Education in State Socialist Societies The Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to examine the educational systems of two highly developed socialist industrial societies, the Soviet Union and East Germany. It seeks to relate changes in the educational systems of the two societies to changes in their economic systems and to describe the changing social structures which their educational systems are required to reproduce. I hope to show that such societies, in contrast to the industrial societies of the West, face special problems of reproduction which stem from their commitment to the ideology of Marxism. They not only have to reproduce economic skills; the major rationale for their existence is that they are building a new form of society and forging a new type of socialist man. They therefore, have to produce people committed to the revolutionary values of Marxism, people with a socialist consciousness. As I have already argued, however, (in Chapter 2) the particular form of their socialist development produces dilemmas which they have so far found great difficulty in resolving. These dilemmas—between equality and efficiency, involvement and control—are acute in the field of production where they articulate new forms of social stratification. But they are also acute in the field of education. The efficiency-equality dilemma raises questions about who shall be educated, the problem of selection and of what should be taught in schools, the problem of curriculum.