A CRITIQUE OF ANTI-COMMUNIST VIEWS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CLASS-BASED AND THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN IN EDUCATION

D. N. PRIKHODKO, L. S. SYSOEVA

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Scientific Communism)

The spiritual foundation for the education of Soviet students, for the formation of their personal and professional qualities, is Marxist-Leninist ideology. Striving for the fullest, deepest, and most scientific systematization of human knowledge about the general laws of nature and human society, Marxist-Leninist ideology proceeds from the standpoint of such a class position as is interested in the maximum objectivity of its views, principles, norms, and ideals. As the ideological foundation of the educational process, only such a worldview is capable of forming a specialist who fully corresponds to the purpose of his professional-social role in Soviet society.

The moral demands of communist ideology, its aesthetic ideals, worldview positions, and other value orientations are refracted through the prism of the interests of the most progressive class itself, which is the exponent of social progress. The subjective positions of this class coincide with the objective progressive tendencies of social development leading to the creation of a highly industrial, classless communist society. It is precisely this circumstance that serves as the criterion of the truth of Marxist-Leninist ideology and allows us to speak of the identity of the universal human and the class-based in the content of its ideals.

As the ideological foundation of the educational process, this ideology precisely sets the goal of forming the personality in accordance with these ideals.

V. I. Lenin, emphasizing that “only the worldview of Marxism is the correct expression of the interests, viewpoint, and culture of the revolutionary proletariat”¹, showed that Marxism did not discard “the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, but on the contrary assimilated and reworked everything that was most valuable in the more than two-thousand-year development of human thought and culture”². By accumulating within itself the progressive tendencies of the spiritual process in the development of society, Marxist ideology is the bearer of universal human values. Herein lies its world-historical significance.

¹ V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 41, p. 337.
² Ibid.

The Communist Party, basing its program on questions of upbringing on Leninist principles, considers the main task in ideological work at the present stage to be “the upbringing of all working people in the spirit of high ideological commitment and devotion to communism, of a communist attitude toward labor and public property, the complete overcoming of survivals of bourgeois views and morals, the harmonious development of the individual, and the creation of a genuine wealth of spiritual culture.”³

In the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party, L. I. Brezhnev singled out the very important idea that today the all-round development of the individual appears not simply as an ethical ideal, but above all as an objective necessity of the socio-economic and political development of society. “The great cause of building communism,” it is emphasized in the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress, “cannot be advanced without the all-round development of the human being himself. Without a high level of culture, education, social consciousness, and inner maturity of people, communism is impossible, just as it is impossible without the corresponding material and technical base.”⁴

The basis for the upbringing of an all-round developed individual is, first of all, the formation of a communist worldview and the cultivation of a communist attitude toward labor.

It is obvious that the thesis that precisely such an ideal of a communistically educated person, in principle, corresponds to the universal human ideal of a harmoniously developed personality will not raise objections.

Analyzing the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the education of Soviet students, bourgeois sociologists attempt to substantiate the following basic thesis: “Marxist-Leninist teaching and its ideals, in the spirit of which they seek to create the new Soviet man, are profoundly alien to the interests of the individual. The study of Marxism is presented as a coercive adaptation to a certain aggregate of social dogmas and formulas, for at the foundation of the education of Soviet students lie value orientations determined by the generally accepted official Marxist-Leninist ideology.” As a “positive alternative” there is proposed such a process of education as would be oriented toward universal human values. It is known that the universal human values of the educational process in a class society ultimately prove to be class values. The principal attacks and speculations of anti-communism with respect to the Soviet system of education are built upon ignoring this indisputable thesis.

A correct view of the educational system as one of the instruments for adapting the younger generation to social values, including values of an ideological and political kind, is today widely recognized also by bourgeois sociology. The American sociologist R. M. Williams emphasizes: “Education cannot fail to have to do with values...,” “The educational system is, to the highest degree, accountable to the demands and pressures of society, the community, the state, and the country.”⁵ And sociologist O. G. Brim, absolutizing the function of the system

³ Program of the CPSU. Gospolitizdat, 1961, p. 117.

