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.

At that time, in 1920, many people thought that it was enough to deprive the tsar, landlords, capitalists of power, and a very beautiful life would immediately begin. But it turns out that after the victory of the revolution, almost everything begins to depend on how the liberated country will study: to study not only in school, but everywhere and in everything. To learn to count and plan, to learn to manage, to learn to work together, to learn to think about the whole country, to learn to be free people, to learn a new morality – "to learn communism", as Lenin said.

«… The tasks of young people... could be expressed in one word: the task is to learn," Lenin said then, at the Third Congress of the Komsomol. Exactly what young people had always been deprived of, now became not only available but mandatory!

Since then, the words "to learn", "to educate", "to master culture" have become one of the most important, most common words in the country. They are familiar to us now, but then they stunned us with their novelty. Learning has always seemed noble, but by no means the most important thing. People did not even think that everyone should and can study.

Never before has there been a state in which all life, all its development, all happiness would depend to such an extent on the teaching and education of all people.

Never before has there been a state in which the teaching and education of everyone to such a large extent would be not a personal, but a socially important matter.

The word "study" in our country has a special meaning, because our whole country is a student in history. We learn to build a new life, we learn with all the signs of teaching: with difficulty, with mistakes, with a gradual approach to the truth.

To live in such a learning country, to conform to its essence, to be part of it, means to constantly learn.