Red Schoolhouse, Revised

While U.S. educators have exhorted one another to look to Russia as a shining example of scholastic success, at least one Soviet citizen has been sharply critical of his country's school system. The critic: Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who last April began grumbling that students were graduating from high school with an unmaterialistic, lily-fingered snobbery about physical labor, Marx urged that children be set to work early, the Premier told a youth congress ominously, "and that is quite correct, since only under such conditions will boys and girls appreciate the full complexity and the delights of labor."

Predictable result: last week, after months of debate by Soviet educators and further eruptions from Khrushchev, the Supreme Soviet voted unanimously in favor of a sweeping reconstruction of the Red schoolhouse. Highlights of the change, which will get under way next September and be completed in three to five years:

P: Grammar school run for eight years rather than seven.

P: The system of fulltime middle schools (corresponding to U.S. high schools) will be abandoned. The majority of students will go directly from grammar schools into factories and farms. Those who want more education may apply for a shortened work day, continue studying in three-year night courses.

P: A second group of teen-agers will learn trades or professions in threeyear, "secondary general-educational labor polytechnical schools." They will not escape calluses; the schools will be associated with factories or collective farms.

P: A third group--presumably the smallest--will receive highly specialized university preparatory education, also put in time in farms or workshops run by their schools.

P: University and technical-institute entrance will be determined by recommendations from the party, the Young Communist League, trade unions, and other "social organizations." In some branches of higher education students may concentrate on their studies for the first two or three years. But thereafter they must put in regular periods of work in factories, laboratories and the like. The desirability of "Communist morals" and a Marxist-Leninist outlook will be stressed at all educational levels.

Something less than wholehearted approval of the new plan came from Alexander Nesmeyanov ( TIME Cover, June 2 ), president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In a Literary Gazette article, he observed mildly that interrupting a student's education tended to make him forget what he had learned. Neither was Nesmeyanov enthusiastic about night schools; it would be better, he wrote, if teen-agers studied in the morning, when their heads are clear.

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