⁴ L. I. Brezhnev, Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Publishing House of Political Literature, Moscow, 1971, pp. 101–102.

⁵ R. M. Williams, “Values and Modern Education in the United States,” in Values in America, edited by D. N. Barrett. University of Notre Dame Press, 1961, pp. 60–67 (in English).

education as an instrument for the preservation and adaptation of social values, in general reduces the social purpose of education only to this function. “The educational system of a society,” he writes, “is a means by which traditional culture is preserved, and any new values it transmits within a single generation.”^5 Attention should be drawn to the following point. American sociologists see in the educational system not simply an instrument for preserving and adapting values in general, irrespective of their political and ideological context in a given society. For example, they probably see the greatest social value of this instrument precisely in the fact that it deals specifically with the political and ideological values of the given society. “Undoubtedly, it [education.—Authors],” writes R. M. Williams, “creates and disseminates knowledge. Nevertheless, another central function of public schools and nonsectarian universities consists in teaching young people with different backgrounds to establish common ideas and social standards. Our educational system is one of the greatest institutions of all time for inculcating voluntary consciousness and unity.” Moreover, analyzing on the basis of a sample survey the effectiveness and character of university students’ adaptation to political values, R. M. Williams writes, not without enthusiasm, that “in the sphere of political values it is an established truth that students are not radical in relation to their parents and mentors. And as soon as they graduate from college, they try to adapt their political position to the line that prevails in the social groups to which they belong. They still accept to a great extent the notion of the ‘benefactor state,’ which provides welfare, security, and guidance of economic life, and in the overwhelming majority they share the traditional ‘liberalism’ of the Bill of Rights.”^7 Moreover, the sociologist writes about these “political values” without a shadow of an attempt to doubt their actual social significance. On the contrary, R. M. Williams himself is a convinced apologist for these bourgeois values. For him the political character of these values is rather formal. He regards these values as immutable and natural attributes of a modern, industrially developed society; their social significance for him has an enduring, universal-human character. Still more sharply expressed is the thesis of higher education as an instrument for stabilizing and adapting the value system of bourgeois society in P. Reinert. “In today’s fierce struggle,” he writes, “between the free world and the world of slaves, between free consciousness and slave consciousness, American colleges and universities must confidently transmit the basic values of our American way of life.”^8

Thus, bourgeois sociology does not exclude the purpose of the system of higher education as an instrument for educating youth in accordance with ideals determined by the ideological and political values of bourgeois society. Moreover, it regards these values precisely as the ideological basis of education.

^6 O. G. Brim. Sociology and Education. New York, 1958, p. 16 (in English).

^7 R. M. Williams. Cited work, p. 77.

^8 P. Reinert. We Support These Truths.—In: Perspectives and Goals in Higher Education. Washington, 1962, p. 205 (in English).

Moreover, it is by no means limited to an abstract-sociological consideration of this question; it would not be an exaggeration to say that, as a general recommendation fully corresponding to the interests of the dominant social groups, it demands that young people be educated precisely on this ideological basis. In that case a natural question arises: on what grounds, from the standpoint of these positions, does bourgeois sociology consider itself entitled to accuse the Soviet system of education of carrying out the ideological and political education of youth in accordance with a definite ideological system and definite social values? After all, bourgeois sociologists themselves acknowledge that one of the most important functions of the system of higher education consists in stabilizing and transforming the social values of society. Moreover, none of them denies that such a function is also inherent in the Soviet system of higher education. The answer to this question should be sought not so much in the theoretical constructions of bourgeois sociology as, above all, in the ideological-political orientation of bourgeois sociologists, determined by their position as theoreticians, practitioners, and, ultimately, apologists of the dominant ideological system of bourgeois society, principled ideological and political opponents of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the socialist social order.

