TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/0423120.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.1 KB | 151 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 70

Expelling The Ghosts of Marx and Lenin


Soviet bloc schools embrace freedom and reform


    His normally fidgety students were riveted when Moscow
history teacher Andrei Isayev turned the tables on the Russian
Revolution. Isayev first took down all the pictures of Lenin in
his tenth-grade classroom. Then he told his students that the
1917 Revolution, which had been taught for decades as holy writ,
was not so glorious as their government-issued textbooks had
portrayed it. The students proved to be fast learners. "Lenin
was a dark personality," one of Isayev's pupils says, when a
Western visitor asks him about the founder of the modern Soviet
state. He made "big mistakes" and caused "a catastrophe."

    Not so long ago, such comments would have been considered a
betrayal of socialist ideals and Isayev would have been sacked.
Today, with glasnost gusting through the Soviet Union and
communism lying in tatters throughout Eastern Europe, teachers
and pupils in these countries are experiencing a new burst of
intellectual freedom. Exults Jaroslav Bek, an English teacher
at Prague's Belojannisova Street School: "At last we can tell
the truth to the children."

    The state used to decide where and what every child would
study. Now private institutes and church-run schools are
springing up, and mandatory courses in Marxism-Leninism are a
thing of the past, at least in the East European nations. Even
the Soviets have relaxed the requirement that university
students pass an exam in Marxist ideology, although party
officials gamely insist that the philosophy remains central to
Soviet society.

    In Czechoslovakia teachers can describe the 1968 Soviet
intervention as an invasion instead of as a "counterrevolution"
to which the Soviets "gave brotherly assistance." Teachers in
Hungary can openly discuss the 1956 uprising for the first time
since the event occurred. At the elite Moscow Higher Party
School, which trains apparatchiks to run local and regional
party committees, instructors express thoughts that would have
been considered heresy only a few years ago. "I tell the Cuban
students, `Castro is great, but he won't last forever -- learn
democratic methods,'" says professor Yuri Aksyutin.

    However refreshing the new honesty may be, it does not
repair the damage done by decades of dogmatic rigidity. Science
and other fact-based disciplines largely escaped
politicalization under communism, but economics and the social
sciences were systematically reshaped to conform to Marxist
principles. Now that ideology no longer governs how such
subjects as history and philosophy are taught, professors are
unsure what to tell their students -- or even what the truth is.
"They are at square one," says Sarah Lawrence president Alice
Ilchman, who visited the Comenius Institute of Education in
Prague earlier this year. "They want to know how to write
textbooks with differing points of view."

    Failing economies and a lack of hard currency are the
biggest obstacles to educational reform in the East bloc. In
Poland poor working conditions and low pay have led to a
shortage of 100,000 teachers. Romanian educators are appealing
to the West for typewriters, copying machines, computers,
calculators and books. They are also seeking funds to rebuild
the Bucharest University library, which was badly damaged during
last winter's revolution.

    Motivated by self-protection as much as by altruism, Bonn
has offered more than $590 million to aid East Germany's
troubled universities. The plan is to funnel federal money to
selected West German colleges, which will then be teamed with
East German schools in need of help. Bonn's concern is that East
Germans, who are streaming across the border, will strain the
capacity of West German schools unless their own
higher-education system improves quickly. In West Berlin alone,
authorities are bracing for the arrival of some 1,500 East
German students. These newcomers are expected to swarm to the
city's 13 universities and institutes this week for the start of
the summer semester.

    Such tensions are mild compared with those in Romania and
Czechoslovakia, where new governments have given students a
strong voice in how their universities are run. Hundreds of
professors have been fired, some because they were Communist
Party loyalists, others because students deemed them incompetent
or uninspiring. At Prague's Academy of Fine Arts, students have
dismissed all but two of their 39 instructors. They have hired
an outspoken new rector: Milan Knizak, 50, a long-haired
multimedia artist who sports three earrings in each ear. Knizak
has rejected the school's slogan, which said the purpose of art
was to help build socialism. Declares Knizak: "The artist is
responsible only to himself."

    Many of the teachers who remain will need retraining,
especially in modern languages. Throughout the East bloc,
Russian was often the only foreign tongue taught. There are some
18,000 teachers of Russian in Poland, for instance, compared
with just 4,000 for all other foreign languages combined.
Russian instructors there and in Hungary have been encouraged
to learn English, German and other Western languages, but few
seem eager to make the switch. "This is a grave crisis for me,"
says Gabriella Udvarheyli, 34, a Russian teacher in Budapest.
"All those years of study and, suddenly, my subject is swept
aside."

    American colleges and corporations are offering dollars,
scholars and the promise of lucrative research contracts to help
bolster the East bloc's fledgling reform efforts. In January the
American Federation of Teachers unveiled a project to help East
European educators learn how to instill democratic principles
in their schools. Hungarians got a taste of free-market theory
last fall, when the International Management Center in Budapest,
in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, became the
bloc's first business school to offer an American M.B.A.

    Meanwhile, Corvin University, the first private university
in postwar Eastern Europe, is scheduled to open its doors in
Budapest next September. Fees will be high -- some $3,000 a year
-- but students are already jostling for places. And that, says
Istvan Horvath, president of the University Federation of
Hungary, is the way it should be: "Competition must be created
for the student and the institution in all subjects."

    In the short term, however, competition promises to be
education's biggest problem. As Gorbachev tries to coax results
from perestroika, and the East European nations struggle to
revitalize their economies after 40 years of Communist rule,
schools will have to vie with industry and agriculture for
scarce resources. But for the moment at least, teachers and
pupils seem thrilled by their new freedom to think, speak and
seek the truth now that the ghosts of Marx and Lenin have been
expelled from the classroom.


By Susan Tifft. Reported by John Borrell/Budapest and Elizabeth
Tucker/Moscow.