A recent statement by Russia’s Minister of Science and Higher Education, Valery Falkov, that there is “no need for universal higher education” in Russia is an open admission of the collapse of the Russian economy and its intellectual potential.
Instead of developing critical thinking, academic education, and young people’s professional self-realization, the emphasis is being decisively shifted toward militarization. This is reflected not only in official rhetoric but also in practical measures, including the organization of summer camps and extracurricular programs.
The described initiatives, where children are taught tactical training, shooting, drone operation, camouflage, and “behavior during shelling,” can hardly be called ordinary patriotic education. In reality, this amounts to early military training disguised as leisure. Children’s camps in 2026 with names like “Stormtrooper” and scenarios involving “war alarms” create an environment in which war becomes normalized, and a future graduate is shaped as a potential combat participant rather than a civilian specialist.
It is particularly telling that such programs are supported by state institutions and organizations linked to military formations. This is a systemic approach: militarization is no longer an exception but part of the educational model. From an early age, children are offered not development in science, technology, or the humanities, but adaptation to the logic of war.
In Russia, education in its classical sense—as a path to independent thinking, professional choice, and social mobility—is being devalued. Instead, the priority becomes training personnel needed for industrial and military-oriented state needs.
Summer camps, which should be spaces for rest, creativity, and socialization, are being turned into platforms for training military discipline, obedience, and readiness for violence.
Russia does not need intellectuals capable of building the future. It needs a compliant mass: boys who, straight from school, can operate kamikaze drones and unquestioningly follow orders, and girls who maintain the machinery behind this conveyor of death. The deliberate destruction of a country’s intellectual capital for the sake of a dictator’s immediate ambitions is the highest form of violence against its own population, depriving Russia of any future prospects in the modern world.
