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