Page:NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SURVEY 18; CZECHOSLOVAKIA; THE SOCIETY CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110015-7.pdf/32

 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110015-7

endeavor. Political loyalty again became the prerequisite for hiring teachers and for the admission of students to secondary and higher institutions. School authorities were once more explicitly ordered to give preference in admission to children of loyal party members and to those of proletarian origin. Disciplinary commissions were set up to deal with student nonconformists.

University students were required to attend 2 hours of Marxist-Leninist training a week. School inspectors were again assigned to insure that schoolteachers properly indoctrinated their charges. History and social science textbooks were ordered rewritten to reflect the party line more faithfully. Students' spare time was again taken up with state-sponsored athletic and cultural programs. A program for "all-day education" patterned on the Soviet model was implemented to keep children of working mothers in class after regular school hours. And parents received instructions on how to supplement their children's political training at home.

Despite these changes and efforts, the Husak government appears to have made relatively little headway in its program of "normalization" as far as ideological education is concerned. Comprehensive strategies and plans to achieve this objective had been laid out in a series of directives in January 1970 and again in July 1971 at the 14th Party Congress; but still in the October 1972 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the regime's mass organizations were asked to come up with concrete "political-educational and ideological programs," and in July 1973, the plenum once more called upon educational authorities to prepare to present to the upcoming 15th Party Congress "clearcut, specific educational goals at every school level..." In his concluding speech to the July 1973 plenum of the Central Committee, Husak acknowledged that the problem of winning the allegiance of youth to the socialist cause was no longer as easy as before the 1968 reform and that the task would require the full activation of all political and social institutions—from the party and government to the family.

2. System and organization

The base of Czechoslovakia's formal educational system is the compulsory 9-year elementary school, or first cycle, designed for attendance by the 6- to 15-year age group. The first 5 years are devoted to inculcation of the basic "building block" subjects (language and arithmetic); the remaining 4 years are designed to elaborate these basic subjects but also to introduce the social and natural sciences and to sort out the children according to their aptitudes for either academic or vocational study. Special schools or classes are provided for retarded children, juvenile delinquents, and artistically talented youth. In addition to traditional subject matter, the elementary school is supposed to provide systematic political indoctrination and practical experience in workshops and fields as a means of inculcating the child with the attitudes towards work characteristic of Marxist-Socialist philosophy. Some elementary school students—reportedly one of every six in 1973—fail to finish elementary school due to poor grades and go directly into the lowest level apprentice school or, in a few cases, directly to work. A Secretary of the Central Committee at its 14th plenum in July 1973 announced that experiments had demonstrated the feasibility of contracting the curriculum of the lower form of the elementary school from 5 to 4 years and hinted that this might be done after necessary preparations were made. Czechoslovakia's progressively tightening manpower supply led observers to suggest that such a measure might be particularly motivated by the desire to hasten the induction of new labor force increments.

In Czechoslovakia as in other Soviet bloc countries the subordination of educational to economic objectives has worked to make job-training activities largely inseparable from formal educational activities as such. In the early 1970's, 55% of those completing their basic 9-year schooling entered apprenticeships; the large majority qualified as journeymen after a course which, for most, lasted 3 years. Training is provided in approximately 230 apprentice schools for students who live at home with their parents, and in some 1,400 apprentice training centers attached to large enterprises which furnish room and board for the student. Completion of an apprenticeship entitles the student to a job as a skilled worker with journeyman status, and qualifies him to matriculate in an off-hours vocational school leading to foreman status of in off-hours classes at the general secondary school level with an opportunity to take the examination for entry to a higher educational institution. In the interest of those with broader aptitudes, the apprentice curriculum is set up to comprise not only technical subjects but also general subjects which would make possible movement back into the academic track. The broadening of vision and elevation of expectations motivating youth in Czechoslovakia, as in most advanced countries, have resulted in many youths setting their sights beyond the goals achieved by their fathers in blue-collar activity, complicating the task of the regime in achieving planned enrollment targets in apprentice schools. Thus, apprentice schools registered

26

APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110015-7