cational schools had been
established providing a relatively high quality of education in such
fields as agriculture, engineering, theology, commerce, art, and music.
Although there were many students of higher education at the University
of Sofia, about 10,000 students annually attended foreign universities,
principally in Austria and Germany.

By the end of World War I, many villages that had more than twenty
families had their own primary school. Larger settlements in more urban
areas often had their own _progymnasia_ and gymnasiums. In towns that
had 20,000 or more citizens, there were kindergartens for children from
three to seven years of age. Both religious and linguistic minorities
had their own schools, which functioned within the public school system.
Foreign schools coexisted with the public school system. Although the
curricula of the foreign schools were similar to those of the public
secondary schools, subjects were taught in western European languages,
forming a link between Bulgaria and the West.

By 1921 a three-tiered system of education--consisting of the four-year
elementary school, the three-year _progymnasium_, and the five-year
gymnasium--became officially compulsory in the first two stages. Many
children failed to attend school, however, and many villages, despite
the official policy, were without school facilities. The entire
educational system was controlled by the government through the Ministry
of Public Education, which regulated the contents of texts and courses
and the administration of exams. The model for the educational system
was essentially European, with a particularly strong emphasis on German
and Russian patterns.

In 1921 the Law of Public Instruction brought an increase in emphasis on
vocational training. Orders were issued to bring about a transition to
"vocational education and respect for labor." Eventually, schoolchildren
were forced to spend two weeks of their studies in "compulsory labor,"
a concept that was the precursor of the Bulgarian communist philosophy
of the integration of work with education. During this period the
students worked in such projects as cleaning school facilities, binding
texts, and cultivating school gardens.

In 1934 a so-called modern school was established to give the student an
alternative to the academically and socially elitist gymnasium, but
there were still a number of deficiencies in the Bulgarian educational
system. The literacy rate ha