Learn to live in the XXI century!
Advanced technologies in education — an essential tool of social development
Efim Mikhailovich Malitikov,
Professor, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Committee for Dissemination of Knowledge and Adult Education of the Commonwealth of Independent States, established by the decision of the Council of Heads of Governments of the CIS on January 17, 1997. Initiator of a new independent branch in the CIS — Adult Education, which is an important tool in the basis of sustainable development of mankind in the XXI century. President of the International Association «Znanie» since 1995, continuing the annals of its predecessor — the All-Union Society «Znanie» and having general consultative status in UN ECOSOC and consultative status in UNIDO.
Dear Readers!
The process of mental change is the most complex and lengthy process in our human life, since it affects the genetic, political and social status and aspect of our being.
Today we can often see the tallest and largest country house in the neighborhood, which in architecture, taste, false idea of wealth and functions is a primitive village hut.
It demonstrates only by its size the unrealized essence and unfulfilled style of its owner. It is the essence of an ambitious, genetically undeveloped man. The happiness of many generations of his ancestors lay in the blind struggle for a piece of bread and a roof over his head.
Given a chance to change his life financially, such a person tries to change, in this way, his class. «Know our own!»
Dreaming of a palace, he builds a barn, sometimes spending enough money to build a palace.
Our society is a derivative of the self-expression of influential, powerful people, who once received a long time ago a conventionally decent education. At the same time, they ostentatiously demonstrate their progressiveness against the background of mental backwardness.
The budget — constitutional socialist system and the class — lesson form of education have created a deep rut from which many generations of people, governments and states cannot get out.
Even the newest achievements of the modern world, like paper on a bureaucrat’s desk, lie in limbo, awaiting examination and acceptance by the next new generations.
The new agents, being outrages of habitual norms, attitudes and principles of life, stick out from the environment, causing its irritation and threatening fateful resistance to them.
There is no dispute that, in the old days, the Soviet educational system was good and gave the world outstanding scientists and specialists. But, many decades have passed since then, changing the world, its scientific perceptions, and its views of the future.
I would like to bring this topic to the attention of the high founders of the newspaper and its powerful readers, to whose response it is designed.
It is necessary to revolutionize the approach to education in general, but also to highlight a much more important aspect of it.
The task is not to speed up, supplement, tweak, or adjust the educational system.
The task is to fundamentally change the attitudes underlying the sustainable development of mankind.
It is no coincidence that over 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and half the planet, i.e. 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day.
It is no coincidence that 880 million people on Earth are completely illiterate — they can’t read or write.
To this we must add you and I, we are among the 4.5 billion people who do not have enough modern knowledge.
At the same time we continue to think that we are running society. In reality, we still manage, but already almost independent of us, the digital world by prehistoric or, if you like, antique analog ways and solutions.
It is difficult to take note without a psychological shock that large-scale military operations, flight missions and routes of ultramodern flying nuclear missile carriers are still calculated on a logarithmic ruler.
It is no coincidence that the superpower USSR collapsed and in its place on 1/6 of the planet’s landmass lie in a plaster sarcaphagus, its former parts, once one mighty body, not reunited.
These supposedly independent states have pretended to proclaim a synthetic Commonwealth as a successful derivative of the continuing friendship of peoples who once proudly spoke the same language.
Having employed thousands of officials, unfit for the Future, living according to the formula of billy-goose bums on the funds of the Commonwealth of Independent States quota budget, we, intuitively, but «secretly» guess at our mental incompetence.
We are fooling each other, humming the space age with steam train horns and driving with the curtains closed in an unknown but the same direction.
And all this is ruled by unconscious ignorance and a desire to stay a little longer and keep others in ignorance of the obvious.
By boasting about 50 years of our best people, in the same factory and in the same workplace, we demonstrate and preach ignorance, primitivism and worldview backwardness.
The fine old educators of the «analog» last century are already unacceptably backward in their modern knowledge. They no longer have anything to say even to their former «analog» but advanced students.
For today’s young people with a digital mindset from birth they are no longer teachers. They are pupils at most, but who and how can teach them at a worldwide pedagogical deficit of 15 million people out of 59? And this number is constantly growing.
The old system insists that the main factor in a successful education is direct contact between student and teacher.
Indeed, this is an important factor. But, what can we do if it is no longer effective for the Third Millennium society.
The classroom-lesson method does not provide even basic literacy for hundreds of millions of people.
Socrates once taught individually, Plato created an entire academy with only a few students. They learned by walking in conversations in the garden. The students made a life from their teacher, imbibing his ideas about the world and copying even his way of thinking.
However, the classroom-lesson system was replaced by the Platonic system when thousands of educated people were needed.
The time has come to say goodbye to it as well.
After all, the population of the planet is growing every second, illiteracy is not lagging behind and growing even faster. The shortage of educators, not to mention teachers who meet today’s demands, is constantly increasing.
