Education: Soviet Boarding School

At its most highfalutin, the goal of Soviet education is “men and women of noble spirit and lofty ideals who will serve their people selflessly.” But Russian schools do not inevitably produce bright-eyedc “builders of Communist society”—not in a land of war orphans and working mothers. Three years ago Nikita Khrushchev ordered a Pavlovian solution: boarding schools in which “engineers of the soul” could hatch a new elite under ideal laboratory conditions. By last week Russia had more than 500 such new schools, with an enrollment of 360,000 students. “The time is not far off,” Khrushchev has gloated, “when all our children will be raised in boarding schools—provided their parents agree.”

The hedge is advisable, for most Russian parents need persuasion. Despite the Communist edict that mothers stick to bearing and let the state do the rearing, Russians prefer more ancient practice—and so do their preachers. Khrushchev’s own grandchildren are not in boarding schools, nor are those of his Kremlin colleagues. Most boarding-school children are enrolled because of special circumstances, e.g., overlarge families. Russians able to support their children do not easily surrender them, and the millions of Russians who still place God above Marx may never do so. By this year’s end, Russia will have more than 700,000 boarding students; in five years it expects 2.500,000 such students from age 7 to 17. But day schoolers (now 31 million) probably will long outnumber them and delay Khrushchev’s prophecy.

Psychology & Chinese. Nonetheless, boarding schools are Russia’s most significant new educational wrinkle. Their graduates will soon be the nation’s anointed. This is clear from the life being led by 250 first-to-eighth graders at Moscow’s new Boarding School No. 2 in the quiet suburb of Pokrovsko-Streshnevo, one of 46 such schools in the Moscow area. Already No. 2’s students (65% boys) are impressive specimens, honed by top-notch teachers, and one “upbringer” (counselor) for every 15 children.

No. 2’s students hit the deck every morning at 7 for calisthenics and a daylong schedule that keeps them hopping until lights out at 9 or 9:30 p.m. There is no time for mental slouching. All boarding-school students, for example, major together in one foreign language (first choice: English) from second grade. But No. 2’s students have a rockier road to mastery than most: they grapple with Chinese. All studies fill 4½ hours of formal classes and up to two hours of homework, six days a week.

Manners & Mechanics. To round off the embryo elite, there are afternoon lessons in music (all instruments), good manners and ballroom dancing, along with projects in radio, photography and chemistry. Manual training is mandatory, and older children will soon work part time in nearby factories to learn a trade. Each child must also learn to drive a car—and repair it. Every Friday comes “hygiene day,” when all must pass personal inspection of clothes and quarters, and each dormitory also has a logbook for daily lapses: “Dust on the window ledge,” or “Lint under Kolya’s cot.” The students get one day off a week (Sunday), and all must then clear the premises, visit relatives or friends. The reason (to prevent loneliness) illustrates the logic with which shrewd Principal Alexander Andreyevich Petrov runs the place. An able headmaster, Petrov is well paid; he and his teacher wife earn $300 monthly, a tidy income by Soviet standards. Petrov does not hold with physical punishment (“Rewards work better”). To encourage the emergence of “good qualities,” he keeps a box for students to deposit notes (read publicly) describing their classmates’ “positive” behavior. His discipline method is a point system in which a whole class is docked for individual transgressions or rewarded for individual triumphs. It is Principal Petrov’s pride that his harshest punishment is sending a sinner home in midweek. Only gross insubordination, says he, moves him to invoke it.

If his students unanimously enjoy the school, as Petrov claims, it is a year-long pleasure. The school has its own fully stocked farm 20 miles away, where students camp every summer and learn agriculture while doing chores. More parents may find such attractions hard to resist; Petrov says that his waiting list is long. Most attractive of all is the tuition, scaled from $3 a month for low-income families to $50 for the wealthiest (average: $10). Even the top fee, which only four families pay. is well below the $80 a month that each student costs. For the school supplies not only food, shelter, books, learning and character, but also every stitch of clothing. “Our Soviet government,” says Elite Hatcher Petrov proudly, “does not economize on children.”