Another guiding principle of the educational system in Bulgaria, which was initiated at the time of the takeover and still obtained to some degree in 1973, is the concept that sons and daughters of the worker and peasant classes should be favored in terms of their preference of access to education, particularly at the higher levels. This policy was clearly motivated by a desire to compensate for the exclusion of this class from such institutions in the past. In the early communist years institutions of higher education charged tuition, but children of the worker-peasant classes were exempted. By 1954 this class constituted 20 percent of the higher education population, a figure that by 1970 had risen to 78 percent. In 1973 the government was still maintaining a preferential clause for these students in higher education and reserved 10 percent of the places in such institutions for them.

Another principle of the educational system is the promotion of technical or vocational education and the simultaneous downgrading of the humanities. Academic studies were quantitatively reduced in order to place greater emphasis on practical work. When a student has completed his formal education in the school system, he will have at the time spent at least one-third of his school hours working on a farm, in a factory, or at some other enterprise. In the curriculum itself technical subjects are given a place of greater importance than the humanities. Although studies have indicated that a great many students seeking admission to institutions of higher education aspire to the study of the humanities, governmental policies have limited the number of places available in these areas in order to train technical-vocational specialists to meet the needs of the economy (see ch. 12).

The last important principle of Bulgarian education is the nationalization and secularization of the school system. When the Communists took power in the 1940s, they quickly closed all foreign and private schools with the exception of schools for the children of Soviet officials and diplomats. Schools of ethnic minorities fell under the aegis of the government and thereby lost all autonomy. Ironically, in 1973 the only private school that existed was related to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. As the church is subservient to and dependent upon the state, however, the existence of such a school undoubtedly represented little threat to the government.

EDUCATIONAL REFORMS

Between the years 1944 and 1948 the Communists set about eradicating the prewar educational system. By 1947, when the constitution (also called the Dimitrov Constitution) was enacted, all prewar textbooks had been replaced by communist texts; all schoolteachers and university professors who were considered reactionary or fascist had been replaced by persons loyal to the Fatherland Front (Otechestven Front) government; and all institutions of higher education had been opened to workers and their children, whereas students thought to have fascist or reactionary tendencies were denied admittance.

The Dimitrov Constitution stipulated further that all schools, including those that had previously been private, would be the property of the state; that all foreign schools would be closed for the academic year 1948-49; and that religious schools would be discontinued. Ironically, the only denominational schools that were allowed to continue were those that trained priests, but these schools had to have special permission from the state in order to continue their operations.

In 1948 and 1949 another series of reforms was initiated, which, although less sweeping than the original reforms, tended to pattern the Bulgarian school system more closely on that of the Soviet Union. In August 1949 a joint resolution of the BKP Central Committee and the Council of Ministers declared that education would be carried out in the spirit of socialism, based both on the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and on Bulgarian friendship with the Soviet Union. The ideological studies introduced into the curriculum consisted of the fundamental principles of Marx and Lenin, the history of the communist party of the Soviet Union, and the history of the BKP. All of these subjects became obligatory from kindergarten.

The second initiative in the 1948-49 reforms was the declaration that all universities and institutions of higher education as well as the Academy of Sciences were no longer autonomous. A third reform during this period was the reduction from five to four years of the gymnasium, which in turn reduced the total schooling from twelve to eleven years. The fourth reform was the redesigning of polytechnic education to greatly increase the number of trained graduates to fill the rapidly escalating demands of the economy.

In statistical terms the results of the various communist reforms were mixed. Although the number of primary and secondary schools increased slightly overall from 1938 to 1948, there was hardly any appreciable growth in primary schools, whereas secondary schools nearly doubled. The number of students, similarly, barely changed in the same ten-year period; the number of primary students actually declined, but the number of secondary students grew appreciably (see table 6; table 7).

Higher education, on the other hand, made great strides after the communist takeover as the number of universities and other institutions of higher education increased by one-third. Despite the emphasis on technical and vocational education, such schools dropped in terms of facilities, students, and teachers during the early communist years. The number of teachers of polytechnic subjects also declined during the period (see table 8).