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Education and National Development in the European Socialist States: A Model for the Third World?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Walter D. Connor
Walter D. Connor
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
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Extract

The problems created by rapid expansion of educational systems in the underdeveloped states of Asia, Africa and South America are the subject of a large and diverse literature.1 Familiar to even the most cursory student of this literature are several themes: (1) the ‘devaluation’ of elementary education, which no longer affords entry into white-collar positions as it did in the late colonial periods; (2) the persistent and diffuse ‘elite’ connotations of higher (and even secondary) education, the supply of which, while increasing, remains relatively short; (3) the skewed distribution, within higher education, toward ‘traditional’ disciplines—notably law and the humanities—reflecting the values of the colonial system and running against perceived needs for technological skills; and finally, the concern over the ‘destabilizing’ consequences of a growth in educational access and aspirations disproportionate to the economy's ability to ‘fit’ much of tne-educated-manpower into the system.

Type
Education and Social Mobility
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1975 , pp. 326 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975

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References

1 See, e.g., Coleman, James S., ed., Education and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965);Google ScholarAnderson, C. Arnold and Bowman, Mary Jean, eds., Education and Economic Development (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).Google Scholar

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7 Expansion of education institutions could scarcely have led, of course, to any result other than ‘democratization’. The small upper and middle classes of Tsarist Russia were served well by foreign and domestic educational institutions: any large increase in the number of institutions could only imply the enrollment of numerous youth of ‘toiler’ background, who made up the vast majority of the age-eligible population.

8 Much of the contemporary data for the remainder of this paper is drawn from reports from the research division of Radio Free Europe, which remains as ever an indispensable aid to the researcher interested in the area. Most of the citations to domestic newspaper and journal sources are taken from a recent series of reports on higher education in the socialist states (see below); in the interests of brevity in the notes, those citations which are taken from reports in this series are not identified as such, except by the lack of any reference to this series of Radio Free Europe reports. Any other secondary citations, whether to RFE reports or other sources, are identified.

See: ‘Higher Education in Bulgaria’ (November 9,1972); ‘Higher Education in Yugoslavia’ (December 22, 1972); ‘Higher Education in Hungary’ (January 10, 1973); ‘Higher Education in Poland’ (January 2, 1973); ‘Albanian Higher Education’ (November 6, 1972); ‘Higher Education in the GDR’ (January 29, 1973); ‘Higher Education in Rumania’ (December 19, 1972); ‘Higher Education in Czechoslovakia’ (December 21, 1972); and the summary report ’Education in Eastern Europe: Progress, Problems, and Prospects’ (March 9, 1973).

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38 In this, the East European experience is similar to that of the U.S.S.R. earlier: upward social mobility into nonmanual jobs by the offspring of workers and peasants was common, and no doubt education played an important role in promoting this mobility. But there is no evidence that this process resulted in downward mobility for any large share of those born into white-collar backgrounds. See Feldmesser, Robert A., ‘The Persistence of Status Advantages in Soviet Russia’, American Journal of Sociology LIX, 1 (07 1953), pp. 19–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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44 Ibid.

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46 See Fiszman, , ‘Education and Social Mobility’, pp. 23–4,Google Scholar and by the same author, Revolution and Tradition in People's Poland: Education and Socialization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 271.Google Scholar

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49 Ibid., p. 103.

50 Magyar hirlap, September 5, 1972, p. 2,Google Scholar as cited in ABSEES, January 1973, p. 204.Google Scholar

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63 How long they will serve this end is another question. Though its level of economic development is comparatively high, Czechoslovakia like the other socialist states needs more highly trained personnel, and demand for university education continues to run high.

64 Pravda, May 10, 1972.Google Scholar

65 Scanteia, July 22, 1972.Google Scholar

66 Viata studenteasca, October 25, 1972.Google Scholar

67 The author's own experience at Moscow State University, where students in law and other non-science faculties often agreed that their courses were ‘easier’ than those of science students (and also frequently admitted that they would have preferred a science faculty, had they thought admission likely) tend to add some confirmation to this.

68 Matthews, , Class and Society, pp. 346–7.Google Scholar

69 Neustroev, V. F., ‘Opyt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia problem narodnogo obrazovaniia na sele’, in Sotsiologicheskie problemy narodnogo obrazovaniia (Sverdlovsk, 1967), p. 25.Google Scholar

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73 See Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘The Soviet Past and Future’, Encounter, March 1970, pp. 11–12, and sources cited therein.Google Scholar