strial workers, who constitute the largest group in the society. At
the bottom of the structure are the peasants. There are, of course,
gradations of power, privilege, and prestige within all of the social
groupings. The society has been very mobile since World War II with
rapid upward mobility based mainly on the expanding economy,
industrialization, and modernization. Toward the end of the 1960s, as
the economic growth rate slowed, so also did the social mobility, and
there was evidence that social groups were stabilizing.

Education has been the key to upward mobility and, since coming to
power, the Communists have given preference in educational opportunity
to formerly underprivileged groups. At the beginning of the 1970s,
however, the percentage of students of worker and peasant origin
enrolled in institutions of higher learning was far below the percentage
of workers and peasants in the population. Students from the lower
income groups have not competed favorably against those from more
advantaged backgrounds and, although upward mobility is not blocked, it
has been becoming more difficult. Membership in the BKP remains
important for persons desiring to move upward in the social structure.

For the leadership the importance of education lies in the fact that it
is the best means for orienting the people in the official ideology as
well as for training the professionals, technicians, and skilled workers
needed to run the country. The ideological indoctrination is pervasive
throughout the entire school system, but the concurrent goal of meeting
the needs of the economy has suffered because the system of higher
education has not expanded rapidly enough to absorb most secondary
school graduates who are desirous and capable of pursuing higher
studies. Many educational reforms have been enacted over the years, but
they have been cautious and limited and have not attacked the major
problem of providing much greater funding for higher education.

In the cultural sphere the party and government have promoted pride in
the ancient Bulgarian heritage but have regulated art, music, and
literature in order to bring about conformity with the Soviet-developed
doctrine of Socialist Realism. Throughout the communist era there have
been periods of freeze and thaw in the controls imposed on artists and
intellectuals, but the periods of greatest restriction in later years
have not equaled the severity of the Stalinist times. In the 1