The Soviet Challenge.

Abstract

I n the last decade the Soviet Union has made dramatic gains both quantitative and qualitative in mathematics and science education and in training at the preuniversity level. For the 98 percent of the school-age population that now com pletes secondary school or ks equiva lent, the Soviets have introduced sci ence and mathematics curriculums whose content and scope place them far ahead of every other nation, in cluding the United States. Their fore most scholars and educators are engaged in a concerted drive to pro vide mass education of unmatched quality. In order to appreciate the scale of Soviet educational expansion, it is worth remembering that during the Stalin era the secondary school gradu ation rate was as low as 5 percent out of 1,000 children entering the first grade in 1930, only 49 completed the tenth grade in 1940. In 1957 the year of Sputnik, and just prior to the Khrushchev reforms of 1958 no more than 1,728,000 students gradu ated from secondary schools. In June of 1978, however, after years of extraordinary investment and effort culminating in the introduction of compulsory ten-year schooling in 1975, over 5,200,000 students gradu ated from secondary schools of all types, a success rate of 98 percent. (In the United States, by contrast, about 75 percent graduate from high