pedagogical circles the bourgeois prejudices have taken particularly firm root, and we are compelled to conquer our Communist position slowly, step by step. The teaching staff, which grew up in bourgeois prejudices, was at the bottom of its heart hostile to the proletariat and had no contact with it. We must now raise a new army of pedagogical workers, which must be more closely connected with the party, more intimately acquainted with its ideals, more fully impressed with the spirit of those ideas.
Far from any advance less than 27 per cent of the children are receiving any instruction whatever. Humanité, the leading Communist organ of France, on January 3, 1920, in summing up the official report of Lunacharsky, Chief Soviet Commissar for Education, gives this figure and the British Labor Party's Russian delegation reports:
The Russian educational authorities estimate that 25 per cent of the child population are now in receipt of a normal education of the elementary type. This is probably an overestimate, as in some places visited accommodation for only 10 per cent of the children existed; and also there is no method of insuring compulsory attendance as in England, and children who do not wish to attend simply remain away. In some of the villages any education is of a very primitive description and confined to the winter months and to children between 8 and 13. It is estimated that 15 per cent or 20 per cent of the children are receiving some form of effective elementary education.
It may, therefore, be questioned if the proportion of children attending school is greater than under the Czars!
