The Communist Party, therefore, must, on the one hand, ensure, through the working of soviet institutions, that there shall be a more rapid development of the places where children are prepared for school life, and it must ensure that there shall be a steady improvement in the training given at such places. On the other hand, by intensified propaganda among parents, the party must overcome bourgeois and petty-bourgeois prejudices concerning the necessity and superiority of home education. Here theoretical propaganda must be reinforced by the example of the best conducted educational institutions of the Soviet Power. Only too often, the unsatisfactory condition of the homes, creches, kindergartens, etc., deters parents from entrusting their children to these. It must be the task of the Communist Party, and especially of the women’s sections, to induce parents to strive for the improvement of social education, not by holding aloof from it, but by sending their children to the appropriate institutions, and by exercising the widest possible control over them through parents’ organisations.
80. The unified Labour School.
The preparatory institutions are for children up to the age of seven. After that age, education and instruction must be effected in the school — not in the home. Education must be compulsory, which marks a great advance upon tsarist times. It must be gratuitous, and this also marks a great advance, for even in the most progressive bourgeois lands only elementary education is gratuitous. Education is naturally open to all, for the educational and cultural privileges of special groups of the population have now been abolished. Universal, equal, and compulsory education is made available for all children from the ages of seven to seventeen.