Education

This article is adapted from an original work. It may be also be translated from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, EcuRed, or Baidu Baike.

Translated entry from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Volume 42 (1939), pp. 544-47:

Education means enlightenment, teaching, the process of assimilating knowledge and the body of knowledge obtained as a result of systematic training. The task of education in the USSR is the enrichment of knowledge, the formation of a comprehensively developed human personality on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, the training of highly cultured builders of a communist society. The personality of a person develops throughout life, but the foundations of education, the school gives the younger generation (see). On the basis of general education, which ensures the mastery of the fundamentals of the sciences, a special, professional education is being built (in technical schools, special schools of various types, in higher educational institutions and other schools).--In capitalist society, the bourgeoisie gives the working people education "only insofar as as it is in her best interest. And this, really, is not so narrow," Engels wrote with irony (Marx and Engels, Works, vol. III, p. 402). The following statement of V.I. Lenin has retained its full force for the present time: "the school was completely turned into an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, it was all imbued with a caste bourgeois spirit, it had the goal of giving the capitalists obsequious slaves and intelligent workers" (Lenin, Works, vol. XXIII, p. 199). Education in bourgeois countries is essentially available only to the ruling minority, the right to education, (see) there is bought for money. Only in the country of victorious socialism, according to the Socialist Constitution, all citizens of the USSR have the right to education, a school taught in schools in their native language, the organization at factories, state farms, machine-tractor stations and collective farms of free production, technical and agronomic training of workers" (Constitution of the USSR 1936, Art. 121). In no other country in the world is education given such exceptional attention as in the USSR.

The founders of Marxism-Leninism have always attached great importance to theory, science, education. Socialism "is based on all the material of human knowledge," wrote V. I. Lenin in 1902 (Lenin, Works, vol. U, p. 125). The words of Vladimir Ilyich connected with this thought are widely known: “You can become a communist only when you enrich your name with the knowledge of all the riches that humanity has developed” (Lenin, Soch., Vol. XXX, p. 407). “You have cut the task of construction,” Lenin said, addressing the youth, “and you can solve it only by mastering all modern knowledge” (Lenin, ibid., P. 409). Soviet youth, enthusiastically participating in the grandiose creative work of our homeland, is successfully fulfilling this Leninist song. Comrade Stalin emphasized that “education is a weapon, the effect of which depends on whoever holds it in their hands, whom they want to hit with this weapon. Of course, the proletariat, socialism needs highly educated people” (Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 10th ed., P. 610).

The scientific substantiation of the content of education was given by Karl Marx in one of the instructions to the delegates of the Geneva Congress of the 1st International. Defining an educated, organic and most important part of which education is, Marx noted that by upbringing he understands three things: “Firstly: the mind. Secondly: physical education, such as is given in gymnastics schools and military training. Thirdly: technical education, which introduces the basic principles of all production processes and at the same time gives the child or adolescent skills in handling the simplest tools of all industries "(Marks and Engel's, Works, vol. XIII, part 1, p. 199). V. I. Lenin demanded that the school should give "a wide general overview" (Lenin, Soch., Vol. XXX, p. 419). Polytechnic education (see), a cut plays a large role in solving the problem of mastering technology, is inextricably linked with general education, because the foundations (beginnings) of polytechnical education are unthinkable without a solid assimilation of mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural science and a number of others educational subjects.

In the development of the bourgeois secondary school, an important role was played by the struggle between supporters of the so-called classical education, in the center of which was the study, and moreover formal, of ancient languages, and real education, based to a large extent on natural science. The classical system education has still retained a significant share in the school business of the bourgeois countries. But real education, which has spread rapidly since the end of the 19th century, under the conditions of the bourgeois school does not and cannot stand at the height of advanced scientific theory. These two directions in bourgeois education are a vivid and characteristic example of a break between theory and practice, while only under the condition of the inextricable connection of the latter can truly scientific knowledge be provided in education. The falsification of scientific knowledge in education is especially strenuously carried out by the Nazis, who reduce school to study, ch. obr., "racial studies" and "homeland", that is to the imposition of a fascist worldview. Only the Soviet school is able to provide students with a comprehensive and truly scientific education; it pays equally serious attention to both the so-called humanitarian, and natural and mathematical sciences. Soviet pedagogy rejects the division of education into material (assimilation of knowledge) and formal (development of abilities, thinking, etc.) accepted in bourgeois literature. The disputes of bourgeois educators about the priority of this or that type of education were of a scholastic, metaphysical nature, for the conscious assimilation of knowledge determines the development of thinking; the enrichment of knowledge and the development of abilities (thinking and other mental functions) are inextricably linked sides of a single education process.

