ABSTRACT
Uniform vocational training in a country as large and as diversified as the USSR is the result of a centralized system. As a Marxist-Leninist state, vocational training is designed to meet the needs of a planned, state-owned economy and to instil in young people the work ethic of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Any description of that system has to take these two aims into account.
Vocational training in basic craft skills begins at school, and is developed throughout compulsory education and in legally required collaboration with enterprises in industry, commerce and services. For those students not proceeding immediately to higher education at the universities or technical institutes (and not entering unskilled employment), trade training is largely compulsory between the ages of 15 and 18 and leads to a trade diploma in one of the 1,500 recognized crafts across the 14 branches of the Soviet economy. The major workhorse of the system is the special professional technical school (SPTU) of which there were some 7,600, with 3.8 million students, in 1983. Annually SPTUs produce 2 million skilled and semi-skilled workers for industry.
Despite a comprehensive training system and a radical review in 1984, there remain many internally voiced criticisms that the economy regularly fails to achieve its targets of both quantity and quality. Nevertheless, the system has much to recommend it to Western countries seeking to close the gap between education and vocational training.
Note: As a Briton who has spent some time studying a particularly interesting type of Soviet educational institution, I have included both factual information and personal impressions in this chapter. I have dealt principally with the SPTU, an upper secondary school which combines general secondary education with training for a particular vocation, but I have also commented on vocational training as a whole in the USSR. Many Russian terms relating to education do not have an exact counterpart in English. In this chapter English approximations have largely been used for the sake of comprehension and readability. Readers interested in precise use of Russian terminology can follow it up in the glossary in Zajda, 1980, whose definitions have largely been used where it has been important to employ a Russian concept.
