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At the second half of the century, prompted by a vigorous pursuit of culture, science and arts, a unique system of education at so called gymnasias (i.e. schools of the highest grade preparing for universities) began forming in Russia. Gymnasias gave their pupils an extensive training in the sciences as well as European languages, the latter opening Russians access to Western culture and science. By the end of the century a system of industrial schools offering a first-grade training to those who wanted to use their talents in the field of industry had been formed. On the whole the Russian system of secondary education surpassed in quality of training the educational systems existing then in Europe and America. Attempts at reforming the now present Russian educational system should preserve the best features of the Russian 1. Freedom in choice of subjects for study, from the secondary school to a university. Each course earns a student a certain number of credits and in order to get a certificate of education, a student has to gain a set number of points credit/hours and pass a set number of examinations. That is why students take on subjects they are interested in and avoid subjects they are not interested in. The absence of a set system of knowledge enveloping what should be known to any educated person, as existed in Russia for more than a century, makes many university professors speak of the importance of imposing on the secondary school a so called "core curriculum," or an obligatory set of knowledge, which is aimed at improving the situation when a person claiming to be educated is ignorant of so many subjects that a professional looks like a twisted tree, being well-grown in one direction but clipped and undeveloped in all other directions. The traditional freedom of choice is a result of struggle for personal freedom in all areas, subjects for study included. Freedom in itself is excellent, but the cost of its extremes are self-evident. The price of freedom of choice is a low level of education.

2. The second causal circumstance the freedom of teachers, who are at liberty to teach only what they themselves consider necessary and important. First, any university professor can work out any course of study he has invented himself and he can teach it if it has been approved by his or her colleagues at a university (at some universities a prior approval by other professors is not required). Second, a professor has the right to choose any textbook from a large number offered by publishing houses. Third, from a chosen textbook any part can be omitted, if a professor isn't well acquainted with it or doesn't think it important. If a professor has acquired permission to teach a given course from a school or university administration, everything else is up to him.

3. The great merit of American schools and universities lies in the fact that all examinations are taken in written form only, be it examinations taken at some point of a course of study of final examinations at the end of a course. No oral examinations, no oral questioning students of their knowledge of a subject, especially in the presence of other students. This advantage has a negative side to it, which may seem negligible at first sight, but which serious analysis shows to be substantial. Again I want my readers to understand me correctly. Written examinations when students receive lists of the same questions and fill in the empty spaces left with brief answers have many positive aspects as all students are put in the same position. Any prejudices on the part of an examiner are excluded as are any grounds for complaints about an examiner's prejudice against a student's race, religion, etc. (the number of people squabbling in courts of law is growing in America more and more rapidly, being parallel to the growing number of lawyers and becoming a tragedy for that beautiful country, but this is a different topic). A student puts down in his questionnaire what he wants to and has nobody to complain against. If a student does make a complaint, a committee is set up which examines what has been put down and then makes a decision. It is simple. It is democratic. It is practical. In Russia teachers at all levels of education (at schools and universities alike) put questions to students in class, make students solve mathematical problems on blackboards in the presence of other students, and nobody raises any objections on moral or other grounds. At American universities practices of this kind are completely excluded; nobody has the right to put a student in an awkward situation or make results of intermediate or final examinations public. A teacher cannot test a student's knowledge at will, to say nothing of arbitrary questions at oral examinations when a teacher can see that a student is weak at some particular part of the course and ask him more questions about it.

4. At most American schools and at all universities students are not put into any particular class or group. They are free to choose subjects and teachers and then take lessons. For example, to get a certificate of secondary education in Washington, a student should have a mathematical subject for each of his last four years of study and subjects in physics, biology and chemistry during his last three years of study. But as concerns, for instance, mathematics, a student is not obliged to study everything -- algebra, geometry, elementary differential calculus. His to choose are several dozen different mathematical courses with less material; a student has to have just one of them at each of his last four years of study. If a student does not study all mathematics, it is his business. The same with physics and other main subjects. All other subjects are still simpler -- everything depends on the student's initiative. But if a student chooses subjects, he cannot establish a permanent peer group to work with. A student chooses courses and teachers and is free to move about. For one of his lessons he comes to an open classroom where the teacher he has chosen delivers a lecture, for another lesson he goes to another classroom. So all notion of group is lost, as there are no teams about. There are individual students who are strangers to each other, moving from one classroom to another. If there is an acquaintance in one classroom, he is greeted with a couple of sentences, while the others sitting there would be totally ignored as strangers. This does not surprise anyone. But this is destroying a very important thing that group teaching has: a group is a family where people help each other, know each other, and it is acceptable to announce the results of a test before such a group in order to prick the conscience of a poor pupil (or his ambition, as might be). Yet in the U.S., to do so is to commit something like strip-tease, which could easily be followed by the students demanding the removal of a teacher guilty of disclosure of personal data -- and having their demand met. And since group teaching is absent, students are robbed of an important part not just of their social life, but of a more efficient method of making knowledge reach every individual, and thus the advantages of competitiveness, which, paradoxically, Americans care so much about.

