the whole school system. It had
education sections in all the district people's councils, which
administered and, through their inspectors, controlled the teachers and
the teaching programs. Party control at all levels was exercised either
directly by the Party's basic organizations, as was the case in the
higher institutes, or through the branches of the Union of Albanian
Working Youth, the Party's most powerful front organization. The
majority of the teachers in secondary schools and higher institutes
were Party members.

By the beginning of 1970 the regime seemed to have scored substantial
progress in the field of education. Illiteracy had been reduced
considerably, if not actually eliminated. Through an intensive program
to train elementary and secondary school teachers, build schoolhouses,
and make schooling obligatory up to the eighth grade, the government had
enabled all the country's children to obtain some kind of rudimentary
education. It had also instituted a system of higher education and had
founded the first university in the history of the country and was thus
no longer dependent on foreign universities to train people in the
various professions. It had also instituted a widespread network of
professional and vocational schools intended to train badly needed
technicians and skilled workers.

The whole education network, however, was a one-track system geared to
serve the ideological and political objectives of the Party. The Party,
through the Central Commission on Education and the Directorate of
Education and Culture, both attached to the Party's Central Committee,
controlled every facet of the school system: programs, curricula,
administration, teaching staffs, and funds. The schools, students,
teachers, and professors were so organized as to form a monolithic
establishment centrally directed and completely immersed in
Marxism-Leninism.

The entire system was dedicated to the education of the new man with
Communist traits and morality. As defined by the Party leaders and Party
theoreticians, these traits and morality meant the development of a
"revolutionary spirit and responsibility for one's tasks for society and
the cause of socialism, the defense of the basic principles of the Party
and the implementation of its correct policy." The whole school system,
as developed in the past twenty-five years, therefore, was for the
building of communism as defined and interpreted by the Albanian
Communists