Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

"If these things could be moved to the Soviet Union, how much they would promote our agricultural technology and our agricultural production!"

A scholar nearby overheard this and came over. He hesitated for a moment, as if he had something to say but didn't know whether he should, but in the end he did.

"Comrade General Secretary, there is something I need to make clear to you."

Slava looked at him.

"It's this genetically modified technology for food," the scholar carefully chose his words, "that is currently subject to international controversy regarding its safety."

"What controversy?"

"The point is—if people eat this kind of genetically modified food for a long time, this kind of food that has been modified to be high-yielding, pest-resistant, disease-resistant, and lodging-resistant, will it produce any negative effects that are not yet visible many years later?"

No one can guarantee anything about this right now, and no one can be sure that everything will be fine in the future. I think we should be cautious about this new, unproven technology.

Slava nodded; that certainly made sense.

Then the scholar changed the subject, saying, "But then again—we do need this technology. It's very convenient for our research. We do hybridization breeding, we study the relationship between genes and traits, and we use this technology for all of these tasks. Even if we don't eat it directly, it greatly promotes the development of our entire agricultural science!"

Slava listened with his hands behind his back.

He stood there looking at the laboratory and nodded.

"Okay!" he said decisively.

"We, the Soviet Union, absolutely must have this technology! We may not need it, but we absolutely cannot be without it!"

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

That day in southern France, the Soviet Union and France reached a deep cooperation agreement on agricultural technology.

Specific terms will be discussed gradually later. Breeding varieties, germplasm resources, food processing and preservation technologies, cold chain logistics... France will directly provide Moscow with these things that it can offer and that the Soviet Union urgently needs. More importantly, it will send Soviet researchers to French laboratories to work alongside them and gradually relearn the skills that had been lost for a generation.

For Mitterrand, this was what he wanted: orders, votes, and the results that would help him win April. He was satisfied.

For Slava, the significance of this collaboration goes far beyond just a few train cars of vegetable seeds and some refrigeration equipment.

We've only defeated one Lysenko so far, but what if there's another Lysenko in the future?

It's time to reform the scientific research and education sectors.

Chapter 90: This may be my only chance in this lifetime

On February 13, the Soviet delegation concluded its visit to France and returned home with a full load of information.

Slava planned to make some major reforms to education, but this couldn't be done on a whim. He had to consider the specific conditions of the Soviet Union, conduct research, and hold seminars with educators and employers to discuss solutions.

After Slava announced that the meeting would be held next week, the leader spoke with Slava about it that very evening.

"Brother Lao, is your reform geared towards scientific research or employment?"

The room was too dark, so she got out of bed barefoot, pulled the curtains open a crack, and quickly crawled under the covers.

"Are we still talking about this so late..." Slava yawned.

"Can't sleep, huh? Besides, your system can access the data directly, so feel free to thank me!" Director Nian poked his waist.

"You know perfectly well how much water you've inflated in your data," Slava said, pursing his lips.

"It's as if the data reported by the bureaucrats below is any more accurate than what they say—do you even want to hear this? If not, I'm going to sleep!" she said, giving Slava a light kick.

So Slava started listening to the talent shortage data from the annual consortium. The numbers were grim; the more information technology was deployed and the faster the consortium developed, the greater its appetite for technical talent became!

The league is short of everyone; they're looking for players everywhere.

“At this rate, our talent supply will not be able to keep up,” Slava said.

Director Nian didn't have any good ideas either. After thinking for a while, he suggested, "How about expanding enrollment? Establish more universities and enroll more students?"

Slava shook his head.

“Expanding enrollment is the easiest way, but also the stupidest way,” he said. “Once you open the doors of universities wide, the quality of the people you recruit immediately drops. You end up producing a bunch of mediocre students, who are useless to the consortium and just occupy the allocated quotas.”

Talent isn't something you can create by simply increasing quantity.

Director Nian didn't immediately refute. She thought for a moment and changed her perspective.

