Figure of the Day: Russia tails along in education spendings

Sociologists of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have calculated how much money different countries of the world spend on secondary education. Judging by these figures, a little more than 5 thousand dollars a year is spent per student of a secondary educational institution. Lithuania, Turkey, Greece also spend about the same amount per year per student in educational institutions. Slightly less - Chile (about 4 thousand), and significantly less - Mexico (2.5 thousand). In the first place is Luxembourg: about 22 thousand dollars a year per student.

But a little more than 2 thousand dollars a year is spent on one student of a secondary specialized institution in Russia - this is the lowest indicator among all the countries included in the study. Here we even lagged behind Mexico (there are about 4 thousand a year), to say nothing of other countries.

Economist Dmitry Milin justly remarks on this matter: “and then we are surprised that there is no one to work at the factories!” And assesses the country's prospects in this state of affairs:

“We have ruined education, school and university. In order to learn a good engineer, you need 20 (TWENTY) years (10 normal school, 5 good university and 5 years of practice in a strong team).

Engineers in Russia are people despised by society with a reputation as "nerds" / "creacles" and salaries that are lower than those of officials and "siloviki". Plus, the most talented engineers from Russia leave for countries with higher wages and more comfortable living conditions.

During industrialization in the 1930s, Russia had an excellent education created in Tsarist Russia, on which the USSR parasitized. But it was not enough for industrialization, which was carried out by American and German companies with their specialists.

The USSR did not have its own personnel and technologies for building modern factories. Therefore, GAZ is a copy of the Ford plant, AvtoVAZ is a completely purchased from FIAT plant with full documentation for the car, Magnitka is a copy of the US Steel metallurgical plant in Gary, Indiana.

The Soviet successes achieved under Khrushchev is a typical catch-up development - a cheaper process than that of the leaders. The famous "R-7" Korolev is a talented revision of von Braun's FAU-2, all Soviet (and not only Soviet, by the way) cruise missiles are a development of the successful FAU-1 project. And all the prohibitive cost of searching for successful directions in rocketry by "trial and error" was undertaken by the Third Reich.

The same is with the atomic bomb. The USSR was "finishing" the atomic bomb in a successful direction discovered by the Americans (and achieved greater success than the United States at the time of the creation of the hydrogen bomb - at that time, no aircraft could take an American hydrogen product on board in terms of size and weight), but in this case too all the colossal costs of finding a good direction through "trial and error" were borne by the United States.

But when it was necessary to become leaders and spend resources on development "in a wide range of technical and scientific alternatives through trial and error", it turned out that the USSR did not have enough resources for all this, and it went bankrupt by 1991..."

However, this situation has developed not only in the field of technical education, but also in the humanities too. Here is what one of the commentators on Milin's publication writes:

“It's everywhere. Not only with engineers. I will not say about the natural sciences, I am a humanist and have taught at universities all my life (I left!), But the fact that education there turned into Aunt Moti's courses is unambiguous. Many objects have disappeared altogether, the hours have been reduced significantly! Thanks to the paid (twice by the way!) "Education", where the university "loses income" because of me. It was useless to fight. "Specialists / bachelors" are graduated not with diplomas, but with crusts..."