All other chapters of this book will be devoted to purely practical things, business problems of learning.

But a few minutes of life, the first few pages of the book will be devoted to the main, difficult, central thoughts.

2

Central thoughts have the property that they concern questions to which there is no simple, absolutely clear and identical answer for everyone. That is why they have occupied people for thousands of years. For example: "Why does a person live?" or the resulting question: "Why does a person study?"

It goes without saying that a book about learning should open with explanations of why a person should study. Perhaps the reader will be upset if the author does not convince him that learning is good, and not learning is bad. That studying well is better than studying badly. That learning is light, and ignorance is darkness.

To be honest, I started with this: I wrote not one, but several chapters in which I argued that learning is good, and not learning is bad. I have given direct proofs and proofs of the opposite, collected the opinions of many thinkers, selected examples from the lives of great people, proving that learning is light, light and light, and ignorance is darkness. The darkness is dark and impenetrable. Even the most ignorant person, the one for whom ignorance is not darkness, but the name day of the heart, even he, after reading these chapters, would tremble in his soul, think about his wrong life, and, without noticing it, would reach for a textbook of botany, realizing with all his being that learning (have you heard?) is light, and ignorance, whatever you say, is darkness.

But no one's soul will tremble. No one will read the beautiful chapters. I threw them away. Nobody needs them. Because any reader, if you ask him, will prove with amazing inspiration that learning is light, and ignorance... He will prove this: that ignorance is darkness!

There is no such question as "Why study?"

How much the world is worth, everyone who had the opportunity studied. And in the ancient world, about which we know a lot, and in the Middle Ages, about which we know less, and in the "nineteenth century, the iron age", and in our atomic age, the question was and is solved simply: whoever has the means to learn, learns. Wealthy people never asked why they studied, but sent their children to schools, gymnasiums and universities. None of the living millionaires writes letters to the newspapers with the painful question: "Why study?" The opportunity to get an education has always accompanied wealth.

Let us listen to the words: education is given, education is received... They give and receive – as an inheritance, as wealth. In our country, education is free so that all children have the same opportunity to study, regardless of the status of their parents. But even for this free education, the people pay with their work. Of course, the means for the maintenance of schools do not appear out of thin air. Free for the family, but not free for the people.

So why should we argue in vain, why and for what to study? What is there to be so interested in, is the teaching light or not? There is one simple and business-like question: what real opportunities do we, I have, to get a good education? How to take advantage of these opportunities?

The civil war had not yet ended when young people from all over the country, many from the front, gathered in the hall on Malaya Dmitrovka, in Moscow, where the Lenin Komsomol Theater is now. They knew that Lenin was to speak, and they waited impatiently to see what he would say, because this man, Lenin, had been saying the most necessary things to people for almost a quarter of a century.

Lenin came to this congress and did say a precise and timely word, although it seemed unexpected. The word was: to learn.

The word "learn" had always existed, but now it was as if it were a completely new word, newly discovered, newly found, because it had an entirely new content.