August 06, 2019 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Why Russian Empire Failed in Creating World-Class Universities
There is an interesting anecdote in the
life of Wilhelm Kühne when he held the position of professor of physiology at
the University of Heidelberg from 1871 to 1900.
Those were the times when like the rest of
the world does today the Americans would flock to the universities of the
European Empires such as French, German and British (and may be Russian but
less so as this was one empire whose education standards had consistently
remained low).
In the 1800s or the nineteenth century in
contrast to the Western Europe urban men in the Russian Empire had a literacy
rate of a meager 20 to 25% literacy rate.
Mind you we are talking about an empire
that had predominantly agricultural base and the percentage of urban population
was exceedingly low.
If you have read any of the masterpieces and
the Great Russian classics you will note that they are often set in rural country
and heavily contrasted with the rich lives of the few Royalties and Nobilities
in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
The peasants, the workers, the serfs were
largely illiterate with women having very little scope of getting any form of
education.
The Orthodox Church was deeply suspicious
of educating the populace and as far as they were concerned education was an
impediment for religious indoctrination and their hold on masses.
On the contrary they understood
instinctively very well that lesser the education greater is the scope for
religion to flourish and therefore greater their stronghold over the masses.
Universities in the Russian Empire came
much later with the reign of Alexander I and even then the universities that
were set up were very few limited to Kazan, Kharkov, Saint Petersburg, Vilna,
Dorpat and of course Moscow.
They were all set up on the German model
which itself provides sufficient evidence about the quality of education and research
in the German confederation (after the Holy Roman Empire) and later the German
Empire.
Only the children of noblemen and merchants
could dream of going to universities with peasants and the serfs having no
chance of aspiring to even basic education.
Even among the landowners and serf-proprietors
education was abysmally low.
The Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (1825 – 1855)
was deeply suspicious of the West Europe and censorship to free though was
omnipresent.
He ridiculed the foreign ideas and tried to
suppress or neutralize them by calling them “pseudo-knowledge” (which the
American students were embracing and taking with them back to the New England
Universities and setting up laboratories that would in future germinate to
scientific power houses).
The Russian Empire’s bureaucracy (like that
of today’s Hindu land) was characterized by graft, corruption and inefficiency
with every man with slightest of power exploiting to fill his own pocket.
The intellectual atmosphere remained
oppressive till the end of tsar’s Nicholas I reign.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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