As in other areas of Soviet life, educational quality and opportunities were much lower in the country than in cities and towns, whether because of poor teaching, understaffing, inadequate physical plants, lack of necessary equipment and supplies, or overcrcwding. Because education and Party membership were the two main roads up the social ladder, inferior rural schools made it difficult for counfry children to get ahead. Village schools were sometimes abandoned, leaving children with no schooling if their parents could not afford to transport them elsewhere (until 1965 such transportation had to be financed by parents).-"'-'’
Rural schoolchildren were often used as a source of free field labor—so-called vocational training—that kept them out of school. A Kirghiz high school principal complained in a letter to Pravda that between 1977 and 1981, his students had never begun the academic year before November. Teacher turnover was high in villages because, despite government incentives, teachers did not want to commit their own lives and their children's to the isolation, primitive conditions, poor housing, and other deprivations of rural life. Country girls who were accepted at a city teachertraining institute generally did not care to return. However, remote Stalin-era schools often benefited from the skills of highly educated political prisoners serving out sentences of exile and in need of a salary.'’*
According to a Soviet survey of 1967, only 26 percent of kolkhozniks (collective farmers) had a secondary or higher level of education, compared to 44 percent of other working-class people. The disparity between the educational levels of children of the urban intelligentsia and farmworkers was even wider. Khrushchev tried to even out the playing field by starting an "affirmative action" program that reserved most college-level places for applicants with at least two years of working experience in industries and farms. Also under his leadership, state and collective farms could send workers off for specialized education, at farm expense. After completing their education, workers were obligated to return to their farms. These policies began to be withdrawn even before Khrushchev fell from power and were abolished after his fall in 1964. Farms could still opt to finance their workers' further education, but in fact villagers who emigrated to cities mostly took the menial jobs city people scorned. Even when it came to specialized training in agricultural sciences, village schoolchildren were at a disadvantage compared with their city counterparts. In 1961, for example, only a third of students admitted to Soviet higher agricultural schools came from farm families.
World History