Marxism-Leninism requires such a formulation of education, in which the gap between theory and practice, which was "the most disgusting feature of the old bourgeois society" (Lenin, Soch., Vol. XXX, p. 405), is eliminated. The unity of theory and practice assumes that in the process of education, the ability to apply the acquired knowledge in practice develops and improves. The process of education is organically linked with the process of cognition, because “cognition is an eternal, endless approach of thinking to an object. The reflection of nature in a person's thought must be understood not "dead", not "abstract", not without motion, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the emergence of contradictions and their resolution” (Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, 1936, p. 188). And the fact that “from a subjective idea a person goes to objective truth through “practice” (and technology)” (Lenin, ibid., P. 193) makes a person's education truly scientific. Education should constitute an organic unity with upbringing. The upbringing of communists, the mastery of Bolshevism, the acquisition of all the knowledge and behavioral qualities necessary for this are the most important task of educating communist morality.” (Lenin, Works, vol. XXX, pp. 409-410). “Our school,” Lenin said, “is willing to give young people the foundations of knowledge, to give them the ability to develop communist views, it should make educated people out of them. It should, while people learn in it, make them participants in the struggle for liberation from the exploiters" (Lenin, ibid., p. 413). “To build, you need to know, you need to master science, and in order to know, you need to study. Study hard, patiently" (Stalin, Speech at the VIII All-Union Congress of the Komsomol 16 / V 1928, in the book: Lenin and Stalin on Youth, 1938, p. 309). Mastering science, like mastering technology, is unthinkable without highly organized labor, without overcoming all sorts of difficulties. Education in the USSR is growing every hour. The XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) established for the 3rd five-year plan the outline of the assignment: “Implementation of universal secondary education in the city and conquest in the countryside and in all national republics in total seven-year secondary education with an expanded enrollment of children with ten-year education in order to increase the number of students in primary and secondary schools in cities and workers' settlements from 8.6 to 12.4 million, and in rural areas from 20.8 to 27.7 million... To raise the continent of students in universities and technical colleges to 650 thousand people so that the main attention in the coming years will be paid to the higher quality of higher education” [Resolutions of the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b), 1939, pp. 36-37].

In the USSR, education of adults acquired a grandiose scope. While further in such an advanced country as the USA, teachers are arguing about whether the education of a mature person is possible, in the USSR it has already been shown in practice how tens of millions of workers in cities and villages are gaining genuine scientific knowledge, take possession of the entire cultural heritage, create a new, socialist culture, create a new type of comprehensively developed person. The Stakhanov movement plays an exceptional role in the development and formation of a new socialist personality, since “it contains within itself the grain of the future cultural and technical rise of the working class,” because “it opens up the way for us, on which only one can achieve the highest indicators of labor productivity, which are necessary for the transition from socialism to communism and the destruction of the opposition between mental labor and physical labor" (Stalin, Speech at the First All-Union Meeting of the Stakhanovites, 1935, p. 11). The remarkable successes of the Stakhanov movement contributed to a large extent to the achievements of the state system of industrial and technical training (see), which covered many hundreds of thousands of workers in our country. The plan of the third five-year plan provides for: “Carrying out a wide range of activities for serious advancement in the implementation of the historic task of raising the level of culture and technology in the working class of the USSR to the level of workers of in-line and technical labor "[Resolutions of the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, 1939, p. 301. Stalin: “We want to make all workers and all peasants cultured and educated, and we will do this in due course” [Stalin, Report at the XVIII Congress of the Party..., 1939, p. 61 ]. G. Weisberg and S. Frumoe.