certs, and other cultural activities are popular leisure-time
diversions. The cinema is extremely popular in both town and village,
although increasing television viewing has been reducing cinema
audiences.

In addition to sports, young people spend much of their leisure time
listening to popular music and also dancing. In fact, they are
periodically reprimanded by the BKP leadership for spending too much of
their time in leisure activities and not enough in socially useful
work.

CHAPTER 6

EDUCATION

The educational system in Bulgaria, as in the Balkans generally, began
to develop in a real sense only in the nineteenth century, principally
because Bulgaria had been under Turkish rule for 500 years. As education
was of little concern to the Turks and an educated Bulgarian population
would only represent a threat to their regime, the advancement of a
formal educational system was either openly repressed or neglected by
the Turks. As a result, the literacy rate in Bulgaria was one of the
lowest in Europe at the time of liberation in 1878. During the six
decades between liberation and World War II, the educational system had
made great progress in providing basic education to young people, but
there remained a hard core of illiterates in the adult population. After
the Communists took over in 1944, a massive drive in adult education
virtually eliminated the problem of illiteracy within a decade.

The educational system under the Communists was essentially patterned on
that of the Soviet Union, and the desire on the part of Bulgarian
authorities to stay within that pattern brought about a general
cautiousness as they restructured the system to make it coincide with
the newly imposed ideology. Although educational reforms have been
enacted with great frequency, they have often dealt with matters of form
rather than of substance. The basic adherence to Soviet guidelines has
remained intact throughout the years of communist rule.

As in most Eastern European countries, the major objectives of the
Bulgarian educational system have been premised on both ideological
issues and the demands of the national economy. One of the primary goals
of the system--both stated and implicit--is the production of the ideal
communist citizen who will work for the realization of "socialist
construction" and the betterment of the socialist society. A second
major premise of the system is that the demands of the economy must be
met