Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russia Today channel, who lived and studied in the US when she was 15, criticized the “horribly” poor education in America, saying instead how “tolerant” Russians have been historically.

• “From time to time I am surprised by the hypocrisy of these people, this country, this government. I am not talking about the nation, because we are not Nazis, unlike them, but about the country, Great Britain. There is also a lot of hypocrisy in America, but because of the terribly bad education that has been implemented there for many decades. Because of this seemingly deliberate bad education, there is also a large share of naivety and ignorance, outright stupidity.
• Most people don’t know how to find north and south on a map. I can’t find Russia on the world map. It doesn’t surprise me because I graduated from an American school. I remember how at school the Latin teacher, who was considered the most educated person in the school because he was in Europe, he was a very educated person by their standards, asked me to write the Russian alphabet on the blackboard. He was in the twelfth grade, the last year of school. My colleagues were 18, 19, 20 years old. I wrote the Russian alphabet on the board, and my classmates were amazed to learn that there are other alphabets in the world. I’m not kidding. They had no idea that there were other alphabets in the world. It amazes me how we don’t even realize how open we’ve been historically, even though it seems strange to the rest of the world. We were more tolerant, unlike them. Their approach to us, to themselves and to the rest of the world, to colonialism and to everything that is happening now, is based on their deep-rooted hypocrisy.
• We do something, we go forward and say: yes, we do it, because we fight for it. And we fight for everything we say we fight for. They always talk about other values, other goals, ideals. We will fight them to the last bullet, which I hope will never happen.

This is not the first time Simonyan has criticized the US education system.

“They (Americans) are like little children, they don’t believe what they don’t want to believe. Like small children, they are captive to the world of their own fantasies. “I recently reread old letters that I sent to my parents when I was studying in America,” she said in June on the air of the “Russia-1” TV channel.

Simonyan, who studied for a year in the United States as part of an exchange program funded by the US State Department, said in an interview in 2010 that it was while studying in the US that he discovered that Russians and Americans “are so similar in culture, family values, lifestyle, reaction, sense of humor.”