ABSTRACT
From what I have already written the reader will be able to imagine the reply to my third question: What does Russian youth look like, this youth brought up in the belief that religious feeling is a kind of sexual hysteria? The young Bolshevik gets very little real learning. Education, as we generally conceive it, aims at giving the pupil a foundation of knowledge and training his mind to work logically; in Bolshevia education has nothing in common with this. To learn in Bolshevia means to learn to explain everything, from archæological discoveries to the pictures of Picasso, by the class-war and by its relation to production. It resembles not so much education as scholasticism, theological dialectics, such as were taught in the monastic schools in the Middle Ages. Amusing examples of scholastic problems, such as “how many angels can you get on to the head of a pin?” come to mind when contemplating the Bolshevik system. The role played in the courts by the “dynamics of revolution,” which require of the judge that he shall not be concerned to deal out justice, but only to intensify the revolution, is 131paralleled in the Russian schools and universities, where teaching has to submit to the requirements of “revolution dialectics”—that is, a bending of all scientific observation to make it fit the theories of Marx and the compilations of Lenin.
