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p Modern technology gives much to the citizens of socialist society but it also makes high demands of them. While creating the conditions for man’s harmonious development, automation demands this development of him. It demands that he should have extraordinary erudition and extensive knowledge and that he should engage in day-to-day creative quests. Under socialism scientific progress is indissolubly linked up with the progress of each individual.

p Man is the end aim of communism. It is important to note that this aim coincides not only with the interests of individuals but also with the objective development of 234 technology. The highly developed and highly organised automated production of communism is incompatible with narrow specialisation of workers, with bondage to one profession, with lop-sided development, when all other human talents are sacrificed for the sake of narrow professionalism. This production, Engels wrote, presupposes “people with widely developed talents, people who can take their bearings in the entire system of production".

p The requirements of modern, let alone communist, production can be satisfied only by comprehensively educated people.

p But who can be considered an educated person in our time, and what will such a person be like in the future?

p To be educated in our day means to master the fundamentals of science, to know its major achievements, to have the skill to apply these achievements in production and to know machinery and the technology of key forms of production. “Such a person,” A. V. Lunacharsky wrote, “hears the entire concert played around him, he distinguishes all the notes in it, notes that merge into a single harmony that we call culture.” Universal learning is the ideal of education, for it enables man to surmount the survivals of the old division of labour and lop-sided and restricted development, and gives him the ability to move from one field of endeavour to another. Such a person is no dilettante with superficial knowledge, a person who knows a little of everything but nothing thoroughly. He is a person who has completely mastered his basic profession and has the knowledge to engage in an allied range of work. While hearing the notes of the entire orchestra, an educated person plays one instrument with skill, giving it his heart and soul. “It is absolutely imperative,” A. V. Lunacharsky wrote, “that man should work creatively in some field, that he should delve deeply into this field, and that with all the strength and blood of his heart and the juice of his brain he should produce really vital inventions for humanity. If this is absent in a person, he is only a dilettante and cannot be acknowledged as being educated.”

p The harmonious combining of versatile education and specialisation is a major requirement of modern technology.

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p The moulding of the highly trained specialist is a task of our days. Today when science and technology are developing swiftly, when science is unravelling the mysteries of the atomic nucleus and outer space and penetrating into social life and economic management, the mastering of the fundamentals of both natural and social sciences has become an absolute necessity.

p The development of science and technology and science’s penetration into production and life are uneven processes. What only yesterday was moving to the forefront has today become secondary, and what is in the limelight today may yield its place to something more important tomorrow. This underscores the fact that the training of specialists must keep abreast of the times. A specialist has to be mobile, to be always prepared to tackle new and more important problems of science, technology and production. He can do this only if he has had universal training, not in the sense of enabling him to change his profession at any time but of giving him an “extended” speciality which would represent not a mechanical sum of old or existing specialities but the organic unity of these specialities. This unity is founded on a community of theoretical and special training. Greater physical and mathematical theoretical knowledge and the mastering of technological processes based on general theory are the road to training “extended” specialists, the demand for whom is steadily increasing due to scientific and technical progress. This road has been taken by leading Soviet institutions of higher learning.

p Modern production is enhancing the role of natural and technical sciences in industry and, correspondingly, in the training of specialists. However, intoxication with the achievements of natural sciences and technology sometimes leads technicians and naturalists to narrow technicism, to, in the words of Academician V. Shuleikin, “ physical and technical conceit”, to the belittlement of general education and, in particular, the social and humanitarian sciences.

p Modern science and technology confer immense responsibility on man, and in order to control science and technology or place them in the service of the working people 236 he must have not only technical, but also philosophical, emotional and moral training. To achieve this one needs, first and foremost, to be a human being in the loftiest sense of the word, a fighter for the new, communist ideals. The human in a person is created not only by technology and the natural sciences. One cannot become a person in the real sense, let alone a person of the future if one disregards ideology, morality, literature and art; yet this is where we would be led by narrow technicism, by blind faith in the omnipotence of the natural sciences and technology.

p It is quite easy to identify oneself with the magnificent machines of our day, and care nothing for the profound social and psychological problems worrying contemporary mankind. It is not at all difficult to picture the world in both its material and spiritual aspects as some soulless dynamic system consisting of nothing but rigid columns of figures and formulas.

p In order to prepare a person for work under conditions of a scientific and technical revolution, he must be given philosophical and lofty moral training; his mental and physiological qualities must be improved; the finest chords of his soul must be given sound, and the most diverse creative potentials must be awakened in him. Although the social and humanitarian sciences do not yield direct economic benefits, they serve the above noble purpose. They help to shape the new man and his spiritual world and his attitude to other people, to society as a whole. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that by nature man is a creator, a researcher, an intellectual, and that he lives not by bread alone.

“The ideal,” A. V. Lunacharsky wrote, “is not to train a person in one speciality or another, but to make him a fighter for humanity, and this is achieved only when that person knows the world from where he comes, how it tore away from the capitalist system, what scientific, artistic and technical tasks have to do with this, what his place is in this world and what he has to do. Give him the ability to do what he must do in the epoch of the world’s greatest revolution!" These words, written nearly fifty years ago, have not lost an iota of their significance.