Education in the Soviet Union
The People's Commissariat for Education directed its attention solely towards introducing political propaganda into the schools and forbidding religious teaching.
During the 8th Party Congress in March 1919, the creation of the new socialist system of education was said to be the major aim of the Soviet government.
In accordance with the Sovnarkom decree of 26 December 1919, signed by its chairman Vladimir Lenin, the new policy of likbez (Russian: ликвидация безграмотности, romanized: likvidatsiya bezgramotnosti, lit.
Moreover, millions of illiterate adult people all over the country, including residents of small towns and villages, were enrolled in special literacy schools.
Komsomol members and Young Pioneer detachments played an important role in the education of illiterate people in villages.
This policy, which lasted essentially from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s, promoted the development and use of non-Russian local and regional languages in the government, the media, and education.
A huge network of so-called "national schools" was established by the 1930s, and enrollments continued to grow throughout the Soviet era.
[8] However, an important legacy of the native-language and bilingual education policies over the years was the nurturing of widespread literacy in dozens of languages of indigenous nationalities of the USSR, accompanied by widespread and growing bilingualism where Russian was said to be the "language of internationality communication"[9] [10] (Russian: язык межнационального общения).
Independent subjects, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, the mother tongue, foreign languages, history, geography, literature or science were abolished.
In addition, many textbooks - such as history ones - were full of ideology and propaganda, and contained factually inaccurate information (see Soviet historiography).
[19] Once those children were taken out of the mainstream (general) schools, and once teachers began to be held accountable for the repeat-rates of their pupils, the rates fell sharply.
[citation needed] This distinguishes the Soviet system from the rest of the world, where educational levels of schools may differ, despite their similar names.
[citation needed] PTUs, tekhnikums, and some military facilities formed a system of so-called “secondary specialized education” (Russian: среднее специальное, sredneye spetsialnoye).
PTU's were vocational schools and trained students in a wide variety of skills ranging from mechanic to hairdresser.
Graduation from this level was required for the positions of qualified workers, technicians and lower bureaucrats (see also vocational education, professions, training).
"Institute" in the sense of a school refers to a specialized "microuniversity" (mostly technical), usually subordinate to the ministry associated with their field of study.
[citation needed] Numerous military and militsiya (police) schools (Russian: высшее училище/школа, vyshee uchilische/shkola) were on the same higher level.
[citation needed] The spirit and structure of Soviet education is mostly inherited by many post-Soviet countries despite formal changes and social transitions.