"Have you considered using a different method to recruit people?"

"Boss, tell me quickly!"

“I’ve been looking at some materials recently,” Director Nian said. “Didn’t China reinstate the college entrance examination more than ten years ago? They have a nationwide unified examination—all candidates take the same paper, use the same standards, and are admitted based on their scores. This way, children from remote areas can also get into good universities as long as they do well on the exam. It doesn’t matter who your father is or which city you live in; it only looks at your exam paper.”

She paused, then said, "Think about what's going on with our current admissions system. Kids from Moscow and Leningrad have an advantage because they're close to the system, while half of the kids from Central Asia and the Caucasus are turned away just because of the travel and accommodation costs! If we had a unified exam across the entire Soviet Union, wouldn't that give more talented kids from remote areas a fair path to advancement?"

Slava didn't say anything.

“And it’s not just China,” Director Nian continued. “Look, the West is also advocating this now—'everyone should go to university,' to popularize higher education and keep lowering the threshold for university admission.”

The propaganda is very appealing, claiming it's about educational equity and giving everyone a chance. This trend is gaining momentum now; shouldn't we in the Soviet Union follow suit and open the doors of universities to more people?

Slava hesitated.

He knew that Director Nian meant what she said sincerely; she genuinely felt sorry for the children who were turned away because of their background, region, or lack of family connections. Her intentions were fair and kind, a fact that Slava never doubted.

But he could not agree.

"Director Nian, I don't agree with your idea of ​​'everyone having access to university'! And I especially disagree with simply copying China's national unified examination!"

Director Nian waited for him to continue.

"The idea of ​​everyone going to college sounds appealing, but I think it's actually a trap."

"how to say?"

"Have you ever thought about it? Not everyone is suited to go to university. This isn't discrimination, it's the truth! Whether someone has the talent, the interest, and the willingness to work hard to receive higher education—that makes a difference."

Forcing someone who isn't suited for university into a college is torture for them and a waste of the country's resources.

He turned around.

"In other countries, graduation is just graduation, but our universities genuinely guarantee job placement for their graduates. Once you graduate, the government ensures you'll have a relevant position. What does this mean?"

This means that for every unqualified college graduate we hire, we are essentially putting a mediocre person into a position that should be filled by a qualified individual. In Western countries that advocate for universal college education, graduates have to find jobs in the market themselves; if they can't find one, that's their own problem.

We are different; behind each of our university places is a real job allocated by the state.

The state guarantees the quality of education to employers, and employers trust the state.

Slava's tone softened: "Besides, university has never been the only path in life. This is precisely where we in the Soviet Union did better than the West."

"We have a complete vocational and technical education system. Technical schools, secondary specialized schools... these places train technicians and skilled workers who can directly start working."

If a child is not suited for theoretical research, but is skillful, hardworking, and willing to learn a practical skill, then it is much better for him to go to a technical school and go directly into a company or consortium. This is much better than forcing him to spend four years in university and get a diploma that he does not deserve.

Putting the right people in the right places is being responsible to people and to the alliance.

He added, "Besides, what we're least worried about right now is a labor surplus. Our labor market is very tight, and everyone is scrambling for workers. The West's policy of encouraging everyone to go to university has produced a bunch of unrealistic and unemployable college graduates, while no one wants to do technician jobs—that's their problem."

If we follow suit, we'll only be asking for trouble!

Director Nian nodded.

Slava is right. The intermediate technicians trained by the Soviet Union's vocational and technical education system were precisely the backbone of the industrial-academic consortium!

The massification of higher education in the West during the 1980s and 90s created numerous disasters in this regard: everyone wanted a university degree, resulting in a shortage of technicians and university graduates being unable to find jobs in their fields, leaving them with nothing to show for it.

Slava must resist this temptation. Instead of weakening the vocational school level, he should strengthen it, making the distinction between "vocational school and university" clearer, rather than ambiguous.

