Word: sovietizers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hechinger, onetime education editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and now associate publisher of the Bridgeport Sunday Herald, traces the history and analyzes the present state of U.S. and Soviet schools in a manner that might unsettle educationists of either nation. Particularly fascinating is the author's account of the rise, and the abrupt, inglorious fall of progressive education in the U.S.S.R. When the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, Hechinger reports, they inherited a system of schools, serving only the children of the upper classes, that was as good as any other in Europe. But in a period...
...Hechinger's notion that the entire progressive period was cynically calculated chaos, begun "consciously and purposely in order to eliminate the power of the old school and undermine the domination of the pre-Revolution intellectuals." U.S. educationists who regarded the Soviet cockroach-hunting interlude as an honest experiment will find Hechinger's theory of planned school-wrecking hard to believe. But plan or happenstance, the effect was of a school system softened to pulp, then reshaped to the form it has had, with some variations, ever since...
Opportunity to Flunk. Hechinger's carefully drawn comparison between the present U.S. and Soviet school systems shows flaws in each. For all Russia's talk of mass education. Soviet schools-at least the sort to which visiting educators are taken-are planned for an elite class of students. In recent years only about 12% of Soviet students have graduated from the nation's ten-year (college prep) schools. And when Premier Khrushchev's learning-and-labor edict (TIME, Jan. 5) takes effect, the proportion probably will drop. In the U.S. 55% of the children who begin...
...Soviet secondary school teacher is expected to be "a scholar in his field and not, as is frequently the case in the United States, merely a college graduate with a rudimentary knowledge of his specialty." Pay, privilege and status of Soviet teachers are far above U.S. levels...
...from lists circulated weeks beforehand, it is possible for a hard-working parrot to have huge scholastic success. For panicked patriots who insist that the-U.S. look abroad for an educational model-something he does not suggest-Hechinger reports that Norwegian academies teach more math and physics than Soviet schools, and that "any French high school graduate would find the Russian [final] exam a breeze...