$Unique_ID{COW02448} $Pretitle{276} $Title{Mongolia Chapter 7B. Students} $Subtitle{} $Author{Trevor N. Dupuy, Wendell Blanchard} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{school education mongolian schools students teachers children teacher books training} $Date{1973} $Log{} Country: Mongolia Book: Mongolia, A Country Study Author: Trevor N. Dupuy, Wendell Blanchard Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1973 Chapter 7B. Students The Mongolian government was confronted with formidable obstacles when it declared education compulsory in 1955. It faced both the indifference of uneducated parents, and the physical problems of a sparsely settled, mobile population living in an inhospitable climate and terrain. Parental apathy has been partly overcome by government propaganda stressing education's importance. The scenario of one play produced in recent years had a widowed mother send her children to school, leaving her with no one home in the yurt to help her. After remarriage, the stepfather, kept one son at home. The other son, who was sent to school, turned out to be a success, but the stepfather, and the son he kept at home, were failures. The Mongolian audience wept. In case such messages are not effective, the Council of Ministers in 1955 authorized the executive committees of the khurals throughout the country to take administrative measures against parents who evade compulsory education for their school-age children. These include a warning, or fines from 50 to 200 tugriks. Transportation problems have been met in part by the establishment of boarding schools in population centers. The goal of the 1963 reorganization plan was to have 40,000 children (40 percent) in boarding schools by 1965, while the Fourth 5-Year Plan calls for boarding facilities for 45 to 50 percent of all students in rural areas. During the winter months the rural school is nearly always a boarding school, but during the fall and spring months when transportation is easier, some of the children may ride horseback to school. If the family is too far away from the school, the children may be sent to relatives who live closer. Mongol families are ready to accept a variety of arrangements for their school children during the school year (see ch. 5, Family). Detailed regulations concerning the administration of boarding schools and the requirements of parents were announced in 1960. Parents are no longer asked to bring meat and cash for their children. They must, however, bring outer clothing, two changes of underwear, exercise books, and all other classroom necessities before the beginning of the school year on September 1. The state provides school uniforms, room furnishings, bedding, towels and toiletries, laundry service, food and drink, and sanitary facilities. The Ministry of Education is given a list of the daily minimal food requirements for the children and instructed to increase the amount of milk and vegetables served. The budget provides that 2.30 tugriks be spent daily on children in the 4- and 8-year schools, and that 3.3 tugriks be spent for children in the 8- and 11-year schools in the larger population centers. In order to provide the needed food, the Ministry of Education raises its own meat and vegetables with the assistance of student labor. University students who meet the requirements are given free tuition and books, as well as stipends of up to 240 tugriks per month. This is a larger sum than the average wage of a Mongolian worker. About one-third of the university students are women. During vacations, the students used to go home to their families and help with the livestock. Now the government decides where they will go and what work they will do. This policy is a hardship for many families. In 1959 government officials decided that students in secondary schools and in higher education must work at industrial, agricultural, and construction jobs for 30 days during their summer vacations. Secondary school children are paid at prevailing wages at the place of employment. Older students continue to get their regular stipends. During one summer vacation period, students and teachers from the university and specialized institutes dug more than 400 wells in dry sections of the country in order to open up new pasturelands. Income derived by the government from student labor, whether it be from the sale of products made during training or the sale of crops from experimental fields, is to be used for the purchase of tools and equipment needed for training, for seeds, to reward outstanding students, finance student excursions, improve school grounds or to set up cultural facilities. A problem particularly concerning school officials is the question of dropouts. Most of the students who drop out leave during the fifth, sixth, or seventh grades. In some of the provinces nearly one-quarter of the children do not complete the fourth grade. The main cause is failure to move on to a higher grade, which in turn is caused by poor studying habits, according to a 1967 report of the Minister of Education. Students become discouraged and leave school entirely if they fail to move up to a higher grade. Various remedies are proposed, including better motivation of pupils and improvements of pedagogical methods. Teachers A shortage of teachers was one of the most serious problems facing the Mongolian system of education in the 1920s, and it has continued to be a source of concern until very recently. The first school of higher education established in 1940, was the Evening Institute for Teacher Certification. The University of Ulan Bator, founded in 1942, had a department of pedagogy which became a separate Pedagogical Institute in 1961. During the early years teachers were poorly trained, and ambitious students were unable to obtain a higher education. In 1928, of 170 teachers, less than half had had any teacher training. They also lacked the ideological background needed to indoctrinate their students in Communist philosophy. Anyone who could read and write became a teacher during the early years. Even feudal officials, if considered loyal to the new regime, were employed. In 1922, the first group of 36 teachers was trained in a 3-month course. A special school, established in 1924, became in 1925 a teacher-training college for elementary and secondary school teachers. In 1934, the Party Congress adopted a specific program for teacher training and instruction. Within the next 30 years the number of teachers increased more than five times. During the second 5-year plan (1953-57), pedagogical schools in Choibalsan, Tsetserleg, and Ulan Bator trained more than 1,000 teachers and accepted 2,000 for training. Evening and correspondence courses retrained 2,000 teachers having over 10 years of service. In 1960, there were 3,743 teachers, of whom 1,081 were in grades 5-7, and 375 in grades 8-10. The school teacher with a secondary education earns the equivalent of 400 to 480 tugriks per month. Outstanding teachers are rewarded with the title "Propagator of Culture" and receive cash prizes. Baldani Tsevegjab, teacher, school director, and