Future Costs Seen in Erosion of U.S., Soviet Education

Both the United States and the Soviet Union “are undermining and eroding their respective educational systems,” Roald Sagdeev, a leading Soviet physicist and adviser to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has told a University of Maryland group.

And in the future, he said, “the entire world may pay for these mistakes.”

Sagdeev, head of the newly created East-West Science and Technology Center on the College Park, Md., campus, warned that both countries face a major crisis in science education, which could have grave consequences for science’s ability to combat growing world problems.

“In America, there has been a lack of foresight among national policy-makers coupled with an environment that undervalues education and teachers,” he told a group of faculty, staff and students Tuesday. “In the Soviet Union, ideology and dogma have taken precedence over academic freedom.”

Sagdeev, a longtime outspoken proponent of disarmament and improved ties between the two superpowers, noted that while the American and Soviet educational systems are fundamentally different, their problems are similar. In both systems, there are conflicts between stability and the rapid changes that are taking place.

Sagdeev, who studied at Moscow University in the 1950s at the same time as Gorbachev, said the future Soviet leader studied the law because “even in those days he wanted to create a state based on the law.”

He told a joke circulating at that time, saying the story illustrates the political climate at the university then:

There were rumors, he said, that a new department store would open on Red Square where brains would be sold. The cheapest would be the brains of physicists; the most expensive, the brains of philosophers because Stalin thought himself to be a philosopher.

“Why, then, am I to pay so much for scientists’ brains?” one old country woman asked. The answer: “Do you know how many scientists we had to kill (to get one brain)?”

Sagdeev, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences, said that in the Soviet Union, social scientists in particular have been hostages of political ideology.

“Economics, Marxist philosophy--so-called scientific communism--is now almost completely out of date. Education that depends on politics is of no use,” he said, “especially if we imagine that the U.S.S.R. is very close to economic collapse.

“I apologize to quote from Karl Marx here,” he said, “but Marx wrote: ‘There is nothing more important than a scientific message to the future generations.’ We should make our students citizens of our countries, of our planet, regardless of any ideology.”