Schools Report 1940

Abstract

Let us now bring these various strands together into the thick thread of Soviet schooling for an overview of its extent, the trends that it had evinced and the problems confronting it on the eve of the USSR’s entry into the Second World War. Although the war was to inflict enormous damage on general education, it affected a system that was already flawed. Without taking the 1940/41 situation into account, one easily falls into the trap of regarding the war as virtually the entire explanation of the educational shortcomings of its decade.¹