The society of the future should replace the elitist model with the egalitarian one. I happened to live in the USSR for a short period (1979–1991) at its sunset, and I can personally say that the egalitarian model adopted in the USSR was successful. At a time when a person is formed (the period of training in primary and secondary school), a huge number of people in the USSR had the opportunity to acquire a good education and a broad Outlook. Of course, not everyone used it. However, this is not a reason to «lower the bar».
According to various studies, the quality of mathematical education in the USSR began to decline since the early 1950s, approximately synchronously with this, the level of scientific and technical potential of our country decreased. Until the 1950s, the teaching of mathematics in Russian schools had been based on the textbooks of the tsarist teacher Andrei Kiselev, the most simple, systematic, but at the same time setting a high pace in the development of the material by students. The high quality of educational materials and the system of education are extremely important, because it is their purposeful and deliberate reduction that has led to the stagnation and degradation of the entire education system in our country and around the world.
The intellectual side of a person is directly related to his behavior in everyday life, as it determines the structure of requests and needs. I am convinced that the total corruption that has now struck my country would have existed to a much lesser extent if the level of education and spirituality of society had not fallen to a minimum. It is not about propaganda, but about the actual intellectual and moral level of the population.
Another consequence of intellectual underdevelopment worldwide is apathy (indifference) to the suffering of others. The soul, like the body, is necessary to educate. The callousness of illiterate people turns off deterrents for politicians, and this is fraught with the threat of serious shocks.
It is necessary to start changing the situation through raising the level of education in the global society.
Mathematical education should be the main axis of the development of skills and learning abilities, including mathematics, logic, as well as analytical games (chess) and so on.
The second educational axis is the study of national and foreign languages, literature and history.
The third is the study of the Sciences of man and the world around him: biology, human medicine, physics and chemistry, geography, astronomy.
The new model of teaching students should be focused on the study of the aptitudes and abilities of students throughout the period of training with the definition of the areas of greatest abilities. Techniques for this are known. The training profile can and should be adjusted during this period if the priorities were initially identified incorrectly. The training should be designed so that students work with a load, with a somewhat high bar, which guarantees a high level of knowledge and analytical skills.
A separate side of education should be medical and sports training of schoolchildren, as now we teach children to use different complex electronic devices, but do not teach them to know and rationally exploit their bodies.
I will object that in any sample there will be children weakly motivated and not inclined to intensive training. On the other hand, we will get a large number of well-trained and highly motivated passionaries, not all of whom will be able to find a place in life that meets their needs. This is fraught with aggravation of internal social contradictions. In past centuries, this led to religious wars, Crusades, etc.
I donʹt think these problems are impossible to be solved. Poorly motivated children may be profiled in a narrow labour creative specialties and also in sports.
Highly motivated passionaries in their excess will have the opportunity to prove themselves in the areas of development associated with high risk. We are talking about the development of resources of the oceans, the bowels of the earth and the space.
In any case, we can and should be focused on the training of the Creators, not the consumers. We must prepare people who will be able to be responsible for the future of our planet.
The second important step should be a change in the structure of social needs from the dominance of material needs to intangible.
We must take a different place: not consumption, but knowledge, work and movement must take the place of shopping and other dominants of the consumer society of the XX century.