The planetary education of people on the planet is in red balance.
The reasonable size of classes and classrooms, as well as the number of students in them, is limited. Even 40 people are difficult to keep in close contact with a teacher.
In addition, the tutelage of teachers is clogging up and sidelining the natural qualities of the individual, who needs to search for truth, for a profession, for a purpose on his own.
New teaching technologies are needed to respond instantly to changes in the human environment and geopolitical trends.
Humanity needs to rely on fundamentally new knowledge.
What is needed is a highly motivated independence of people to learn new professions, disciplines, techniques and principles of life.
All this makes it necessary to look for new modern tools for the dissemination of knowledge.
Humanity already has them at its disposal.
Speaking of a unified educational space today, it is already ignorant and useless to proclaim it without applying catalysts capable of embracing it in a rapidly changing world of knowledge.
These catalysts are the latest modern technologies based on remote space interactive communications.
Until recently we could only read about them in science fiction, see them in movies about space aliens, journeys to new distant worlds and galaxies.
And even today, even very authoritative and powerful figures and organizers of science, education and culture are convinced carriers and supporters of yesterday’s conservative methods of knowledge dissemination. And sometimes, some of them, in the name of self-preservation, are direct antagonists of the introduction of everything new and cutting-edge into the real processes of society — social technology, to which our education directly refers.
The environment is literally teeming with subjects of desperate resistance, resistance to everything that sticks out of it, sticks out, moves faster.
Among these subjects, we can find really influential people, still strong, but already outmoded structures and state apparatuses.
Society has always owed its development to contradictions. This is an indispensable condition for any development.
Today, we can state with great satisfaction the fact that after many years of consistent painstaking work, a structure has emerged that has not let itself be pecked by a sophisticated and powerful bureaucracy. It — through enormous difficulties and overcoming — has acquired a critical mass that must be reckoned with, cannot be ignored and neglected, cannot be brushed aside and forgotten, cannot be unrequitedly pushed aside, contrasting its superiority with solidarity with a soulless and unperturbed administrative might.
We can proudly name this structure.
It is the Modern Humanities University!
It has the most extensive network of more than 370 affiliated institutions in the world.
The daily educational process is carried out via satellite telecommunication channels for all affiliates simultaneously, just taking into account the time zone.
Today it is the largest university in the former Soviet Union in terms of number of students and concentration of its own state-of-the-art technological innovations.
It is the fifth in the world after similar universities of China, India, Mexico and Great Britain.
SGU is seven times ahead of the traditional educational giant, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
This is the university that built its own space teleport. It is also a large TV company, a publishing house, an electronic library and a state-accredited institution of higher education.
It is a university where each student is a personality, but digitized in the smallest details of student life.
It is the higher education institution, where own textbooks are not dumped on students’ heads by reckless masses of the recommended literature, but are prepared and printed in thoroughly verified volumes, suitable for maximum efficient digestion.
This is the University that returned to the mountainous auls and poor deep villages, living even without transport and electricity, the constitutional right to education, not realized until now because of the inaccessible natural conditions and the right to raise in his country new Lomonosovs.
This is a university where even a Kazakh student who does not speak English can take a course, pass an exam and receive a corresponding diploma directly from the University in Cambridge.
SGU is the main basic educational center of the International Association «Znanie» — the regional coordinator of UN non-governmental organizations in Eastern Europe and the CIS
SGU joined to its name the UN ECOSOC General Consultative Status and Consultative Status at UNIDO, acting on behalf of the UN and the CIS Interstate Committee on Knowledge Dissemination and Adult Education as an operator of a permanent global interregional electronic forum — IRENE NGO/UN Network.
SGU — axial element and instrument of MA «Znanie», Russian and international associations of non-governmental universities to implement major UN programs: It is a key element of Znanie MA and the Russian and international associations of private universities in carrying out UN programs such as: «Agenda-21» and «Sustainable Development of Mankind».
The SGU technologies are approved and will be presented at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002; recently they received general support at the last meetings of the high-level segment of UN ECOSOC and UN TACC-FORC — UN Global Working Group, which replaced the DOT-FORC created earlier by the G8 Heads of State.
It gathers around one Sunday table the world’s biggest business tycoons, financial tycoons, authors and masters of the virtual world space and computer technology, as well as politicians of the highest representative level of states, ministers.
The International Association «Knowledge», the Interstate Committee for the dissemination of knowledge and adult education of the CIS invite to visit the SGU, to seek forms of cooperation and use its latest tools of social development at the core of sustainable development of mankind.
Thousands of people from around the world visit the SGU today with a full house, exceeding, as expressed by their Austrian colleagues, a full house at the Vienna Opera House.
Е. Malitikov, Professor,
Chairman of the Interstate Committee of the CIS
Chairman of the CIS Interstate Committee for Knowledge Dissemination and Adult Education,
President of the International Association «Znanie».