A Central Commission
on Education was immediately created in the Party Central Committee; the
commission was headed by Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu and included some
fifty experts in the ideological, academic, and military aspects of
education.

After a year's work the commission completed its report and, in June
1969, submitted it to the Central Committee, which gave its formal stamp
of approval. In December of the same year the government submitted a
bill to the People's Assembly for the reorganization of the educational
system; in its preamble the bill said that it was based on the report of
the previous June as approved by the Party Central Committee (see ch. 5,
Social System).

The Central Committee was the next highest echelon in importance in the
Party organization. In 1970 it was composed of sixty-one regular and
thirty-six candidate members. It was to the Central Committee that the
Politburo submitted its policy decisions for formal approval. As a rule,
in recent years the Central Committee has approved Politburo reports and
decisions with little, if any, debate. But there have been occasions
when the Central Committee has been called upon to decide on issues of
the utmost importance for the country. For example, in February 1948 the
Central Committee was convened to discuss and decide the issue of a
possible merger of Albania with Yugoslavia. Although the forces favoring
such a merger were in the majority, the dissenting voices were
sufficient to block the proposed merger. Another Central Committee
meeting, held in September of the same year, purged the top Party group
that had advocated the merger with Yugoslavia. A similar crucial issue
arose in the fall of 1961 on the question of relations with the Soviet
Union. The Central Committee approved the Politburo decision to break
with Moscow and issued a declaration to that effect.

The Party's ideological principles, tasks, and organizational structure
were delineated in the Party's statute, originally adopted by the First
Party Congress in 1948 and amended several times since then. In it,
control by the Party was detailed specifically, and the statute rather
than the Constitution was the fundamental law of the land. According to
the statute, the highest leading organ of each organization was: the
general meeting for the basic Party organizations; the conference for
the Party organizations of districts and cities; and the congress for
the entire Party.

The