Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/83

 gave very little knowledge but taught the children a great deal of religious lies, was to prepare people to suffer, obey, and be resignedly submissive to the better classes. The common people, had no access whatever to the higher schools, that is to the universities, the social higher technical schools, and various other institutions. And thus an educational monopoly was created. Only the rich or those supported by the rich could enjoy a more or less decent education. For these reasons the intellectuals utilised their position in a very clever manner. And, of course, at the time of the October Revolution they were against the workers; they scented danger of their privileges and rights vanishing if everybody had the right to study, and if the "rabble" were given the possibility of acquiring knowledge.

It is therefore necessary in the very first place to make education general and compulsory. In order to construct life on new principles it is necessary that a man should be accustomed from childhood to honest toil. For this purpose school children should be taught all kinds of manual labour in the schools. The doors of the high schools should be open to all. The priests should be turned out of the schools; let them, if they wish to, fool the children anywhere they like, but not in a Government institution: schools should be secular and not religious. The organs of the local government of the workers have control over the schools, and should not be parsimonious where public instruction and the supply of all the requisites for successful teaching for boys and girls is concerned. At present in some of the villages and provincial towns, some idiotic school-masters, aided by the "kulaks" (or rather the "kulaks" aided by these idiots) are carrying on a propaganda, saying that the Bolsheviks are aiming at destroying science, abolishing education, and so on. This is, of course, a most despicable lie. The Communist Bolsheviks have quite different intentions; they wish to liberate science from the yoke of capitalism, and to make all science accessible to the labouring masses. They wish to destroy the monopoly (exclusive right) of the rich to education. This is the true foundation of the matter: and it is no wonder that the rich are afraid of losing one of their chief supports. If every workman acquires the qualifications of an engineer, then the position of the capitalist and of the rich engineer is not worth a brass farthing. They will have nothing more to boast of, for there will be many such as they. No undermining of the workers' cause, no amount of sabotage by the old servants of