Darden Grzymala Busse 2006

Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Darden Grzymala Busse states that half of the countries that belonged to the Soviet Union got rid of their communist ideals while the rest actually reinstated these ideals after the elections. His study aims to discover why some country’s citizens retained those positive views on the matter while the others grew negative sentiments to the concept. This is done by looking at the schooling pattern by these countries in the decades leading up to communist rule and after as well. Busse then states that this could have possibly happened because of the different education that was provided to individuals in different countries. Some schooling was very nationalist and so they viewed the idea of communism as something foreign that was imposed which ultimately led to the society to reject communist rule.

Existing Explanations of the Communist Exit _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ There is a lot of factors that went into the fall of communism but Busse argues that the social factor of nationalist schooling was more important than all the others because it was throughout a long time. The other factors included the locations of the groups and pre exposed communist ideas.

Correlating Mass Schooling and the Communist Exit _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ The study discovered that there was a connection between literacy rates and the acceptance of communist views within different regions. The countries that had low literacy rates meant they had a poor educational structure and thus would go on to not have a strong nationalist sentiment, this would include countries such as Albania and parts of Central Asia

From Schooling to Anticommunism _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ The anti-communists opinions that were seen after WWII were created by the nationalist education that kids were exposed to. It is a sentiment that people kept even years after that fact. This allowed for the countries to rise up again as new nations without the ideas of communism ingrained in their legislation.

Conclusion _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Everyone has different views on different social topics and concepts, these opinions are mostly influenced by our surroundings and the way we were brought up, which is a point that this study tries to prove by investigating the connection between different schooling and communist opinions. He also argues that althoug economic factors do shape people's opinion, social factors (such school) prove to be more influential on that opinion. It was shown that areas with schools that had communist instructions would make people who saw communism as a good thing. On the other hand, areas that were exposed to school that showed nationalist views were more negative towards communism. In the end, education highly affected how communism was viewed and could even count as a main factor in the fall of communism.