According to Kapo, there were a large number of Communists who made
little effort to implement the Party social line because the customs
inherited from the old society still existed in the minds and hearts of
the people and because the Party had been unable to divest people of all
that was "hostile and reactionary and clothe them with the Party
ideology." Kapo considered the most disturbing feature of this state of
affairs to be the religious and patriarchal aspects that prevented the
youth from creating a new socialist society and that continued to exist
even among Communist cadres.

Western correspondents reporting from Tirana, in commenting on Kapo's
speech, stated that what actually disturbed the Party most was the
persistent opposition of the parents to new social standards set by the
Party to regulate and control family life in general and the life of the
youth in particular. Standards for dating, mixed Muslim-Christian
marriages, engagement of boys and girls within socially accepted classes
(the aim being to isolate the children of the former upper classes), and
working and living together in various so-called volunteer construction
projects were objectionable to parents.

EDUCATION

Pre-Communist Era

As late as the 1940s over 80 percent of the people were illiterate. The
principal reason for this was that schools in the native language were
practically nonexistent in the country before it became an independent
state in 1912. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century the
Ottoman rulers prohibited the use of the Albanian language in schools.
The Turkish language was used in the few schools that existed, mainly in
cities and large towns, for the Muslim population. The schools for
Orthodox Christian children were under the supervision of the Istanbul
Ecumenical Patriarchate. The teachers for these schools were usually
recruited from the Orthodox clergy, and the language of instruction, as
well as that used in textbooks, was Greek. The first known school to use
the native tongue in modern history was in a Franciscan seminary that
was opened in 1861 in Shkoder, where the Jesuits in 1877 founded a
seminary in which the native tongue also was used.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first
decade of the twentieth, a number of patriots who were striving to
create a national consciousness founded several elementary schools in a
few cities and towns, mostly in the south, but they w