Slavomil Janov

"I took an exam on scientific communism. Maybe there were some thick books and textbooks, lecture notes. I admit that I didn't read any of them, not that I wasn't interested, because people evolve, and as a child I wasn't very interested in history, but today I like history and I'm basically a historian in the field of scouting. So today I might not read it, but at least I would skim through it. At that time, I didn't even hold it in my hands and I went to the exam, which was quite important, as it was... It was still socialism, I was actually... it was in 1987. I came to the exam, and there was the examiner, a professor, he had the title of professor, he was educated, and he was writing something on some pieces of paper, and there were sheets of paper with questions laid out like this... And he asked me, without even looking up, he said, "So, colleague" – he said colleague, I remember, he didn't say comrade – he was a bit sophisticated. We mustn't exaggerate dogmatically, I don't want to defend it, but it's not true that everything under socialism was worthless. Of course, the ideology was nonsensical, there was no freedom, no democracy, but some things were completely normal. Fifteen million Czechoslovakians lived under that system, they went to work, they had families, lives, their joys and so on, but of course it was limited. I remember that, he said, colleague, choose a question, and decide whether you want to prepare or go straight ahead. I turned it over and the question was about morality in socialist society. So I said, I'll go straight in, we won't wait for a moment, but I had no idea what I was going to talk about, because I knew that if he wanted some principles or theories or definitions from textbooks, I didn't know anything about that. So I was like... and he kept writing something, he didn't pay any attention to me, he didn't look at me. I started by saying that morality is actually a relatively complex phenomenon of human values and behavior, but that morality can be taught from childhood. So I moved away from what morality is and started talking about how it can be taught from childhood, for example through literature for children and young people, such as Arkady Gaidar's Timur and His Gang, or Jaroslav Foglar's The Rapid Arrows. And he looked at me for the first time, smiled and said, 'The Rapid Arrows? Those were a bunch of colorful boys, right?' I said to him, 'Comrade Professor, by colorful boys, you mean the characters from the comic book, from the cartoon series?' He said, 'Yes, yes, I remember that, I read it as a boy after the war, wait, what was the name of that magazine?' So I played along with his interest in journalism and said, 'Probably Vpřed after the war, or maybe Mladý hlasatel before the war.' 'Oh yes, yes, yes, they did all those good deeds, yes, that’s morality, give me your index, full marks.'"