RabFak

RabFak (Russian Рабфак; abbreviated from Рабочий факультет to German "workers ' faculty ' ) was the designation of special education in Soviet Russia or the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. They had been organized to enable young people from the working class, who often had school completion rapid preparation for higher education through general education courses.

Basis of the establishment of RabFaks was the political upheaval in Russia, which had taken place with the October Revolution of 1917. Mid- 1918, the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia issued a decree that allowed workers and peasants to have to enroll at universities without entrance exam and without educational background. As a result, it came at the beginning of the new academic year 1918 to a dramatic increase of student numbers. However, could the former freshmen the least to do with the subject matter a bit, because most working-class children at the time of the Russian Empire did not receive adequate education and were often illiterate. To counteract this situation, proposed to the then Deputy People's Commissar for Education, Mikhail Pokrovsky, set up special evening schools for the preparation of the working people to study. On September 11, 1919, the People's Commissariat of Education decided that the universities to "workers ' faculties ', supplement to which all Studierwilligen could prepare in day or evening classes to the actual study.

The first such preparation course was organized at the Moscow School of Commerce (now the Plekhanov University of Economics ) in the same year. 1920 enacted the People's Commissariat of Education Decree " About the working faculties ", which now formed the legal basis for this institution. The duration of the preparatory course was fixed at three years for day classes or evening classes for four years, every worker or peasant could leave enroll a minimum age of 16 years. Students at day courses were given during training to RabFaks grants from the state, also their training time was fully credited to the working hours.

Their greatest importance RabFaks reached the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, when there was in Moscow, Leningrad, Alma- Ata, and other major university cities in the country more than 1,000 RabFaks. In the academic year 1925/26, some 40 percent of the Soviet freshmen graduate of RabFaks. From the mid- 1930s increasingly dropped the demand for workers' faculties, since now able to provide even the most aspiring students an adequate education through compulsory education. As a result, the last RabFaks were dissolved beginning of the 1940s.

The Soviet RabFaks system was later in the GDR in the early post-war years for the so-called workers 'and peasants' schools as a model. The purpose of these institutions was also there the qualifications that prospective students from the lower strata of the population that previously did not have a high school can achieve.