Back in the USSR...

That almost hurt... enough with the lame song and movie titles, please.

When I was in the USSR, I spent the bulk of my time in the Russian Republic (RSFSR), where the compulsory school level of achievement was 11 years (roughly the same as ours). I visited several schools, from an elementary level one, to a technical high school (like a boarding school for particularly good students) and such universities as Moscow State and Leningrad University.

My experience was an odd one... much of what I saw, I recognized as similar to what we had here in the US. Classrooms seemed universally the same, the games young children played were the same (I lost a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose" to a group of seven-year-olds... I have that in a picture to this day), the campus layout was familiar in its form and function at each university I visited. Other aspects were utterly alien, though. We had no equivalent to the "Young Pioneers" or the "Komsomol" outside of the totally voluntary Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America... and the Pioneers and Komsomol were voluntary, but had universal membership in all the schools I visited. Attendance was based not on where a child lived, but where that child's parents worked and what union the parents belonged to (much like the manner in which the nation voted). Curriculums were based on a student's strengths and direction of study... meaning athletes went to these classes, math whizzes went to these, and artists went to these classes.

What I know from my studies is that there were facets of Soviet education that I felt reflected the dynamic nature of the nation. The USSR had more than 200 different spoken languages and dialects (thirteen of which were printed on Soviet currency), and the education system reflected this in its emphasis on multi-lingual education. Russian children learned Russian in two different alphabets... modern Cyrillic and classical Cyrillic (pre-1921), as well as a foreign language by the time they entered their secondary-level classes. Russian was compulsory for all non-Russian students, but it wasn't universally spoken... that was a real issue with the Soviet Army since service was also compulsory for three years. Many conscripts from the far eastern republics and the far southern republics spoke almost no Russian, and couldn't read more than a few words.

I'm never sure that the differences I noticed weren't cultural in nature more than they were administrative or organizational. Every school I went to had large, well-attended "chess programs" where students studied the game of chess the way were study music or art (perhaps even more intensely than that). By the age of 16, some students could think a game of chess 100 moves in advance of touching a piece... meaning they had beat me at a game before I had finished my second move. There was a large emphasis on "liberal" education (more than I ever would have expected). Besides the classical studies of such works as those of Tolstoy or Pushkin, they read Shakespeare, Yeats, Milton and Voltaire at a very early age. I did see portraits of Lenin in every school room... but no more than we see portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy or the sitting President in our own (I don't recall seeing any portraits of Gorby the whole time I was there, in fact).

I honestly don't know what our system is failing at when compared to what the Soviets had been doing. What I do know is that, since the fall of communism, such nations as Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Russia itself have all seen a dramatic increase in school drop-out rates, illiteracy, and school violence and crime.

Perhaps that is the price of a free society... but the system by which children and young adults are educated hasn't changed all that much. Why are they better at it then we are?