Word: publicize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...button on sale at Moscow's Izmailovo open-air market not long ago neatly captured the country's traditional attitude toward sex: IN THE SOVIET UNION, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SEX. As far as public discussion is concerned, the statement is not far from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology...
...openness is not just a media phenomenon. The Moscow City Consultation on Family and Marriage recently opened its doors, offering advice to the general public. The Family and Health Association, a voluntary organization, has applied for membership in International Planned Parenthood. Sex education, offered for the first time in just a few schools in the early 1980s, is now supposed to be part of a course on marriage and family life required in all Soviet high schools...
Skeptics are not so confident. They say schools cannot lead the way to reform, they can only reflect society, not shape it. Some of the harshest criticism comes from Uchitelskaya Gazeta, a pro-reform teachers' newspaper that regularly berates the State Committee for Public Education and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Those two mammoth bureaucracies oversee the nation's school system and train its 4 million teachers. Reformers believe that both block educators eager to try more innovative methods...
Gennadi Yagodin, appointed last year as chairman of the State Committee for Public Education, has been blunt about the failings of teachers. Many cannot be replaced or re-educated, he says; the system is simply stuck with them. Money is another problem. Yagodin has promised to double the budget for new school construction and teaching materials. But the biggest need, he feels, is for free thinking. Says Yagodin: "The school badly wants more democracy." In the end, only a generation of new teachers, trained in the era of glasnost, may be able to carry out the sweeping school reform...
...highly unusual public apology, published as an advertisement in TIME and about 100 other magazines and newspapers, Exxon Chairman L.G. Rawl promised that his company not only will pay all direct cleanup costs but "also will meet our obligations to all those who have suffered damage from the spill." Under federal law, the company must pay the first $14 million in cleanup costs, then can tap a fund set up by the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Act for an additional $86 million...