East German/Soviet schools.

[RotStern]

Does anybody have any idea how these schools were structured?
I know for a fact that the Soviets had excellent education.

[Arlekino]

I think we had good education in Soviet Union. Every single day homework on every subject, we study western writers I remember study Byron, Dante, yes important part played Russian writers. As well Science and sport, music, geography like any other subjects and once per week one lesson military programme. Even I remember lessons about British Imperialism, British kings and queens. After school activities like sport, singing, dancing groups it was compulsory we had to do something after school.

[Svoboda]

Does anybody have any idea how these schools were structured?
I know for a fact that the Soviets had excellent education.
My mother lived in western Ukraine under the Soviet Union and went through the full soviet education system, so I have some idea of what it was like. Some interesting things of note that she told is that she is fully proficient in the use of an AK-47 as some sort of military training was given in secondary school, her classes had to be taught in Russian despite Ukrainian being the language most people spoke in western Ukraine, and she also noted to me how she was taught a perception that in the United States the vast amount of people lived in poverty while the few were rich.

And she did get an excellent education there, she majored in engineering in her university and when she came to America she landed a good job (after learning English) in not too long.

[Raúl Duke]

I heard education is very good (and free) in many of these 'socialist' countries.

Cuba may have a much better educational system than Puerto Rico and allegedly has a better one than the US.

[Red Commissar]

At least they had their priorities straight. Schooling in the west is becoming increasingly marginalized and targeted for budget cuts.

And another question- How did one go from secondary schooling to a university? Was there an exam of some sort or did they just look at performance? And I suppose that leads into another question- how did they measure a student's proficiency in a given subject?

[Arlekino]

To go to university is was exams. As well exams at schools on Mathematics, Russian, first languages literature exams. The scale was from 1 to 5. 5 it was higher and of course 1 is lower grade.

[FSL]

In terms of expenditure, socialist states had this "golden rule" of spending around 15% of their budget on education. Even in the 70s that would mean 7-8% of their GDP and in the 50s it would be closer to 10%.
Cuba, according to the CIA world factbook of all sources, spends 9.3% of its GDP in education. By comparison, Finland's government spends roughly 8% and Greece's not even 4%.


After 1991, when we had immigrants from these countries, some of them opened ballet schools or became street mucisians (they were probably orchestra members with some pretty decent salaries back in the day). The educated labor force is presented as a "plus" even by today's private investors in these countries.


All in all, it sounds good.