p The prime objective of education through labour is to inculcate respect for all forms of socially useful work, both physical and intellectual, to surmount the scornful attitude to physical work and also the philistine attitude that mental work is easy and useless. The fusing of mental and physical work in production is the goal of the Party’s general line aimed at changing the nature of work, teaching people to take a communist approach to labour and moulding the new man.

p The distinction between mental and physical work is 309 being erased in the Soviet Union, but, regretfully, there still are people who think that mental work is easy and clean while physical work is thankless and dirty and inferior. These people forget that mental and physical work are themselves heterogeneous.

p We talk a lot about the atomic age and sometimes lay much too much stress on the industry of the future in the belief that man’s role will be reduced to the pressing of buttons. Yet all of us know that no robot can replace professions in which the human heart, kindness, cordiality, attention and artistic taste find expression. Of course, in the not too distant future, man will be delivered from arduous labour. This is something we are still looking forward to. Socialism has opened broad highways and the most diverse possibilities for man. There are so many of these highways and these possibilities are so great that they dazzle some people. In particular, this applies to young people lacking experience. Society has therefore to help people, especially young people, to choose their road in life in accordance with their personal qualities and talents.

p Many factors influence the choice of a profession: the working conditions, the wage or salary, the popularity and importance of the profession, personal inclinations, and the advice of other people. Society creates opinion about each profession, attracting people’s attention to those which are the most important at the given stage of social development.

p Every profession has its good and bad workers. In popularising a profession, attention should be drawn not to the profession generally but to its leading representatives. There is hardly a profession that does not afford the opportunity for creative work, contemplation and improvement. The task, therefore, is not simply to teach a profession—that is not difficult—but to make certain that the person concerned completely masters this profession so that he can work creatively.

p Respect for thinking, for the 15,000 million neurons “eager for work”, as was noted by a reader of Komsomolskaya Pravda, signifies respect for one’s profession and opens the door to limitless professional and general improvement. There is room for creative work and thinking in all fields of endeavour: a machine-tool means as much 310 to a good, thinking worker as an instrument does to a scientist or a music score to a conductor.

Every person must study his profession and analyse its potentialities and prospects. This will help not only to get rid more quickly of professions that are noncreative and without prospects but also to bring to light the creative potentialities of other professions. This is the only way to attract people to professions required by society and make people feel satisfied with their work.