igher levels of
education the student must sign a document that obligates him to accept
a working assignment, which should be related to his field of
specialization, for a period of three to five years.

Another facet of the system is the eradication of old values and their
replacement with new socialist values (see ch. 4). One of the first
tasks of Bulgarian educators was to eliminate religious teachings and
practices in the schools. Religion, as a subject, was eliminated in the
early years as was the history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
Students are taught that atheism is both reasonable and scientific;
religion is dismissed as a relic of a superstitious and undesirable
past. By the same token, students are indoctrinated strongly by
teachers, directors of extracurricular activities, and colleagues to
revere and swear allegiance to the government.

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