Leader’s official website reported that Ayatollah Khamenei addressed a meeting of ‘hundreds of young talented students and domestic and international science Olympiad winners’ on Wednesday.
“The country’s economy should rely on the brilliant talents of its young students and elites and not on underground resources,” the Leader asserted. “A set of three features 'talent,' 'outstanding efforts on study and work,' and 'admirable patience and persistence to pursue sublime objectives' as constituent elements of the elite,” the Leader added, calling on elites to view the concept in a new light to find its true nature.
Ayatollah Khamenei pointed to ‘a decade of scientific progress of the country,’ and assessed the continuous movement forward as a real need. “As emphasized on the directive issued recently for the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, scientific movement should not be stopped, since any lag in this movement would lead to retrogression,” added he, and that “with rapid scientific progress, Iran has not yet found its place it should have, since it had been lagging behind since long ago; so, it is necessary to push scientific movement forward with all necessary components as science-based economy.”
The Leader believed that the future of the country and nation hinged upon improving scientific pillars. “In an economy relying on the ready-made oil and gas and other underground resources, the system would be too tedious to produce innovations; neither would it foster elites, with no real progress in the path to success,” he told the meeting.
He used a metaphor of a child of a well-off family who would squander money, lavishly spending it on trifle thing to describe economy dependent on natural resources; “A country relying on crude oil to handle its economy and the well-off child are the same in this regard,” the Leader added.
“Any policy tailoring its economy on oil would be tantamount to leave it on the mercy of brute forces of international economics given the fluctuations in crude prices; any country with such policies would have imagine its future very grim,” Ayatollah Khamenei argued. “A well-connected chain should incorporate all organizations in production of knowledge, where all rings of the chain would work in harmony with other members,” he demanded.
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