Development, Part 4b
Education, key to development
Lenin’s
short 1920 speech to adult educators (attached)
starts with some paragraphs about the war situation. This was a little more
than two years after the Great October 1917 Russian Revolution, and in the mean
time there had been counter-revolutionary uprisings and military interventions
from the capitalist powers, including Great Britain. These can serve to remind
us what an enormous effort had to be made just to obtain sufficient peace to
start building the USSR.
In the
remaining page or so of this typically powerful summing up by Lenin can be read
his view of the relationship between education, development of industrial
productive forces (including electrification), and the emancipation of the
peasants from poverty and backward material conditions.
Says Lenin:
[We] “…will go to the peasants with a
practical, businesslike and clear-cut plan for the reconstruction of all
industry and will demonstrate that with education at its present level the
peasant and the worker will not be able to carry out this task and will not
escape from filth, poverty, typhus and disease.
“This practical task is clearly connected with
cultural and educational improvements and must serve as the central point
around which we must group all our Party propaganda and activities, all our
school and extra-mural teaching.
“This will help to get a sound grasp of the
most urgent interests of the peasant masses and will link up the general improvement in culture and knowledge with burning
economic requirements to such an extent that we shall increase a
hundredfold the demand of the working-class masses for education.”
We, too,
must link up the general improvement in culture and knowledge with burning
economic requirements. This is the reason for our studies.
Image (Poster): “Do you help to liquidate illiteracy?” (USSR,
1925)
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Speech to Adult
Educationalists at 3rd All-Russian Conference, 1920, Lenin.
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