To end this part of my article, I must mention that though the above is true for the majority of American schools and colleges, there are still exceptions. In rich suburbia of big cities, and in some other places, excellent schools exist where teachers are not afraid to call the student to the blackboard and ask him questions there (according to the tradition of a particular school, and according to the rules approved by the parents' committee -- by the way, parents' committees are exceptionally influential bodies throughout America); where the requirements of knowledge in the obligatory set of subjects are higher than the average American level; where the students, though also moving from one classroom to another, know each other personally, because the number of pupils is small, and because they all participate in extensive extra-curricula activities; so the ties of school fraternity hold for life. These excellent schools provide students for the best universities, and are extremely popular. But my article deals with ordinary public schools. Another exception is private schools, in most of which there are permanent classes of students, obligatory sets of subjects, and many other typical features reminding one of the former Russian gymnasias. But the number of private schools is small, and so is the number of their graduates, and a true American schools looks quite different.

So, comparing the systems of American and Russian education, and the tradition formed within the two, I state that what riches Russia possesses lie in its traditional system of secondary education that should be preserved. And within this system, there are rare precious gems -- our best teachers, born with a gift for teaching, whose intellect, talent and self-denial contributed to the heritage of the nation and should continue to do so.

I must make the same reservation about the most prestigious private universities such as Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and others. Last year, one year of study at a university of this kind cost from twenty-six to thirty-two thousand dollars. Few can afford this education. Besides, the competition for admittance is tough (one has, first of all, to graduate from a prestigious high school, have good results at examinations and be distinguished in some special way, like winning a national award, prize etc.). So I intend to discuss not these universities and their established rules, but the bulk of the American system of education, the 1,900-odd universities in the U.S.

MORE ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF SUPPORT OF EDUCATION IN RUSSIA
A year ago, the Washington Post published the results of an opinion poll conducted by the Carnegie Foundation on the conditions and prospects of teaching. The poll covered over 20,000 university lecturers teaching in 14 countries and took some two years to complete sixty-seven percent of teachers in Hong Kong, fifty-five percent of Dutch teachers, and forty-two to forty-four percent of their German and American colleagues considered their salary "good" or even "excellent." Among Russian respondents, the share of similar answers came to just about 4% (and I believe they were not exactly sincere). Only Israeli and Chilean university teachers saw themselves as still worse off.

However, Russian university teaching staff have more appetite for teaching than anyone else in the world: more than sixty percent of them named teaching as the chief incentive for working in an educational institution. While the percentage of Americans giving the same answer was also close to this figure, only twenty to thirty percent of the Israeli, German, Swedish, Japanese and Dutch professors, lecturers and teaching assistants saw their chief interest in teaching, and the rest of them would rather have engaged in pure scientific research. This means that in Russia, university faculty consist mainly not of people who turn to teaching because they failed to succeed in science, and not of those who dream of joining full-time research again. They are people who teach because in their hearts they have a true interest for this kind of activity. Also, slightly over sixty percent of Russian teaching staff said that their occupation enjoys the respect of society (Russia came sixth on this point, after Brazil, England, Korea, Japan and the U.S.A.), though only twenty percent though that the country's leaders take heed of their opinion in making decisions.

In all countries except Korea, university teaching staff note that secondary school graduates are inadequately educated. Only Korean professors (more than half of them) believed that secondary schools provide a sufficient level of education to their graduates to continue study at universities. In contrast to this, only twenty-five percent of Russians called would-be university students adequately prepared for the requirements of university studying. In their opinion, two thirds of new students are not ready to study at a university.

However, here one might consult the results obtained by Prof. Stevenson, who make a comparative study of American and Asian schoolchildren. His data mitigates the harsh self-criticism piled up by Russian educational specialists. Prof. Stevenson's research has shown, for example, that American children just beginning their first school year generally read quite well, averaging better than the Chinese, the Taiwanese, or the Japanese, though there is much individual difference. However, by the time they reach the fifth year of study they completely lose this advantage. The first-formers in Beijing are much better prepared to study mathematics than little Americans of the same age, and by the time they reach the fifth form the children from Chicago lag even further behind the Chinese, the Japanese and the Taiwanese.

At the same time, one should bear in mind the fact that American parents (mainly mothers had been polled) are convinced that their children are born gifted in every respect, that they excel at their schools and, on the whole, are the best in the world. There are far fewer mothers in China, Japan and Taiwan (5-8 times, to quote) who possess such self-conceit. This is a typically American trait, aptly noticed by Stevenson,and I believe it to be one that also differentiates American parents from Russian ones. Absence of any parental self-conceit promotes a more realistic, more demanding attitude towards fruitful children school studies, and prevents making children into conceited snobs.

