GallerySchooling
The Seven-Year Plan holds out wonderful prospects for Estonia's cultural advancement too.
First, public education. In capitalist Estonia compulsory education for children of school age was, properly speaking, restricted to four grades. Only half the pupils were able to finish the sixth grade.
In Soviet Estonia compulsory seven-year schooling has become an established fact in both town and countryside. Anybody can receive a full secondary education. Instruction is given in the Estonian language.
Currently, the school is being reorganised to bring it closer to life. This reform will raise the standard of general education and polytechnical training and prepare the young people for useful labour in industry and agriculture apart from providing higher educational establishments with a better-trained intake.
The reform will be inaugurated in the 1959-60 school year and completed in three to five years. Naturally, large funds will be required and many important things will have to be done.
In particular, ordinary and boarding schools to accommodate 50,000 pupils, twice as many as in the previous seven years, will be built. In addition, many collective farms will erect schools buildings at their own expense.
Higher Education
In Soviet Estonia higher education is open to everyone. Today three times the number of students attend the republic's universities and colleges as formerly.
Under Soviet power the network of colleges and institutes in Estonia has grown. The Estonian Agricultural Academy—founded in Soviet times—has a student body of 2,300; it trains agronomists, farm-machinery experts and other agricultural specialists.
The Tallinn Teachers' Training Institute has a student body of 1,600. Since the war the number of students at the Tallinn Polytechnic has increased more than five-fold. Its annual graduation is 360-380 engineers, compared with the 9-10 engineers graduated under the old regime.
At Estonia's oldest Tartu University many new buildings have been added and new faculties have been opened.
In the next seven years Estonia's colleges will train more than 15,000 specialists. This is apart from the specialists turned out by the thirty-five technical colleges against the seventeen in old Estonia which have six times as many students as previously.
Soviet Booklets, London, England, in December, 1959, as part of the series
"THE FIFTEEN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF TODAY AND TOMMORROW."
We do not endorse the Soviet account of historical events or their circumstances contained therein as factual.
