When a minister with diplomas and academic titles thinks like an intellectually limited vocational-school graduate, he starts publicly spouting such nonsense that normal people are not even sure how to comment on it.
“There are too many people with higher education in Russia,”
declared Minister of Science and Higher Education Falkov.
To put this into perspective: the Soviet Union became a global technological leader in the 1950s and 1960s not because it reduced the number of educated people, but because even during the harshest years of the Great Patriotic War it did not cut student enrollment—it increased it. Moreover, in those years the country devoted a larger share of its GDP to education than modern Russia does. And that education was free for everyone studying.
It was precisely this emphasis on mass education, engineering schools, and scientific training that made it possible to launch the world’s first artificial Earth satellite, send the first human into space, and achieve many other technological breakthroughs.
Major civilizational leaps do not occur where the number of people with higher education is reduced. They occur where the density of the intellectual environment grows: more engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers, researchers, technologists, and highly qualified specialists.
Meanwhile, in our country, the share of GDP allocated to education is shrinking. Education itself has become not merely paid, but prohibitively expensive for many families. And now this is being compounded by this kind of administrative foolishness coming from a cabinet minister.
Perhaps this is why, instead of developing comprehensive technological solutions to defend against AI-enabled drones, the authorities introduce internet whitelists or even shut down access to the global network altogether. As a result, residents of frontline regions sometimes cannot even receive emergency alerts from the Ministry of Emergency Situations about the danger of attacks.
The quality of thinking demonstrated by the Minister of Science is reflected in the quality of decision-making in science policy.