"What about the national unified examination?" Director Nian asked. "Even if we don't make it so that everyone can go to university, it's not wrong to standardize the admission criteria so that children in remote areas have a fair measure, right?"

"Yes, it's right to go in the direction of standardization."

Slava pondered for a moment: "But I don't think it will work in the Soviet Union to simply copy Old Zhong's nationwide regional unified examination system."

First, there's the language issue. Old Zhong could easily organize a nationwide standardized test using only one language—because over 95% of their population speaks Mandarin, and it's the standard language. But what about the Soviet Union?

The leader also realized the problem: "Russians only make up a little over half of the total population of the Soviet Union. The other half are Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Georgians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians... My goodness, dozens of ethnic groups, each with their own language and their own higher education system."

Kyiv University has a Ukrainian language department, Tbilisi University has a Georgian language department, and Tashkent University has an Uzbek language department.

We cannot directly interfere with local demands for mandatory Russianization, as that would be tantamount to publicly declaring that all children of non-Russian-speaking ethnicities are inherently second-class citizens in the competition for higher education—because they have to compete with Russian children using a language that is not their mother tongue.

This might have been manageable at other times, but what time is it now? Besides, they are a constituent republic of the alliance, not our administrative region. Doing this will only lead to local ethnic uprisings.”

Director Nian's expression turned serious; she knew Slava wasn't exaggerating.

"What if we set questions in fifteen different languages?" she asked tentatively.

“What kind of unified exam is that?” Slava spread his hands. “Fifteen languages, fifteen papers, how are the difficulties aligned? How are the scores compared? What’s the difference between this and no unified exam? The point of a unified exam is to measure everyone with one standard. If you use fifteen standards, the standards themselves are not the same length.”

He then said, "Moreover, the unified exam is unfair to universities. Our Soviet universities are so specialized that it's impossible to create a single, universal exam."

The Soviet Union did not have a national college entrance examination; instead, universities set their own exams. Students could only apply to a particular university in a given year. If they passed the university's exam, they were admitted; otherwise, they had to go home and work.

“The first two years of undergraduate studies at Lao Zhong’s university still have a lot of general education content, so they can take a general science exam in math, physics, and chemistry, but we can’t,” Slava said. “Look at MFTI—the Institute of Physics and Technology, which focuses on cutting-edge physics and engineering. How high are its physics admission requirements?”

Then look at the Dimiryazev Agricultural College; their entrance exams cover biology and agronomy. These two schools are completely different in terms of both entrance requirements and content.

What would happen if you created a 'universally applicable science exam'? The MFTI would say it's too easy to screen out the people they need, and the agricultural college would say the physics section is too difficult—none of their students could pass it. You'd please neither side.” Slava shook his head. “Our universities are highly specialized; you can't use one exam to fit all of them.”

"Moreover, Lao Zhong can accept the national unified examination because they have a thousand-year-old imperial examination tradition. Their scholars change their fate through a national examination. This is engraved in their culture."

We don't have that foundation; Russia doesn't have a civil service examination system. If you suddenly introduce a nationwide standardized test that determines your future, the social resistance will be enormous, and guess who will oppose it the most fiercely?

“Intellectuals,” Director Nian replied.

"Yes, in addition to written exams, universities also have oral exams in their self-administered exams. We all know how murky oral exams are. The ones who benefit the most from the system where a higher-up can make a phone call to admit students are precisely those people."

Their children get into the best schools through their parents' connections and favors. If we were to hold an anonymous, unified exam where no one could get in through back channels, it would be cutting off their path—intellectuals would collectively oppose it, and that's a considerable force. For the Soviet Union at this point, we need to consider this carefully.

Director Nian remained silent for a long time: "But there are just too many problems with the current enrollment system. You can't just leave everything unchanged because you can't copy China's system."

“When did I say I wouldn’t change?” Slava looked at her. “I’m against copying, not reforming!”

