*achers Under Communism— The Case off East Germany

I N OUR always ongoing attempts to improve the education and professional status of teachers, we have often looked outside of our borders for comparisons and ideas. Generally we have observed the democracies, where political ideas have much in common with our own, and sometimes the Soviet Union, with which we are obviously in competition internationally. However, there is one European coun try—Germany—which could be of special interest to us, since its western part, the Federal Republic, has developed a demo cratically-oriented school system, while the eastern part, officially called "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" (German Demo cratic Republic) or DDR, offers us a classical example of just what happens to teachers in a communist society. How training and em ployment of educators in that state compare with conditions in a free country will be described briefly in this article, based on the writer's recent on-the-spot observations and research in East Germany, which were facilitated by his native command of German and previous teaching assignments in the Federal Republic. In essence, the schools for which edu cators in East Germany are trained are com pletely public and administered by a central Ministry of Education. In 1965, the DDR's parliament, which has a statutory majority of the "Socialist Unity Party," entirely recon stituted the school system, which—not count ing vocational and other specialized schools— consists of three basic elements. There are, first, for children aged one to six, various types of voluntary preschool institutions, and latest statistics show facili ties exist to accommodate 62 percent of children below age six. 1 All children within the compulsory school ages (6-16) attend a ten-year school with a virtually uniform cur riculum. Its unusual features are the required study of Russian starting in grade five and an elective second language (usually English) two years later, plus far more mathematics and science than are obligatory in either West German or American schools. There also is systematic "polytechnical" instruction,