author, celebrated her 30th anniversary as a teacher in 1957. She was awarded two orders of Sukhe-Bator, two orders of the Red Banner of Labor, and other medals. She had worked to combat illiteracy and had helped establish the evening University of Marxism and Leninism. Her pupils have become writers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, and she has the title,"Honored Teacher of Mongolia." In 1967, the Minister of Education stressed the need for responsible and disciplined teachers who have been adequately trained in their fields and who are "ideologically stable." He cited the need to standardize teacher training, recruitment, promotion, and on-the-job training, as well as for teachers to profit from one another's experience. Proper assignments, promotions, and assessments are also needed. Content and Method In the 1920s, Mongolia's first schools taught children to read and write in Mongolian script. Geography and history were also part of the curriculum. Memorization was the primary method of instruction. The Mongolian school was then and still is a disciplined institution rather than a child-centered one. A uniform syllabus was introduced in the mid-thirties, but in the 1940s the chief concern was with ideological orthodoxy. In 1949, the Party Central Committee handed out specific instructions for teaching history and literature in the schools. The Education Act of 1961 revised the educational system and stressed the need for coordination of studies with practical life at all levels. In cited Mongolia's change from a country of livestock breeders to a nation with settled farmers and factory workers, and pointed out the need to give students advanced techniques and knowledge as well as high Communist morale. Greater attention was to be paid to instilling study habits among pupils; teaching them to love work and to respect workers; to be materialistic in outlook; and to be patriotic and loyal to the cause of proletarian internationalism. The 1966 Party Congress adopted the fourth program of the Central Committee, which contained a section devoted to education. The program stressed the importance of giving young people a Communist upbringing. The Party was urged to disseminate modern knowledge and scientific-atheistic propaganda among the people (see ch. 14, Political Values and Attitudes). Party propaganda beamed to the Mongolian people through a variety of media is woven also into the subject content of school classes. Even geography is taught with an ideological bias. The glories of communism and the decadence of capitalism are illustrated by the study of history. From the fifth year upward, children are impressed with the inevitable victory of communism, and taught to reject bourgeois ideas. The purpose of teaching history is to illustrate Communist principles and create Party supporters. Genghis Khan, the traditional hero of Mongolian nationalists, is shown to be a tyrant working for feudal lords. Communist leaders Lenin and Sukhe Bator are elevated in his place. The Manchus of China, who ruled Mongolia for so many years, are depicted as evil warlords and the source of Mongolia's present problems. Attitudes toward other countries and even toward history itself change from time to time and are coordinated carefully with the Soviet propaganda line (see ch. 12, Foreign Relations; ch. 13, Public Information). Basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught during the first 4 years. Russian language becomes part of the curriculum during the third year in Ulan Bator schools and during the fourth year in all other schools. The Cyrillic alphabet is used to teach both modern Mongolian and Russian. Traditional Mongolian script is now taught as well, and this gives students some awareness of Mongolia's history before 1921. The goal of the General Education and Labor-Polytechnic School is to give children ages 8-16 a good Communist upbringing and a general academic and polytechnic education. By polytechnic is meant an introduction to handwork, such as sewing, woodwork, and practical experiences in horticulture and animal husbandry. The curriculum of the 7-year schools includes the Mongolian and Russian languages, the geography and history of Mongolia and the world, elementary algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, zoology and botany, as well as music, crafts and sports. The 10-year schools offer more advanced work in these subjects and include economic geography and political science. The mathematics offered includes trigonometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, and infinite series. Western visitors to Mongolia report that most of the schools are now housed in buildings rather than gers (see Glossary), as in former years, and that nurseries, schools and laboratories are well-equipped. Libraries are well-stocked, but many books are published in the Russian language. Textbooks printed in Mongolian continue to be in short supply. The first printing press in Mongolia was purchased in Shanghai in 1924, and a building was constructed to house it. Between 1940 and 1947, 2 million school books were printed. Today the Sukhe Bator State Printing works in Ulan Bator has modern equipment, thousands of employees, and publishes many books, including textbooks. Each year the Academy of Sciences makes available a list of books published. The 1962 list included 45 textbooks, in addition to dictionaries and other reference works, educational books, literature, and translations. The subject matter of the textbooks included arithmetic, literature, home economics, astronomy, economic geography of the socialist countries, Mongolian literature, general geography, Mongolian grammar, algebra, physics, music, and both Mongolian and Russian readers. Many of the Mongolian textbooks are simply translations from the Russian. Textbooks printed in the Soviet Union are used in higher education in part to save the Mongolian printing press from having to publish books for which there is only a small demand. Many of the advanced students go to the Soviet Union for Study and all of them are able to read the Russian language. At the end of 1966, the Ministry of Education approved the setting up of "methodical centers" in the elementary schools in order to provide teachers with visual teaching aids and equipment. The heads of the centers are appointed by the principal and work under supervision of the Chairman of the Methodical Union. Specific materials are listed in the directive of the Ministry of Education. These include reference works and visual aids for teaching arithmetic, language and composition, nature, labor training, foreign languages, drawing, singing and physical culture. Space is provided for displaying the students' creative work. The Education Minister noted in his special report of 1967 that while many of the elementary and secondary schools were equipped with carpenter and blacksmith shops, work-and-rest camps, and experimental plots, there was a need to see that the work and experimental rooms were properly supplied with radios, record players, tape recorders, and movie and slide projectors.