President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues,
Today we will discuss the results of work of the Talent and Success Foundation and the Sirius Educational Centre, which was created three years ago to help gifted children develop their talents, abilities and creativity.
Over this time, the centre has welcomed more than 23,000 school students from the around the country. All of them completed the course of study, and their classes were taught by the best teachers and mentors.
Before our meeting, just now – some colleagues attended these meetings – I was able to communicate both with the children and their teachers. I enjoyed the communication a great deal. The kids are talented, interested and result-oriented. I feel that this is our golden genetic pool. Everything must be done not only to support these kids (that much goes without saying) but to look for and support such kids all over the country, and there are lots of them, to create venues around the country on the basis of such centres as Sirius, which would increase the education quality in the country in general.
From the very beginning Sirius built close and productive cooperation with its partners – hi-tech companies, state corporations, and leading research centres and universities. This allows Sirius students to get involved in promising projects, to be in demand.
Today we also met with heads of many companies that work here. I believe that without direct contact between their workers, those who achieve major practical results, and their future employees, it would be impossible to reach our goal. On their part, industrial and hi-tech companies appreciate how useful this format is for picking promising, well-trained kids.
We can see a truly good and promising result here. The most important thing is that kids that achieve success uncover their talents at home, in their Motherland. It is vitally important for them to see that this is possible and that they are in demand.
Just recently, at one of the last meetings some of my colleagues raised the question of what is the future going to be and whether it is possible to be successful and realise one’s talents here.
I would very much like to have the research centres and laboratories develop here under the guidance of world-renowned scientists. We saw that rudiments of such organisations are already forming in Sirius and I hope that this trend will develop further. We will aspire to create an environment for specialists in the most diverse fields and the most promising directions of research so that they could work here to the best of their ability. Simultaneously, in parallel, there must be work carried out to train future employees so the kids from Sirius and the future university have an opportunity to get directly involved in the work of the laboratories I mentioned.
In order to achieve these goals, we agreed to continue working on creating a material and technical base for Sirius. We will talk in greater detail about this later.
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