Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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TAMBOV: PERESTROIKA IN THE PROVINCES To see how the reforms are faring outside Moscow, a TIME correspondent and a Soviet journalist traveled together to Tambov, about 260 miles southeast of the capital. Setting down their impressions side by side, the two found far more had changed than they expected and discovered a cadre of young Gorbachevs ready to carry out reform, despite the difficulties...
Fedorov's experience of fortune mixed with frustration is typical of the thriving entrepreneurs -- capitalists without the name -- who exemplify a key but controversial part of Mikhail Gorbachev's economic-reform program, the cooperative movement. In 1987 Gorbachev proposed the formation of privately owned, profit-oriented cooperative enterprises to supplement and even compete with state-run projects. The primary goal of his proposal, which in many respects echoed Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy of 1921, was to inject vitality into the U.S.S.R.'s laggard consumer goods and services industries. In addition, the new co-ops would pay taxes...
Like many aspects of glasnost, however, actual reform of government attitudes toward sex is lagging behind the change in official doctrine. Three years after sex education became mandatory in schools, barely any instructors are qualified to teach it. Those assigned to do so are often too embarrassed even to use animals to illustrate their points. Instead, they talk about sexual reproduction in plants or avoid the topic altogether. The effect is that many schools essentially have no sex education at all. Though that is mostly the result of sheer backwardness, some of the delay also stems from active opposition. Just...
...asked about man's need for religion. Boyko, a 32-year veteran of the classroom, was understandably startled: religion has long been taboo in Soviet schools. But instead of avoiding the issue, she led her students through a 30- minute debate on the universal search for faith. "Before school reform, parents would have come to me, frightened that religion had even come up," Boyko said. "Now no one is surprised...
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...