; this goal is to be achieved by educating skilled personnel to fill
the specific needs of its various sectors. Because of the trend toward
industrialization that obtains in all communist countries, a corollary
policy is that the study of science and technology must be emphasized
over the study of the humanities.

According to established principles, therefore, certain policies are
carried out in the process of education. People of worker or peasant
origin, who the Communists perceive as having been deprived of their
basic rights to an education in the past, are allowed to enter the
higher levels of the educational system without the usual prerequisite
examination if the necessary places are available. They generally
represent between 30 and 40 percent of the total higher education
population as compared with 80 percent of the population as a whole.

Certain communist principles form the backbone of the curriculum. Work
is perceived to be an integral part of education as are directed
extracurricular activities, and a sizable percentage of formal education
is allotted for practical and vocational training. Religious education,
which was a legacy from the past, has been dismissed as superstitious
and archaic, and virtually all religious schools have been banned. The
curriculum from the earliest years of schooling to the upper levels of
higher education is filled with such courses as Marxism-Leninism, the
history of the communist party of the Soviet Union, and the history of
the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP--see Glossary).

Under the many and varied educational reforms legislated under the
Communists, the pendulum has swung between relative emphasis on science
and technology on the one hand and the humanities on the other. Although
overall emphasis has always been on the sciences, that emphasis has
increased and decreased at various times since the communist takeover.
Between 1944 and 1948, for example, there was little overall emphasis on
technology in the curriculum. Between 1948 and 1967, however, these
subjects were emphasized to a large degree. Beginning in 1967 some
weight was again placed on the humanities. As of 1973 there had been
some manifestation of rededication to technology and science, but the
latest proposed reform regarding secondary education represented a
desire on the part of the government to fuse general education--which of
course includes the humanities--and specialized training into one
system.