Harm and good of the education reform

By Vestnik Kavkaza

The education reform in Russia has caused ambiguous reaction of the society from the very beginning. Meetings are taking place in Russian cities; the Civil Initiative for Free High Education was established. People are dissatisfied with the reform. They think that some part of comprehensive subjects may become commercial.

“I went to school in 1956,” Valery Khomyakov, General Director of the Institute for National Strategy, remembers. “This was the time of the 20th Party Congress, and all the course books for first grade were printed in advance. All of Stalin's portraits and quotes had been cut out so we, the first-graders, got our first course books with holes, missing some pictures. Our reforms remind me of those course books, because something remains Soviet, judging from the public opinion pressure and something new is being introduced. The Soviet system has been completely destroyed. It had its disadvantages, there was too much ideology, especially in the humanities, but there were many strong points. The main one was that the state really made sure that every Soviet citizen received first a secondary education then higher education if possible.”

Speaking about the modern education system, Khomyakov noted: “Students are protesting, teachers are unhappy with their low salaries, the universities are being closed down, sometimes for a reason. But where is the guarantee that the universities were indeed closed because they were ineffective? What are the criteria? The criterium for the effectiveness of our education is the number of scholars who make a contribution to fundamental and applied science. The second criterium is the capacity of the system to reproduce itself. If we need specialists of this level and specialization, they appear as a result of our system. Our school education is not of the best quality. When we found out that some writers who deserved to be in school textbooks were excluded. For example, Kuprin, Leskov, Babel, while Pelevin was left on.”

Sergey Markov, Director of the Institute of Political Studies, supports the reform: “This reform is being carried out under pressure from the current job market… Full imitation of the Soviet model is impossible for many reasons. First of all, because it was a model of the closed type, while now we live in an open global society. We can't implement for a global society something that was implemented for a closed society. We are now combining the Soviet and the Western models. One of the reasons why Dmitry Livanov was appointed minister of education was in the success that he achieved in his position as rector of the Steel Institute. By the way, this was the institute for Soviet nano-technologies. In fact, it is a university for the study of materials that creates modern materials and we see that, under him, this university has achieved great results in combining the Soviet and the Western models. The government set a task for the Ministry of Education to create a structure that will bring the findings of the universities to the world market.”

Speaking about the reduction in the number of universities, Makarov noted that “this question is more about making some universities bigger that fits the general logic. We need to remove fake universities that devalue education. There are many institutes like this that cannot pass any effectiveness rating. The effectiveness ratings were created precisely to separate them from the normal universities. It is a difficult but manageable task.”