Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 26 – With the
retirement or death of “the last generations who received technical education
in the USSR,” the Russian Federation now
faces an increasingly severe shortage of qualified workers and “the total
de-professionalization of the workforce,”
according to Yevgeny Gontmakher.
And that, far more than many other
problems the Kremlin talks about, the
deputy director of IMEMO argues in “Moskovsky komsomolets,” threatens
the country’s future; indeed, he points out, the collapse of the Soviet system
of technical education is the source of many of them (mk.ru/specprojects/free-theme/article/2013/11/25/950181-rossiya-tyi-odurela.html).
What makes this especially bitter,
Gontmakher says, is that Russians were justifiably proud of an educational
system that was not bad as the mass level and was strong in the sciences and
that the collapse of this system over the last two decades could have been
avoided had different policies been adopted.
Of course, the schools still function,
and most but not all children attend them, he continues. But measured by PISA
standards, Russia now ranks below 40 other countries in terms of science and
mathematics, two areas in which it had been justifiably proud and below 50
other countries in terms of reading comprehension.
Some of this decline reflects
problems in instruction in the schools, but another part is the product of the absence
of competition to get into higher educational institutions. In Soviet times, competition was intense for
a limited number of slots, but now, the number of slots is roughly equal to the
number of secondary school graduates.
As a result, and except for a small
number of elite schools,, “all the other ‘universities,’ ‘academies’ and ‘institutes’”
have an interest not in selecting only the best students but in attracting as
many students as possible so as to get more money from the state or from the
students themselves. But even the best Russian universities are not at the top
of international rankings.
Because Russians have to pay for
higher education now, Gontmakher continues, this has given rise to a class of “no
fewer than10 million” people who leave their small cities or villages to go to
work in larger ones to earn money to pay for schools and get home only on the
weekends.
The situation at the level of
special secondary education is if anything even worse, the result of Moscow’s
decision to shift responsibility for funding onto the regional
authorities. This was “a crude error”
and has contributed to the collapse of the system. Indeed, Russians need to
recognize that the country has lost this entire sector.
And in yet another area, Russia
faces educational collapse. In Soviet times, the government funded “an entire
chain of institutions” to raise the qualifications of workers. Some of these
institutions were unworthy of the name, but others ensured that many people
became more skilled with time. Now, that possibility is largely foreclosed by
the end of these schools.
The “total de-professionalization of
the country” affects not only the economy but also the government
apparatus. It leads to poorly prepared
decisions and poorly supervised programs. And it contributes to or even is the
root of other problems like “crime, extremism, alcoholism, corruption, and all
other threats.”
Gontmakher is far from alone in
sounding the alarm on this point. Another writer has pointed out that as a
result of changes over the last two decades, Russians are not reading as much as their Soviet
predecessors did. Indeed, he says, the “most reading” country in the world was
the USSR, not Russia (rus-obr.ru/ru-web/27938).
And as bad as the collapse of
education in the Russian Federation is over all, many researchers are now
pointing to the fact that it is especially bad at all levels in the North
Caucasus (newizv.ru/society/2013-11-25/193007-neuchenyh-tma.html and kavpolit.com/stavropole-vysshee-obrazovanie-nizshego-kachestva/).
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