The modern world belongs to the educated. We speak about intellectually rich or intellectually poor nations more often, than about resource-rich nations now. It is evident that the world of today is the world of knowledge and modern economics is the economics of knowledge. Educational and scientific issues are paid close attention to by the State Duma of the Russian Federation, its Educational Committee and the Russkiy Mir Foundation.
Although we do not have so many students as, for instance, in China, but there are over 30 million of them in Russia, for sure. We have schools, higher education institutions, postgraduate students. We also have 5 million school teachers, professors and university teachers; all in all – 35 million people, a giant army... No other sphere of our economics has so many people in it.
According to the latest classification of economic and social organization, Russia takes the first place, being the most educated country in the world, as 60 percent of adults got higher or secondary vocational education. Canada takes the second place with 52 percent, then Israel and Korea and the USA are on the fifth place with 43 percent. But we do understand that the numbers do not reflect the education quality and people are not satisfied with our education system. But still, more and more people keep enrolling at higher education institutions and sometimes we get large entries. In general, we consider the base of the Russian education to be solid.
Russian higher education institutions may not be included into the lists of the most prestigious higher education institutions of the world; I’d say, they will never be, as these ratings are usually made by the institutions, which take the leading places. In case one of the ratings criteria was the number of the Universities’ Earth satellites, the Moscow State University would be second to none. Many satellites were launched by the Moscow State University. But as the ratings are made at Harvard (and Harvard does not launch satellites), there will never be such a criterion at all.
The same goes to the Moscow State University' supercomputer – Harvard’s one is weaker than ours. Such a criterion will also never be included into the ratings. In turn, Harvard publishes many magazines and publications in them give much more points than satellites. A satellite gives zero points – less than one publication in a Harvard’s magazine.
So, we are not developing complexes about being outside of international ratings. Russia has its own ratings and we are satisfied with them. We know that our country has great educational, cultural and scientific traditions.
From the moment of discovering Venus’s atmosphere by the founder of the first Moscow University, Russians have made many important discoveries, which determine the image of the modern world.
What is modern chemistry? It is Mendeleev. Who is the founder of everything connected with immunology? Nobel Prize winner Mechnikov. Physiology is Pavlov. Radio – Popov. Television – Zvorykin. Aviation – Sikorskiy. Nuclear bomb was first created and tested on Japanese people by the United States. But the first nuclear power plant was built by Kurchatov.
And the first spaceship was built by Korolev. Who invented laser? Basov and Prokhorov.
Once, having listed all of these spheres, rector of the Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichiy asked: “Anything else?” Basically, there is nothing more.
Russia is the only country, which supports an international space ship. Americans have imposed sanctions on us in many spheres, but they have not done that in space sphere – in this case, they would not have drivers for their own space ships. As our Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said, they would have to launch their cosmonauts with a trampoline.
Now Russia has 40 percent of all the building nuclear reactors, contracts have been concluded with 36 countries. The nearest competitor is two times behind us. Our ill-wishers keep repeating that Russia is a country with torn economics, a massive petrol station.
I am not speaking about achievements in cultural sphere. When people around the world speak about theatre, they mean Stanislavskiy and Chekhov’s drama, speaking about music people recall Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and many others. Leo Tolstoy is still one of the most published authors in the world, who is overrunning all the others according to all the publishing ratings.
We embrace development of international educational contacts. Soviet Union used to prepare human resources for the entire world. The Russian Federation is a bit behind here. All of our higher educational institutions have allotments for international students, who can study at our educational institutions. Russian language helps a lot here.
By the way, there are more problems with other languages apart from Russian. I am the dean of Management Faculty of the Moscow State University and I have quite many students from China. They almost do not have problems with the Russian language, but they do with other languages – with English, French and so on. These languages are more difficult than Russian for them, as they did not always study them at school. Western foreign languages are compulsory for students of Russian schools.
