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In pursuit of equality, Labor governments since 1960 have gradually phased out grammar schools—whose pupils tend to be middle-class—in order to blend their abler teachers and students into the melting pot of the so-called comprehensive schools, which combine features of the grammar and technical schools. That policy has disturbed many education-conscious parents. Those in areas where grammar schools have disappeared complain of declining standards and high levels of truancy and unruliness in the comprehensives. A Department of Education report found that abler children are indeed being kept back because of the "boredom, disenchantment and indiscipline" of mixed-ability comprehensive classes. There is also a decline in students taking foreign languages and other hard subjects.
THE SOVIET UNION. Although educational quality varies between Russia's elite big-city schools and rural ones, all students must take the same subjects in the ten-year general education course. Math and science are emphasized after the first four years. A typical tenth-year program includes courses in Russian language and literature, history and social studies, math, biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, a foreign language (often "strategic languages" like Chinese or Arabic) physical education and military training.
After this, Soviet students divide into vocational schools and more selective specialty schools. The vocational schools send their graduates (about 2 million a year) into guaranteed jobs. Students at specialty schools (about 4.4 million in 1973) are trained in one of 450 fields such as teaching, medicine and communications—as well as art, music and theater. After two to four years of study, they take state final examinations which are used to determine the students who may go on to higher education.