Speech of Professor E.M.Malitikov, Chairman of the CIS Interstate Committee on Dissemination of Knowledge and Adult Education, President of the International Association «Znanie» at the Round Table «Relations between Russia and the West on the eve of the G8 meeting» (by Yu. Luzhkov), organized by the Analytical Council of the «Unity in the Name of Russia» Foundation, Moscow, Savoy Hotel, July 13, 2006
Here, with few exceptions, the worldviews, approaches and philosophy of bygone analogue times dominate at the Round Table. Outdated notions and conclusions about the forms of influence on the new digital mentality of modern civilization and the local conservative form of thinking are no longer suitable for forward-looking assessments of development.
The digital age, digital people, digital mindlessness and rationalism are already the tools of a new generation of young people who succeed in mastering the information society. They live without borders, crossing them daily through the Internet, a transparent world.
Globalization, like radiation, is invisibly and imperceptibly doing its work. It will take us either as riders, saddled with it, or hostages, and will not stop at the protests of poor or rich people or countries. Neither the political will of the superpowers nor the combined might of the world banking system can slow it down.
It is objective, logical and unavoidable.
What is needed is an associated policy, not an obstructive one.
If you remember what the Americans did when the USSR launched the world’s first satellite. They didn’t add to NASA’s allocation, but increased it many times over into education, with an emphasis on adult education.
Today, when knowledge on Earth is updated up to 20% a year, there is not a single university in the world capable of giving people enough knowledge and education to provide leadership and success, an understanding of the details and paradoxes of the world as a whole and in parts at the industry level.
Knowledge is not spread evenly across the planet, like butter on bread. We need a highly productive export-import of knowledge through a targeted worldwide educational teleport-distributor.
It is important to achieve real, rather than declarative inclusion in the policy priorities of states to recognize and support supranational extrabudgetary superbranch of the planetary world order — Adult Education.
We all need a new system of education and not only the budget and constitutional, providing secondary education for all. And education for us — adults who make critical decisions for the country, organize the life of society, choose leaders and carry out policy, including interstate.
In Russia and the CIS the necessary education for adults in general and is based on eyewash in the form of refresher courses, or how we ourselves purposefully and energetically in his career forwarding move «fins».
The world has recognized that adult education is the most important tool of social development at the core of the Sustainable Development of mankind. It is included in the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Program for the XXI century and is supranational absolutely independent branch of world order and world understanding.
Today, without being enshrined in the constitutions of states and charters of ministries of education, this branch is an economic «snowdrop» in the state economy. Nevertheless, it turns over two and a half times more money than the total education budget of the states.
It is self-sufficient, since it is in demand by a conscious part of the world’s population for career advancement and to meet the material needs of adults and their families.
When the number of illiterate non-competitive people on the Earth exceeds a critical mass, they are a working tool of fanatical terrorism, drug business and criminal clans, having the mentality of «living bombs», can bury not only peace, but also the very Sustainable Development of Mankind.
Unfortunately, the Soviet educational system, once successful, which gave the world many Nobel laureates, is hopelessly behind and at the bottom of the international scale. This also applies to other countries, including such countries as Germany.
The problem is that the classroom-lesson form of education is outdated and does not meet the needs of the modern world for productivity and novelty of content. It still operates by inertia, just as we drive and fly on gasoline and kerosene, as long as there is oil in the ground and it feeds the existing infrastructure. But mankind could have long ago driven on water and other cheap and environmentally friendly fuels.
There are 1 billion people on Earth today who cannot read or write. This digital divide is growing, becoming a digital divide every day! This billion is the poorest on Earth because they are not competitive on the world labor market.
For this reason Poverty and Poverty are marching around the Planet, creating a Red Balance of Sustainable Development. However, the poorest billion are not genetically stupid people.
The world needs productive education, mobile for anywhere on the planet, in the mountains and deep villages, the jungle and the Arctic Circle.
An audience of 40 modern professors will not close the digital divide with a 25% teacher shortage. There is a shortage of 15 million of them today. We need to increase the productivity of Educators and Teachers by tens of orders of magnitude.
To do this, we need to move away from classrooms and costly Palaces of Face-to-Face Knowledge.
Teaching is losing its position, moving to a form of Learning.
It is necessary to mentally change one’s attitude to education without fear of fighting the powerful bureaucracy, which is trying to «live up to its retirement,» to the precipice, to collapse, as happened with the collapse of the USSR.
The existing catastrophic situation in education is defended by the bureaucratic machine’s mafia-like collusion.
If we don’t change the education system, we have no future.
The world today needs a distant distributor of the best content and knowledge of the world’s leading universities and professors, operating on the basis of the latest space telecommunications.
If we, relying on the power of the people sitting here, because it is your power that makes up the power of our state, include education, not a declaration on education, then the next generation or even a generation of young politicians will take the «Us and the West» issue off the agenda.
Thank you for your attention.