Use all the opportunities to study in Russia. We will welcome all the educational contacts, all exchanges; we are ready to support them in every possible ways.
Speaking about creating an Association – I think, we are creating a real brotherhood of people, who learn and teach the Russian language. Perhaps we should give some advice like elder people do, when they can’t set poor examples. So, if you study Russian, keep studying it and keep studying in general.
Because life is about studying. A person does not stop studying even for a while and the more a person achieves, the more he understands he should continue studying. When the volume of your knowledge is increasing, according to laws of physics and geometry, the contour of ignorance is also increasing. So, never stop studying. Never think like – I need this knowledge, but do not need this one, this one is interesting and this one is not interesting. As experience shows, there is no unnecessary knowledge. But there is a lot of informational trash and one should tell it from real information, but still there is no totally unnecessary information. We cannot know in which situation we may need one or another combination of knowledge.
I mentioned Mendeleev. I am not sure that our great chemist would create his periodic system if his teacher of the Russian language was not a famous poet Ershov, author of “The Little Humpbacked Horse” tale. It is an unexpected combination, but a great wit is made out of combinations like these. So, a modern person, who wants to achieve the best in life, needs knowledge from different spheres.
I am encouraging to love parents, as today they are very proud of you – they are awarded prizes at the State Duma in Moscow. Love your Motherland. We are all children of our Motherland and great wits are blessed by precisely love to their Motherland. But one should not confuse the love to their Motherland with nationalism, which is hate to other motherlands.
Today we are having a team, which did not exist before and which was only created today, when we started the Forum. Today in this hall you are sitting next to people, who you are going to meet many times and which are perhaps going to become your friends.
Today, you are becoming the participants and creators of a global team – representatives of 57 countries are sitting in this hall today, so you already have contacts form 57 countries. Teams represent all the activities in the modern world – team spirit is very important. Get acquainted and you will be able to make a very interesting and lively team, which will meet, engage over social media, exchange opinions and concerns, perhaps - unite into international families. So, make friends. Friendship is a great power and many of those, who are sitting next to you, can support you in your future life.
Those, who set targets of leadership, always reach their goals. Today we said that one of the aims of our contest was to trigger a leader’s potential of those, who are interested to cooperate. And we see that you are already leaders, you have already won. Won this contest. You should have leader’s potentials to win. You have to set great goals to be a leader. If you don’t set great goals, you won’t be able to reach them. You have to set goals, which are beyond your imagination, but in this case your imagination will find the ways to reach them.
You have already set a goal to learn the Russian language to perfection, as our Asian friends did, who started afresh, but who are today already showing great knowledge. You have set a task to become the best in your professions. Leadership potential should continue putting us through setting great tasks. And the main thing – it is now common to say “Take care”, when bidding good-bye. Some do not take these words seriously. But it is the most important, as the chance of exactly your emergence on the planet Earth is very small. Our head consists of 100 billion neuron cells, which make us completely inimitable. So, exactly your emergence on the planet Earth is the greatest coincidence and it means that every person is an act of nature and God - depending on what every person believes. It is a wonder, every person’s life is a wonder and you are the heritage of your parents, friends, lovers, of your country and of all the mankind.
And you can achieve great things in life if you stay together, studying the Russian language and other subjects, thinking widely and moving forward.
The world is divided in two categories of people: one of them can explain for a long time why something cannot be done, the second category just do. You have to become a part of exactly this category, - you actually have already become them by sending your essay to the contest. It means you are ready to act and to move forward.
A great community has risen from the initiative we started only a year ago. World Association of Youth and Students, Learning Russian can rise out of this initiative. It is also the result of activities we could not foresee even a year ago. But we set a task to unite young people, who think within the paradigm of the “Generation of the World”. And being the heritage of the mankind, take care.
And the last thing. Scientists have recently proved that people, who speak foreign languages, live much longer than those, who do not speak them. So this is my wish: study Russian, live long and prosper.
