And what about those young people who, as you say, have become hostages of new transformations

What tasks should the RF Ministry of Education and Science set for itself?

Now the Ministry of Education and Science faces, in my opinion, the primary task – the restoration of law-centered education. Roughly speaking, it is necessary to return our education to the concepts adopted in it until the mid-1970s, to restore the classical education system.

As far as science is concerned, it is necessary to revive applied science.

Let’s talk more about science …

Friedrich Engels wrote: “When a society has a real need, it moves science forward more than dozens of universities.” In his time, there were practically no separate research organizations, and almost all science was created in educational institutions. Now we have destroyed many knowledge-intensive industries – therefore, questions of practice in science are asked much less often. Most of these questions are relatively primitive. With all due respect to geology (where scientifically interesting questions arise in the course of, for example, the development of new methods of prospecting for oil and gas fields), at the same time, it is well known that, say, problems in the field of solid state physics arising in the development of new technologies the production of integrated circuits, in a purely mathematical sense, is much more interesting than the problems arising in the framework of geology. Accordingly, the semiconductor industry is able to move science forward faster than geology. It was the absence of serious practical issues that gave rise to the tilt of all science towards a kind of autism, when science completely ceases to be interested in the world around it, and only solves its internal problems.

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Interview with a publicist, TV presenter, political consultant, multiple winner of intellectual TV games Anatoly Wasserman.

Anatoly Alexandrovich, please remember how you studied at school?

At school, I had consistently poor grades in calligraphy, drawing, singing, and physical education. In subjects that did not require physical skills, I received only fives. The math lessons were my favorites. I was born into a family of scientists, and it was not so difficult for me to master school disciplines.

In your opinion, do school grades reflect the child’s ability? It was easy for you to study, but history knows the cases when great people in childhood suffered only failures at the school desk – for example, Churchill, Newton, Einstein.

Yes, Albert Einstein did not have enough stars from the sky at school. His abilities developed later. Subsequently, the great physicist was forced to constantly use someone’s help – due to the many gaps in elementary areas. For example, the mathematician Herman Minkowski developed a model of four-dimensional space-time based on Einstein’s idea. Many other parts of the theory of relativity, according to the popular version, were formed by Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marich. And the basic mathematical formulas underlying the theory of relativity were developed by the physicist Hendrik Anton Lorentz and the mathematician Henri Puncare. But Einstein’s merit is that he managed to combine all this into a single concept. Perhaps just because Einstein’s school education was not the best, the scientist perceived ordinary facts and information with a alexis carrel hero essay fresh eye. However, not every C grade student can hope that over the years his abilities will wake up by themselves. Intelligence develops through activity. And within the framework of statistical physics it has been proved: by itself, everything changes only for the worse.

How do you assess the learning process of the younger generation today in comparison with the Soviet education system?

Unfortunately, in recent decades, education has been re-aimed at destroying the whole picture of the world. In my time, they tried to teach children, first of all, to think correctly. Education helped build a holistic picture of the world, that is, the idea that all the variety of phenomena and processes we observe is a consequence of the relatively few laws that interact with each other.

The idea of ​​these patterns is in the legend of Newton’s apple. He allegedly, sitting in his garden in the evening and looking at the moon, saw an apple fall, and realized that the apple and the moon are attracted to the Earth by the same force. In fact, the concept of gravitation itself appeared long before Newton. And he derived a specific formula for the laws of universal gravitation on the basis of many astronomical studies carried out by several generations of scientists. But the very idea that the apple and the moon are attracted by the same force is just a typical example of a holistic picture of the world.

Even the French writer and materialist philosopher Claude Antoine Helvetius two and a half centuries ago said that knowledge of some principles successfully compensates for ignorance of some facts. And some – this is very modestly said. Many thousands of facts can be deduced from one regularity. And to understand this pattern and learn how to work with it, as a rule, is a little more difficult than remembering at least one of the facts explained by it.

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Let’s get back to education. What can you say about the two-tier system of higher education?

I believe that the two-stage education system is methodologically wrong. The student acquires much less knowledge than he would have received in a normal one-stage system. Classical training lasts five years. This is just one year longer than the undergraduate program, which teaches mainly specific recipes, rather than the sciences that generate those recipes. Saving a year at the cost of the fact that in the future you will understand incomparably less, you will not be able to retrain yourself and, ultimately, spend several times more on any advanced training courses than this saved year is, in my opinion, a pointless activity! The sooner we abolish the two-tier system and return to normal, the fewer young people will be disabled.

And what about those young people who, as you say, have become hostages of new transformations? More than one generation of bachelors has graduated.

The bachelor must understand that he was taught ready-made recipes without explaining the laws from which these recipes originate. Therefore, a young specialist should try, in parallel with the current work, to study the foundations on which the knowledge gained by him is built. As I already said, a holistic picture of the world, in principle, can be largely formed independently. This should be done by those who have not formed it in the learning process.

The media have repeatedly exaggerated the issue of training children of government officials abroad. One of the deputies even submitted to the State Duma a bill banning the children of officials from studying abroad. What is your point of view on this problem?

A person whose children study or work abroad will naturally think more about the welfare of the country where they study than about the welfare of their homeland.

Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.” And what greater treasure can there be than children ?! Therefore, I completely agree that education of children of officials abroad is not normal. Considering that each country tries to educate people in the course of training at the same time so that they are on the side of this state, it is understandable: this practice is simply dangerous for Russia. I do not think that it is necessary to strictly prohibit people from studying abroad, but the fact that studying abroad is incompatible with the civil service is quite obvious. And the fact that studying abroad for the children of an official makes it possible to question his good intentions in relation to his native country is, unfortunately, also quite obvious.

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Let’s go directly to you. It is interesting to analyze how your career has developed. You are an engineer-thermal physicist by education, worked as a programmer for a long time, then became a political consultant. At present, you position yourself as a journalist and host your own TV program.

I did not study thermal physics for a single minute after graduation. I started programming right away. Frankly speaking, even before entering the university I wanted to become a programmer. I went to thermal physics because my father hoped that I would continue his specialty. Nevertheless, I have absolutely no regrets about the time spent in my faculty. Thermal physics is a complex discipline at the intersection of many different sciences. It is necessary not only to study all of them, but also to learn to find within the framework of one science the answer to a question that arises within the framework of another.

He first appeared in the role of a publicist and politician on November 23, 1991. On that day, my first published article “Independence from Common Sense” came out – it called for a vote against Ukraine’s independence from the rest of Russia in a referendum on December 1 of the same year.