My first Magazine | Page 10

Editorial

126

The joy of reading , the effort to get information and the wish to educate oneself

Marian-Vladimir Constantinescu DDS , PhD , Professor
Editor-in-Chief
Dear Readers , Confucius said : ,, By nature , men are nearly alike ; by practice , they get to be wide apart .” In the socialist countries beyond the Iron Curtain , the communist education system stated that it was compulsory to attend ten grades , since in this way people were easier to control as Henry Peter Brougham said : ,, Education makes a people easy to lead , but difficult to drive ; easy to government , but impossible to enslave .” Problems arose when one started to look , in the specialized libraries , for information , references and the necessary documentation to write a graduation paper or a doctoral degree . If you were lucky you were likely to find some magazines or books , but not during the last years of that utopian regime in Romania , a regime which was an economic failure and which , moving towards its end , had come to the conclusion that education is expensive , therefore would invariably guide us towards ignorance . Index Medicus allowed you to get information on the existing citations about the subject that you had selected . To add to your documentation you could go to the American Library where you could borrow books coming from the very libraries of the American universities . Moreover , upon request , I managed to receive a series of videotapes from the University of Michigan on modeling in wax and clinical and instrumental occlusal analysis . These videotapes were presented in a scientific session for the faculty teaching staff and practitioners in Bucharest . Also in order to supplement your documentation you could contact the author asking him to send you some reprints . If you did that , and also if you were a patron of the American Library , you would be targeted by the secret services because you had relations with foreigners and you had to suffer the consequences as I had to . ,, Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world .”, said Nelson Mandela . Perhaps for this reason access to training courses by renowned foreign specialists was practically impossible . Exceptionally , we managed to invite Prof . Jean Romerowski , dental anatomy professor at the University Paris VII as a participant in a United Nations Development Programme ( UNDP ) assistance program . So , for a week , Prof . Romerowski initiated us into the occlusal analysis methodology at the Clinic for Dental Prosthetics in Bucharest . Also as part of that UNDP assistance program we managed to equip the first metal-ceramic laboratory and together with Prof . Lucian Ene we managed to take part in the congresses organized by the International Academy of Gnathology - European Section , in Paris and Lausanne . While attending these congresses I met the famous Dr . Paul B . Feinmann from Geneva , President of these scientific events and personal dentist of several film celebrities . He was so generous as to keep me updated on the latest developments related to dental occlusion . ,, The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth .” said the late president John F . Kennedy . The evolution of knowledge after the fall of the Berlin Wall and implicitly of all the communist regimes that slavishly followed the Kremlin ideology involves other issues as