I completely agree that the current college admission system is terrible, and it is precisely because it is terrible that it needs to be changed—but it must be changed according to our own national conditions, and we cannot simply copy other people's solutions without understanding them.

What were the regulations for college admissions in the Soviet Union?

There is no national unified examination; admissions are conducted by individual schools, each setting its own exams and organizing its own process—usually a combination of a written exam and an oral exam, totaling four subjects.

The exam consists of a written exam for the major subject, an oral exam for the major subject, a Russian essay, and a foreign language or other supplementary subject.

The exams are held in two rounds every July and August, and each candidate can only apply to one school. If they apply to one school but fail, they can only wait until next year to try again, or as a second choice, attend a vocational school.

The problems with this system are obvious.

First, there's corruption. The oral exams at top universities like Moscow State University, the Institute of International Relations, and the First Medical College are the main battleground for "telephone admissions." A minister makes a phone call, an academician hands over a note, and a candidate who should have been rejected is admitted!

By 1988, this issue had become so serious that it could be openly discussed in newspapers—Komsomolskaya Pravda had reported on it several times.

Secondly, there is extreme geographical inequality. Children from Moscow and Leningrad have a significant advantage, while children from Central Asia and the Caucasus face considerable financial burdens, with travel and accommodation costs alone deterring half of them from taking exams in major cities. Furthermore, a significant gap exists within the constituent republics regarding Russian language proficiency—the quality of Russian language instruction in rural Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is simply insufficient for their children to handle the level of Russian essays required by Moscow State University.

Third, the "one school, one exam" system forces students to gamble. You can only apply to one school; if you apply to a school you think is too high, you'll end up in a vocational school; if you apply to a school you think is too low, you'll waste your points.

This gave rise to a whole gray industry of "admission coaching consultation" in the Soviet education sector, with parents pulling strings everywhere to find out which schools were easy to get into and which schools had surprisingly low admission rates.

In other countries, students consult about which universities to apply to after receiving their college entrance exam scores. In the Soviet Union, students consulted about which schools to apply to before the exam.

Fourthly, there is signal distortion. Since each school sets its own exam questions, there is no way to compare them horizontally. Employers—especially those in cross-departmental industry-research consortia like Slava—when they see a resume that says "graduated from a mining college in a certain region," they have no idea what level the student actually is.

“We need to correct all four of these problems, but how to correct them requires discussion among those in charge. The current system of rules and regulations in education is very chaotic.”

"Hmm..." "Let's talk about it tomorrow..."

At this point, both of them became so sleepy that they soon fell into a deep sleep.

------

In mid-February, Slava convened a special meeting on education reform.

At this time, education administration in the Soviet Union was divided among three bodies. One was the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education, which oversaw universities and vocational schools; another was the Ministry of Education, which oversaw primary and secondary schools; and the third was the State Committee for Vocational and Technical Education, which oversaw technical schools and vocational training.

Each of the three entities manages its own affairs without communicating with each other. A child's journey from elementary school to middle school to university or vocational school involves passing through all three entities, resulting in a fragmented and disjointed process.

Slava had long planned to merge these three institutions into one, establishing a unified National Education Committee. The idea of ​​connecting the three levels of "general education, vocational education, and higher education" was already in the works and was just waiting for the right moment to launch.

Taking advantage of this discussion on enrollment reform, we can bring together the heads of the three companies to discuss the exams and clarify the merger.

Soon the three ministers arrived. They belonged to three different departments and usually managed their own affairs. But now that they were sitting at the same table, there was a subtle atmosphere – everyone knew that the General Secretary had probably called all three together for more than just one matter.

Slava got straight to the point: "I've called you all here today to discuss reforms to the college entrance examination. But before we do that, I'd like to mention something even bigger, so you all have a general idea."

All three of them were looking at him.

“I plan to merge the three of you into one. We will establish a unified National Education Committee to manage the three levels of general education, vocational education, and higher education in a unified manner.”

The meeting room fell silent for a moment.