also what was Erich Mielke like? from what i have gathered he was ambitious, sociopathic and very meticulous. any other interesting facts about the stasi and their scope would be greatly appreciated.
I don't know anything about education in the GDR, but on the Stasi questions:
The answer to your question about the scale of the Stasi's domestic surveillance operations is: enormous. By 1989, the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees — to put that in context, that's about four times the current size of the CIA, or about 2.5 times the size of the FBI, to monitor a country of 16 million people.
But the really striking statistic is the number of unofficial collaborators/informants: 189,000 of them by 1989, or one for every 90 East German citizens.
Since reunification, the German government (through the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic — whose website has a lot of useful information and context about the Stasi and their work) have opened the Stasi's extensive records to public and academic scrutiny. And they are extensive — in about forty years, the Stasi produced:
... and that's not even including the 5% of their archive that the Stasi destroyed before it was disbanded, which researchers are now trying to reconstruct.
German citizens can actually request to see their Stasi files; many people have discovered that their friends, neighbours and family members were Stasi informants — which has understandably led to some tension in German society.
On Mielke: I haven't read any detailed biographical studies of him, but his general legacy isn't positive: he seems to be generally regarded as a uniquely able spymaster, but also as the strong arm of a deeply repressive state. My German is pretty poor, so I can't give a worthwhile precis of his profile in Germany, but if you speak German there's plenty of writing about him.
To give some international perspectives — from The Guardian's obituary after he died in 2000:
Pedantic, bureaucratic and humourless, Mielke was viewed by many as an unprincipled, heartless party functionary, whose actions were motivated by nothing nobler than a desire to keep himself and his cronies in power. In fact, he was a life-long communist, whose political biography was shaped by his experience in the early decades of the last century.
[...] Politically unsophisticated, with a mindset frozen in the prewar years - when communists saw Social Democrats as their worst enemies - Mielke was nonetheless a brilliant secret policeman. From the moment he took charge of the Stasi in 1957, the agency out-performed most of its western rivals.
From the New York Times:
Mr. Mielke's creed, expressed to subordinates in 1982 and recorded for Stasi archives, was: ''All this twaddle about no executions and no death sentences, it's all junk, comrades. Execute, if need be without a court sentence.'
[...] He had an uneasy relationship with Markus Wolf, the legendary head of Stasi's foreign intelligence operations. Mr. Mielke said he forced Mr. Wolf to resign; Mr. Wolf said in his 1997 autobiography, ''Man Without a Face,'' that he left the service in 1986 of his own free will, and that was the official version. ''He considered himself my rival,'' Mr. Wolf wrote of Mr. Mielke, describing him as ''a warped personality even by the peculiar standards of morality that apply in the espionage world.''