Pavel Durov: belief

Transcript context

…By the way, that’s not such a bad thing, right? If you were looking back, there’s some value to that for young people to, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right? I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to be able to get away with it in the end because, normally, if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools and then you end up nowhere. So, I eventually got into a school where challenging teachers was not fully okay but it was something that you could do and then you would start a debate with the teacher and normally they would allow you to express your point of view and then some objective truth may come out of it as a result. But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What’s the point of life? What am I even doing here? At some point, I decided, since I have to go to school anyway, I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best student and get an A or what we called five in the Russian system on every single subject and that kept me busy for a while. It was incredibly difficult because you didn’t have enough time. Even if you just studied all the time, not doing anything else, you didn’t have any time left to prepare all the homework, tasks and get ready for all the tests. So, I ended up using the breaks between classes but I get to the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent mark in every subject and that kept me happy for a while. What did you understand about an effective education system from studying foreign language at the same time doing such a diversity? If you were to design an education system from scratch for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look like? You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.…

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