The world needs enlighteners and I fill one such need for all of humanity, not just the Bulgarian people, says Bulgarian physics teacher Theodosii Theodosiev, who has given wings to many beautiful minds to fly. On the Day of the Bulgarian Enlightenment Leaders (November 1) he pinpoints the plagues of the Bulgarian education system, foretells an apocalyptic future for the billions of ignorant people on the planet, and sets out his optimistic vision for a worthy place in the rapidly changing world.

Bulgarian students are increasingly falling into negative charts because they lack two things – iron discipline at school and incentives for fair assessment of their work, says Theodosii Theodosiev. But the world is developing so fast that there is no room for those lagging behind. Soon there will be billions of redundancies in the labour market, a dramatic redesign of the map of the world will occur and entire nations will disappear, he predicts.

What will be the fate of this new army of unemployed people? And who will prepare the teachers for the students of the future?

“This will be the manure of mankind and from time to time some talented children will be born out of it”, replies the teacher. “The society will take these children and will try to do something from them, and the rest will be given the bare minimum – just enough for some surrogate consumption and some surrogate entertainment. The latter will be the backdrop against which those who work best and give incomparably more to society will stand out.”

Currently, Theodosii Theodosiev is creating his own expeditionary corps to train teachers for the new challenges.

“The difference between me and most of my colleagues is that, in most cases, a teacher is given 20 classes and on the 21^st hour they stop working,” he explains. "There's no such option for me – we work until we finish the job. The second thing is that I put my children in combat, in a creative environment. In addition to teaching them theory at university level, I give them problems that have not been solved anywhere in the world and they cannot copy the answers from the Internet. The third thing is that children learn to work long hours. In our school camps we work from 8 am to 12 pm every day. In this way, students are taught how to handle a continuous mental workload.”

In his schools, the physicist has trained champions from world physics Olympiads, brilliant graduates of elite universities and scientists worthy of a Nobel Prize. Among them are Tenio Popmintchev - number one in the world of lasers and X-rays, Petko Dinev whose television cameras are used on American space rockets and nuclear submarines, Doctor of Computer Science from Harvard Svilen Kanev, winner of this year's John Atanasoff Award.

“The young people must first go abroad, enter into enormous competition, overcome the fear of competition, achieve more than their competitors and then start working for the whole world and in particular for Bulgaria”, Theodosii Theodosiev believes. “These people love their country, but first they have to get the chance to take the maximum, so that they can give the maximum.”

Aristotle once received an inheritance from his father commensurate with Croesus' wealth. With the money, he toured the entire ancient world, gathered the knowledge of the peoples, and only then returned to Athens to write his famous works. The prominent Bulgarian teacher Teo hopes his graduates will do the same. "I hope to teach the kids to fly their own flight, make a nice voyage around the world and come back," he adds.

English Rossitsa Petcova