The close integration of science, services and industrial production has been done before. Many still remember the time when scientists used to go to factories and ask engineers what they needed to develop. In Central Europe, we may associate this with communism, but it was also the case for generations before that. Since the industrial revolution, actually.
And it continued after the communists. The state budget still supports a number of projects that are carried out jointly by a company and a research institute. However, for universities and research institutes, this has long ceased to be the main priority. According to the concept of productive services (which I will explain later), this should return.
Some people may grumble that something is unnecessarily cancelled and then restored after a while. But that is actually normal. It has been so throughout modern history. A device, arrangement, or wisdom is abandoned because it seems outdated, but a generation later, in a different situation and context, it may come in handy again. But the old thing is not renewed. Something new is created that uses the old experience and the old principles.
It wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t a wave of hysterical rhetoric associated with it, that what was abandoned was oppressive, sexist, communist, a symbol of dictatorship, etc. Routine modernization turns into a matter of morality, or moralizing. After all, we can all see what a crazy form the banal technological shift from petrol cars to electric cars has taken. Or the shift in educational patterns from slapping children to not slapping children.
It would be good to learn to approach this in a matter-of-fact way. Now this or that seems outdated to us, but that’s not to say that in time we won’t see it very differently. It is useful to keep documentation, procedures, records of knowledge, but also perhaps “soft” knowledge of the type that annoyed people back then. No one knows when it might come in handy. That too is part of healthy progress.
