rofessional schools.
According to government statistics, in the late 1950s one out of every
four workers was taking some kind of course. Importance was particularly
given to improving polytechnical and related work experiences and to the
dissemination of manual work in most of the schools. Attempts were made
to build vocational workrooms in most elementary and secondary schools.
Emphasis was placed on technical and agricultural subjects.

By 1960 the system of elementary and secondary education had evolved
into an eleven-year program made up of schools of general education and
of vocational and professional schools. The schools of general education
consisted of primary grades one to four, intermediate grades five to
seven, and secondary grades eight to eleven. In October 1960, however,
as the Soviet-Albanian conflict was reaching the breaking point, the
Party adopted a resolution calling for a reorganization of the whole
school system, the real aim being to purge the schools of Soviet
influence and rewrite the textbooks. One more year was added to the
eleven-year general education schools, and the whole school program was
integrated more closely with productive work so as to prepare youths to
work in industry to replace some of the Soviet specialists should the
latter be withdrawn, as they actually were in January and April 1961.

Another far-reaching school reform became effective on January 1, 1970.
Two factors seemed to have accounted for the new reorganization: the
apparent lack of success in completely ridding the schools of so-called
revisionist Soviet influences and the decision, evidently related to the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to introduce military
training in the whole school system. The reform was decreed by the
Party's Central Committee in a special plenum held in June 1969. At the
plenum the principal speakers were Party First Secretary Hoxha and Prime
Minister Shehu, the latter in his capacity as chairman of a special
education commission attached to the Central Committee. Hoxha charged
that the old school system had left vestiges of the past in the
consciousness of many intellectuals, teachers, professors, and men of
science.

According to Hoxha the aim of the reform was to revolutionize the
schools so that the new generation would be imbued with scientific and
theoretical concepts of Marxism-Leninism and to combine these concepts
with physical and military training. The new educationa