The foremost wish of children from the East, it emerges, is to have an education. Chicago children mostly want to be rich or to be handed opportunity and wealth. I think that in many respects Russian children and their parents would sooner respond like the Chinese and the Japanese, rather than the American. And this gives us hope that with support given to education in Russia, this country can still retain the leading positions it has held in education and science throughout the past century and a half, preserving the unique national features that ensured for the country of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, as well as Lobachevsky, Mendeleyev and Koltsov, a place among the world leaders.system of education rather than replicate the American system.

Everyone is fed up with the endless incantational citation of the fact that when the Soviets had driven their first sputnik into space and when Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the Earth had been successfully accomplished, the USA government took urgent measures for the American system of education to catch up with the Soviet one (that is, what was left of the educational system of pre-revolutionary Russia) and largely succeeded in that educational race.

The echoes of old accomplishments are still reverberating today. When three or four years ago thousands of Russian scientists moved to the West, science and education in Europe and America were presented with an influx of highly trained personnel. Russian professionals began competing successfully with those who had in the last decades acquired the reputation of the best workers available - the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Iranian. Now you can come across Russian professors in any American university, I know even of entire university departments where newcomers from Russia hold all the positions and where before a faculty meeting they discuss in what language it should be conducted - in English or in Russian.

MERITS AND DEMERITS OF WESTERN EDUCATION
The American higher education is respected all over the world. The training of university students in America, with its vibrancy and ability to keep abreadst of the latest scientific discoveries and technological inventions, did not prompt criticism until quite recently. We cannot but admire the widespread ramifications of the American university educational system, which comprises 1,964 universities (compare this figure with less than one hundred in Russia!) and 1,416 colleges with two-year highly specialized courses. These figures do not call for further comment. If we add to them several thousand one-year vocational schools, then what is there to discuss and argue about?

But in spite of all these evident accomplishments, troubled voices make themselves heard today. It is becoming more and more clear that taken as a whole the American secondary school gives only a superficial knowledge of subjects studied, and universities have to devote a large part of the first years of study to remedial teaching. Besides, the disparity of knowledge among students is too great. Fairly good knowledge of some subjects and unacceptably poor knowledge of other subjects is is the rule at both the collective and individual level; that is, every student has a specific set of subjects known well and subjects hardly known at all. These disparities are caused by an Anglo-American system of electives, which allow a student to follow the principle of "I study what I want to and I don't study what I don't want to, that's my business." It is true that a student must take certain compulsory courses in each of the main subjects such as physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology. Even so a student still has the right to choose both teachers and varieties of a compulsory course, so it is possible for one to complete a course in, say, physics which does not even touch upon theories fundamental to the discipline and leaves a student simply less than completely ignorant.

Here I'd like to share with my readers the impression I received from seven years of lecturing in American universities and from discussions held by thinking American professors concerned with the situation. It is beyond doubt that Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and about two dozen other universities attract well-prepared candidates from all over the world and, after a strenuous selection, admit only the best of them. However, even professors of these universities speak of an evident fall in the level of training of first-year students, which has to be still more noticeable in the other two thousand universities. The best professors and leaders of science and education in America are apprehensive of a general decline in the educational level of young Americans, especially young university students, as well as a nearly complete ignorance of social sciences and humanities among those who study the natural, physical etc. and applied sciences. Some young people, when in primary school, gravitate to computers and forget about all else; others at the same age decide to become neurobiologists or surgeons and study nothing but subjects pertaining to their future occupation. Some American experts in education say that today about eighty-five percent of American boys and girl are not acquainted with elementary arithmetic and unable to add or subtract without calculators. Some experts are alarmed by the fact that television prevents children from reading books to the degree that those familiar books with which the older generation has lived their whole life have been taken out of print and moved to computer disks. If a child wants to read a classic, he takes a Shakespeare disk and sits at his computer.

I don't want to grumble or speak ill of American students. They are clever and tenacious in their aims and they work much more than Russian students. But they work only in their chosen field, and moreover, they are depressingly lacking in what is called a general social education, which is almost totally absent. To receive a course of study, a student must pay a large sum, so he tries to get the utmost possible for his/her money. From my experience at teaching, I can tell that in every group of students there are only two or three with poor results, and several dozen whose results are excellent. I am quite satisfied by the results my students achieve on the whole. But in every group of students I come across one and the same thing; that is, if I digress from the textbook or the subject, I see that students' knowledge is fragmentary and limited in scope. As I now understand it, the main reason accounting for this fact are the following circumstances.

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