RabFak

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RabFak ( Russian Рабфак ; abbreviated from Рабочий факультет , in German "Workers Faculty ") was the name of special educational institutions in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. They had been organized in order to enable young working-class people , who often had not completed school education, to prepare quickly for university studies through general education courses .

The basis for the establishment of RabFaks was the political upheaval in Russia that had taken place with the October Revolution of 1917. In mid-1918, the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia issued a decree that enabled workers and peasants to enroll at universities without prior entrance exams and without any previous schooling. As a result, there was a dramatic increase in student numbers at the beginning of the new university year 1918. However, very few of the first-year students at that time could do anything with the subject matter, because most of the working class children at the time of the Russian Empire did not receive an adequate school education and were often even illiterate . In order to counteract this situation, the then Deputy People's Commissar for Education, Mikhail Pokrovsky , suggested setting up special evening schools for the preparation of the working class for a degree. On September 11, 1919, the People's Commissariat for Education decided to add “workers' faculties” to the universities, where all those willing to study could prepare for their actual studies in day or evening courses.

The first such preparatory course was organized in the same year at the Moscow Higher School of Commerce (now the Plekhanov University of Economics ). In 1920 the People's Commissariat for Education issued the decree “On the Workers' Faculties”, which now formed the legal basis for this institution. The duration of the preparatory course was set at three years for day courses and four years for evening courses; every worker or farmer from a minimum age of 16 years could register. Students on day courses received grants from the state during their training at RabFaks , and their training time was fully counted towards working hours.

The RabFaks reached their greatest importance in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when there were more than 1000 RabFaks in Moscow, Leningrad , Alma-Ata and other major university cities in the country. In the academic year 1925/26, around 40 percent of Soviet first-year students graduated from RabFaks. From the mid-1930s onwards, the need for workers' faculties fell, as most of the prospective students now had an adequate educational background due to compulsory schooling. As a result, the last RabFaks were dissolved in the early 1940s.

The system of the Soviet RabFaks was later taken as a model in the GDR in the early post-war years for the so-called workers and farmers faculties . The purpose of these institutions was also there to provide preliminary training for those prospective students from the lower classes of the population who had previously not been able to achieve the Abitur.

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