Meeting with Participants in the National Russian Conference of Humanities and Social Sciences Teachers
June 21, 2007
Novo-Ogaryovo
Встреча с делегатами Всероссийской конференции преподавателей гуманитарных и общественных наук
21 июня 2007 года
Ново-Огарево
VLADIMIR PUTIN: Thank you very much.
Your remark about someone acting as a teacher and starting to tell us what to do is entirely correct. I can add in this respect that this is unquestionably an instrument for influencing our country and it is a tried and tested method. If one side is ready to allot marks, that means it accords itself the right to lead the way and will continue to seek to do so.
Russia needs to be a part, a full part of the global world. We need to be a natural part of this world, and this is what we are. But no one can deprive us of our national specificities, our historical particularities. In this respect, many could learn something from Russia. Russia is a country in which different religions and peoples have developed principles for living together, practically at genetic level, through a natural process over the centuries. If you look at our main religions, even they differ to a considerable degree from the traditional standards of Christianity or even Islam. They have adapted to coexisting on a single territory, beneath a single sky, with other peoples and other faiths. This is a culture that is the product of centuries. This tolerance, as has become the trendy term today, is essentially in our blood.
O. GAMAN-GOLUTVINA (Member of the Academy of Political Sciences):
Colleagues,
When people start talking about teaching the social sciences, I always remember the old joke: before taking a course in Marxist-Leninist philosophy, this student was convinced that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were husband and wife, but then he began taking this course and discovered that they were four completely different people. Fortunately, todays situation is not reminiscent of the collisions of bygone days, but there are some problems nevertheless.
What I would like to say is that, as someone who works in training managers, I think that the people who finish school today or go through university studies, will be the people making the political and management decisions in 10 or 15 years time, and in this respect it is very important that they be in touch with what we could call the pulsing connection between time and place.
What do I mean by this? It is clear that decisions are a sort of projection of the vision of the world that exists at the moment the decision is taken. This vision of the world is formed to a large extent by history and by knowledge of history. We all know that history is politics in the past, and politics is historys present. Of course, history teaches us nothing, but as Klyuchevsky said, it punishes us for not learning our lessons, and the lessons that we learn from the past (from others mistakes) play a large part in determining the quality of the decisions we take today. The past is not some kind of antique shop it is a relevant mechanism that functions in the structure of modernity. The old adage that whoever controls the past also controls the present and the future is being proven true time and time again today.
The Duke of Wellington is credited with having said that, the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. I say this because it would be worth our while to think about our Etons, and not just for business specialists. I think it would be good to look at restoring prestige and exclusivity to civil service, exclusivity not in the sense of distance from the public, but in the sense of exclusive quality of training for carrying out this work. I think that without this we will not be able to restore the states overall effectiveness. Incidentally, I cannot but give my support to the idea that the state is not an impediment to democracy. On the contrary, the state is rather an instrument for defending democracy.
VLADIMIR PUTIN:
First of all, I agree that we need to provide quality training for our specialists, including in the civil service. But I would like to get away from foreign stereotypes of exclusivity in education. When I, as someone who grew up on the streets of Leningrad, hear about exclusivity, I always find myself immediately feeling suspicious towards it, because I get the feeling that is something beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, something cut off from citizens and from the people. I think that we need to talk about high-quality training for our specialists, and about educational establishments providing reliable guarantees of this high quality. That is just a comment I wanted to make, but overall, I fully agree with you.
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8:31В.Путин.Церемонии вручения ГП РФ.12.06.07.Part 4by niknikolay649 views
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