The old school was intimately associated with religion — by compulsory religious teaching, compulsory attendance at prayers, and compulsory church-going. The new school forcibly expels religion from within its walls, under whatever guise it seeks entry and in whatever diluted form reactionary groups of parents may desire to drag it back again.
The old university created a close corporation of professors, a teachers’ guild, which prevented the introduction of fresh teaching strength into the university. The close corporation of bourgeois professors must be dissolved, and the professorial chairs must be thrown open to all competent instructors.
Under the tsar, Russian was the only permissible language in the State service and in the school; the non-Russian subjects of the tsar were not allowed to receive instruction in their native tongue. In the new schools, all trace of national oppression disappears from the realm of instruction, for those of every nationality are entitled to receive education in their respective tongues.
78. The School as an Instrument of communist Education and Enlightenment.
The bourgeoisie comprises a very small minority of the population. This, however, does not prevent it from supplementing the other instruments of class oppression by the use of the school to educate and break in the millions of workers, to inoculate them with bourgeois ideology. In this way the majority of the population is constrained to accept the outlook and the morality of a numerically insignificant fraction.
In capitalist countries, the proletariat and the semi-proletariat comprise the majority of the population. In Russia, the urban workers, though a minority, have in political matters become the leaders and the organisers of the struggle on behalf of all the toilers. It is natural, therefore, that the