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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
Soviet social policy created a modern education system in Tajikistan
where nothing comparable had existed before. However, by the time the
republic became independent the quality and availability of education had
not reached the Soviet Union-wide average, still less the standards for
Western industrial societies. After independence, the education system
remained under the control of the national Ministry of Education with full
state funding.
Historical Development
By the 1920s, few Tajiks had received a formal education. According to
the first Soviet census, in 1926 the literacy rate was 4 percent for Tajik
men and 0.1 percent for Tajik women in the territory of present-day
Tajikistan and in the Republic of Uzbekistan. During the late 1930s, the
Soviet government began to expand the network of state-run schools. There
was strong public opposition to this change, especially from Islamic
leaders. As a result, some new state schools were burned and some teachers
were killed.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the Soviet education system
prevailed, although a uniform set of standards was not established in
every instance. For the average Tajikistani citizen in the 1980s, the
duration, if not necessarily the quality, of the education process was
neither the greatest nor the least among Soviet republics. As elsewhere in
the Soviet Union, the system was divided into schools for primary, middle
(or secondary), and higher education. Middle schools were differentiated
as either general or specialized. For the period between 1985 and 1990, an
annual average of 86,800 students attended general-education middle
schools and an average of 41,500 students attended specialized middle
schools. In the academic year 1990-91, Tajikistan reported 68,800 students
in institutions of higher education.
Data as of March 1996
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