Indeed, within the framework of the positions of bourgeois objectivism, the adaptation of youth to certain social standards is recognized as necessary. Moreover, such adaptation is regarded as an objectively necessary and socially positive phenomenon, harmoniously connected with the interests of the individual in society. The basic question is not whether bourgeois sociology recognizes the need for the adaptation of Soviet youth to certain values, but how it correlates them with universal human, natural values, and from the standpoint of what criterion it is prepared to recognize the universal human significance of certain values and, consequently, the positive consequences of adaptation to such values. The answer is in large measure quite clear. To the doubtful credit of many bourgeois sociologists, it should be noted that for the most part they do not try to clothe their answer to this question in complex theoretical constructions, to lay claim to criteria of objectivity or to a position of ideological neutrality. They themselves give an entirely clear answer: the criterion of the true and social significance of social values, including values of an ideological-political character, the criterion of their comparability with universal human values, should be considered the degree to which they correspond to the value structures (norms) of bourgeois society. The more a given value meets this criterion, the greater its truth, the more fully it corresponds to the universal human ideal of value, and the greater the positive social significance possessed by the adaptation of youth to these values. The point is that universal human values themselves are presented as nothing other than the fullest expression of the values of bourgeois society, which itself, in principle, is regarded as the ideal socio-economic model of individuals’ way of life. In this respect, the reasoning of the sociologist D. P. Fitzpatrick is highly characteristic. “By values,” he writes, “I understand such ideals, goals, and norms that guide human behavior; according to which a person judges the correctness or incorrectness of his behavior; that lead a person toward improvement or toward harm; that make him capable of distinguishing what is good and what is ...”

is bad.”^9 It should be noted that D. P. Fitzpatrick claims a general sociological significance for his definition. What basic values, then, does the sociologist include in this definition and present as universal human values in the period when society is developing at the level of modern industrial organization? These values turn out to be—and could not but turn out to be, within the framework of methodological empiricism and the overt ideological-party orientation of contemporary bourgeois sociology—the basic values accepted as such in the socioeconomic and ideological-political context of bourgeois society. D. P. Fitzpatrick proclaims individualism to be the basic value of society. “I maintain,” he writes, “that the traditionally central value in our economic life has been individualism: the idea that every person should be given complete freedom to achieve what he can.” Such values as “competition, freedom, success, equal opportunity” D. P. Fitzpatrick regards as “subordinate to this basic value.”^10 Thus, quite definitely, the values of bourgeois society are proclaimed as the basic true values. The author then draws a fairly definite conclusion: “Industrial society has also been built in the USSR. But without the influence of American values. Consequently, industrial society can be created without basic values as well.”^11 If one follows the context of D. P. Fitzpatrick’s conclusion, one obtains, approximately, the following reasoning: American society has been built and develops with the help of basic social values that have a universal human character; Soviet society has also been built and develops with the help of certain values, for the development of any society without value orientations, without values in general, is impossible; but the values of Soviet society do not have a true, universal human character, and are the product of subjective decisions of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, the product of dogmatic conclusions of Marxist-Leninist ideology; because the values of Soviet society do not have a universal human character, they do not correspond to the interests of the individual, and the adaptation of the individual to such values must have the character of a “coercive conversion to a faith,” the character of indoctrination.

D. P. Fitzpatrick’s approach is a typical anti-communist falsification of the problem. It may be asserted without exaggeration that bourgeois sociology, in the persons of N. De Witt, D. Kauts, A. Kossow, O. M. Rosen, D. Sherman, W. Rostow, and others, fully pays tribute to such an approach and to such falsifications in analyzing the problems of Soviet upbringing and education.

In this brief article we have attempted to show the untenability of only one falsification by bourgeois sociologists—the attempt to present the class norms and values of bourgeois education as universal human ones and, as such, to set them against Soviet education as a positive alternative.

^9 D. P. Fitzpatrick, “Individualism in American Economic Life,” in Values in America, ed. D. N. Barrett. University of Notre Dame Press, 1961, pp. 93–94 (in English).

^10 D. P. Fitzpatrick, cited work, p. 94.

^11 Ibid., p. 107.