a chance for dignified/stable labor. In capitalist Eastern Europe it's the law of the jungle. Everyone is leaving, so porky has to compensate for lack of skilled workforce through wage/debt slavery while the ones who can't keep up are left behind.
Source: Am Eastern European.
Thtphrase had nothing to do with a degree. It was in reference to having a Party ID. It comes from the Blat culture (essentially loosley organized underground crime groups)
man I fucking miss old Zig Forums shitposting
absolutely based, they're as bad as the Jews
The facts of a relatively poor economy and a long-term continuous sanctions on trade makes the Cubans' achievements more impressive. For the past forty years, education has been a top priority for the Cuban government.[18] Cuba maintains twice the amount of public spending on education as its more wealthy neighbors, at 10% of GNP.[19]
Cuba shows how important education is by keeping a student to teacher ratio of 12 to 1, which is approximately half of the Latin American average. In addition, the youth illiteracy rate in Cuba is close to zero, a figure unmatched by all other Latin American countries.[20] Cuban schools are closely integrated with the community. Teachers are very active in the communities of the children that attend their schools, and build strong relationships with parents and families to enhance the learning process. It has been demonstrated that there is a strong commitment to the educational sector on the part of the government[citation needed]. Equal opportunity for a high quality education for all students is one of the key factors that explains that the Cuban educational success is not a miracle or an accident, but the result of many years of concerted efforts and commitments, by the government to its people
en.wikipedia.org
Compared with other OECD countries, Russia has some of the smallest class-sizes[7] and some of the shortest instruction-hours per year.[8]
In 2014 the Pearson/Economist Intelligence Unit rated Russia's education as the 8th-best in Europe and the 13th-best in the world;[9] Russia's educational attainment was rated as the 21st-highest in the world, and the students' cognitive skills as the 9th-highest.[10]
In 2015 the OECD ranked Russian students' mathematics and science skills as the 34th-best in the world, between Sweden and Iceland.[11]
In 2016 the US company Bloomberg rated Russia's higher education as the third-best in the world, measuring the percentage of high-school graduates who go on to attend college, the annual science and engineering graduates as a percentage of all college graduates, and science and engineering graduates as a percentage of the labor force.[12]
In 2014 Russia ranked as the 6th most-popular destination for international students.[13]
Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, has stated that one of the good things that Russia inherited from the Soviet era was "a high level of education, especially in technical areas so important for the New Economy".[14]
en.wikipedia.org
lol what good is that if everyone with an education emigrates.
Comr8 made a good analysis: plus.google.com
Chapter 5 of the following book talks about Soviet education as of the 1960s: archive.org