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¶ Since all courses are prescribed by the Ministry of Education, teachers seldom dare to deviate from the official syllabus. "Not even the university itself—let alone an individual professor—can change the syllabus of any course except as the change may be authorized by the Ministry." The result, according to one Soviet physicist: "The lectures of many teachers are transformed into an exposition of the syllabus, including every detail, and factual data which obscure the basic scientific core of the discipline."
¶ Though the average physics graduate of a university is on a par with or, within his specialty, superior to the average American with one year of graduate work, the engineer has had such a narrow, vocational course that "in terms of basic engineering preparation, he does not achieve in his five years of training a higher level of competency than his American counterpart does after a four-year course." Furthermore, only 3% of all university graduates take postgraduate work.
¶ Since almost all research aims at solving some specific problem posed by the state, most major research is performed not in the universities but in special research organizations usually associated with a particular industry. Thus education "has been much further divorced from research than the theoretical model of an effective graduate training program would call for."
Such shortcomings, says Korol, should not for a moment blind Americans to the impressive gains of Soviet education—or to what must be done to strengthen the U.S. system. But for those who might go overboard in their awe of the Soviet, he poses these two questions: "When we talk about the vast Soviet efforts in the schools, colleges and universities, are we talking about education as we and the other free peoples conceive of education? Or are we talking about training—a far narrower concept?"