STERILE EDUCATION

In marked contrast to the university students of Western Europe and America, only five percent of whose fathers are engaged in manual labor the students in the Soviet education system are drawn chiefly from factories and farms. Admission to the Rabfac, or Workers' Faculties, corresponding to our secondary and preparatory schools, depends upon three years' employment in industry. The number of the Rabfac students, whose stipend is paid by the government, is considerably over thirty thousand.

The great purpose of the Soviet education program is to turn out a vast number of confirmed Bolshevists to man the elementary and Rabiac schools, and to carry out the technical functions in industry. Before the war Russia was the worst educated European country; the establishment of the collectivist millennium depends upon the thorough solution of this inherited burden of ignorance and incapacity.

One aspect of this system of education must be very unpalatable to Mr. Upton Sinclair. The Russian faculties and students are carefully kept in the goose-step, and any who would molt into swans or ducks are ungently and forcefully removed from their positions. The subtle manipulation of financial pressure which Mr. Sinclair finds everywhere in America, is replaced by the action of bayonets. The new generation in Russia may learn all the physics, engineering, and mathematics that it can these are not dangerous. But political economy, government, history, are all painstakingly censored, even more than natural history in Nebraska.

This one-sided, material emphasis in Russian education will be preserved as long as the present dearth of technical knowledge blights her industrial development. But the day will come when inquiring spirits may question the economical and political bases of the system which nourished them. Then the proletarian whose passionate support made the Bolsheviki masters of Russia, and whose ranks supply the brain and brawn of the movement, may like Romulus and Remus, abandon the wolf who sucked them.