Problems of Geographical Education in the USSR

Geography education in the Soviet Union is found to lag behind advances in geography as a research discipline. Courses in both elementary and secondary schools and at the college and university level are overloaded with factual material at the expense of theoretical problems and general concepts. An essential requisite for improving the content of geography education is better training of geography teachers. Soviet geography teachers are now being trained mainly in the combined geography-biology faculties of teachers colleges. Combined training in more than one teaching discipline is essential because a teacher trained in geography alone would not have a full teaching load of 18 hours a week in most schools. However, the geography-biology combination does not appear to be optimal because the emphasis in biology is no longer on botany and zoology, as in the past, but on human physiology and genetics, with less relevance to geography. It is recommended that geography as a teaching discipline be combined with other subjects of instruction having greater relevance to geography teaching, possibly chemistry, physical education or foreign languages. Less emphasis on fact-loaded regional courses and more stress on systematic courses is recommended, together with training in mathematical techniques.