"STUDY, STUDY, STUDY!"

Having met Vladimir Putin for the first time, Nicolas Sarkozy later described him as “très intelligent.” Mr. Putin is undoubtedly an exceptional man, but there are certain generic qualities to his exceptionality, which show him as a typical product of the Soviet system of education: the breadth of his horizons, and a lifelong desire for learning. Whatever the West may think about them, those Soviet schools made you “study, study, study,” and also encouraged, believe it or not, a strong inclination for… independent thinking. Exceptions are exceptional in every society (President Obama is certainly one), but no other society was more effectual than Soviet society in encouraging “the rule” to get a better education, prized above money and epitomizing success, Soviet style. Perhaps, it was exactly because money was “no object” that free education would rise to occupy the place at the top of the social priorities for every responsible and ambitious Soviet citizen.

On the other hand…

“…This world-famous billionaire was a college dropout, and look where he is today!... That international celebrity never finished high school, and now she got it made! As for the grads, how many of them have no career to speak of? How many of them are unemployed?...”

There is a pervasive mentality in the American schools these days, regarding education as a useless chore, an antiquated fossil from the stone age. Success is everything, money is everything, but what is education? How much is it worth? An honest effort is being made to rationalize better education in money terms (see my next entry Education As Money), but that mostly concerns the prestige of getting an Ivy League College diploma, rather than getting an education as such. Former US President George W. Bush was a C-student at Yale, and he flaunted this fact of his scholastic underachievement in front of an audience of Yale students on at least one occasion that I watched and listened to.

Otherwise, the bespectacled “nerds” have been ridiculed and besmirched around the American nation as an obsolete bunch of useless far-out freaks of society, and there are numberless personal stories to substantiate this fact.

Now, I cannot say that in Soviet schools the “bespectacled” breed were never mocked or taunted, but by and large the “nerds” were highly respected there, protected by the politically correct aura, provided by Lenin’s famous saying: “Study, study, and, once more, study!!!”

In another entry False Idols With Good Taste, in the Russian section (see my posting of January 24, 2011), I am mentioning another Lenin’s authoritative ipse dixit, regarding the high value of classical music. What closely connects them together is the huge political and social significance of Lenin’s prescriptions for the betterment of the Soviet Citizenry, an addendum to “The Twelve Commandments of Soviet Communism.” (See my posting of January 26, 2011, where this entry appears among several others under the joint title La Forza Del Destino.)

“Study, study, study!” Such was the official demand of the Soviet State to all its citizens, a solemn duty of every student. And this official political incentive worked, of course. It has been universally acknowledged that the Soviet system of education was producing, particularly in exact sciences, the most literate and best-educated professional cadre anywhere in the world.

So, what is the moral of this story? It is obvious that the State has an obligation to its citizens to encourage good habits, while stigmatizing bad habits. There is no need to put people in prison for flunking education, but glamourizing truancy, discrediting scholastic excellence, and likewise extolling financial success over solid social values, corrupts and debases the nation, making her dependent on foreign brains (thus seriously jeopardizing national security), while reducing her crop of homegrown talent, and effectively killing her collective will to “study, study, study!”