Text 4. Metamorphoses in the field of education

By Yury Alexandrov

How do you catch ten lions? Catch twenty and release ten of them. The problems of education and science in Russia today are captured in this riddle. Hardly anyone could seriously dispute the need to improve science and the edu­cational system. But how? Russia lags behind advanced and many developing nations in the share of state expenditure for education in the gross domestic prod­uct, especially in view of the near monop­oly of the state in this field. But, the main questions are who to educate, why, and how to teach them.

There are mainly proposals for more government expenditure on education and science, a free state educational sys­tem, higher stipends for students and higher salaries for teachers and scientists. And then all will be right. This explains the guarded attitude of the public to reforms, and protests by scientists and students are held now and then. Their slogans differ little from the demands of pensioners and recipients of state bene­fits, and are socialist in character.

Contrary to those proposals, Science and Education Minister Andrei Fursenko is pushing technocratic reforms. The ministers responsible for the state budget and economic growth are disquieted by incessant calls to increase financing of educational and scientific institutions.

But to make reforms successful, we should not take a purely technocratic “painful but necessary” approach. This applies not only to education and science but also to health services, social mainte­nance, housing and communal services.

The real state of our society must also be taken into account, the material and social conditions of the people, their ide­ology, morals, traditions and attitude toward change. The attitude of the popu­lation is still determined by its adherence to state socialism. The mechanisms of state socialism have exhausted their cre­ative potential on the whole, but remain a factor of social and political stability. A transition is needed from the Soviet “col­lective farm” to differentiation, from “helping the backward catch up with front-rank workers” to making them com­pete with such workers. Thus, our aim is not to catch lions but how to let half of them go if they do not want to leave.

 

Metamorphoses of the school

 

The main achievement of the school and basis of secondary and special higher education is universal literacy. But it is not enough to state this obvious fact. The bad is often the reverse side of the good. Both sides were displayed in various ways under Soviet socialism, and their repercussions are manifested in various ways in new Russia.

The Soviet system of education went through two stages of development. The first began with the establishment of Soviet power and lasted till the adoption of a law on universal compulsory secondary education. School education in those years was aimed at the total mobilization of the population to build industrial state socialism. The achievement of this aim required universal literacy, an army of dutiful industrial workers and technical specialists, and Soviet intellectuals to popularize official ideology.

The task determined the methods of fulfilling it. Those years saw the full enrollment of the younger generation into the primary education system with the subsequent drop-out of backward pupils during the transition to higher stages of education, beginning before the completion of secondary school. Selection become tougher in the course of forced industrialization and as the war was approaching. The state needed more and more workers. The situation remained the same in the postwar years of Stalin's rule. Pupils who dropped out of secondary school went to trade, factory and other schools.

Rather few boys and girls completed the ten-year sec­ondary school, but many graduates could enter an institute without coaches or bribes. In 1950, for instance, only 143,000 pupils received matriculation certificates in Russia, and more than 220,000 were admitted to higher educational institu­tions. In 2003, the figures were 1,519,000 and 1,643,000, respectively.

But, by the 1960s, this approach had been exhaust­ed. As the economy grew and the problem of modernizing it became more complicated, the state needed more skilled workers and specialists whose professional and ideological qualifications would meet, in the opinion of authorities, the tasks of building “a devel­oped socialist society”.

This prompted the idea of universal and compulsory sec­ondary education. There was one more motive adherence to communism, the idea of social progress with social homeostasis, the low level of property and social division among the people. It can be said without any exaggeration that dogma played a fatal part in the des­tiny of the Soviet educational system as well as the country as a whole. A people's drama with some elements of a tragicom­edy unfolded in “universal” and “com­pulsory” secondary education. The cur­tain has not fallen on it yet, and this engenders a feeling of trouble in society.

 

From adults to children and back

 

Compulsory universal secondary edu­cation put an end to the practice of “dropping out” failing pupils. It quickly became clear that a trap was concealed in the total leveling of the ostentatious com­pulsory secondary education. Numerical assessment prevailed over the criterion of quality, and collectivization over skill. Progress in studies and the percent of graduates had to be high. This explains why the system of grading still has only three marks: five (excellent), four (good), and three (satisfactory), while two, or a black mark, is not an appraisal of knowledge but a statement of the igno­rance of the subject.

A variant of the British system of school education practised in Iraq can be cited as an opposite example. Its 12-year cycle was divided into three stages: the first six years and then two three-year­long stages. Knowledge was assessed in a 100-point scale. Only those who gained a certain final sum of points on completion of the six-year course were admitted to the second three-year course, and the same rule was used for admission to the third course. But that is not all. A school-leaver had to get a certain and rather high average mark to enter a medical col­lege, a slightly lower mark for entering law school, and so on.

As a result, teachers were unable to claim that schoolchildren made poor progress in their studies or did not study at all for some other reason other than their fault. In legal parlance, they lost the presumption of innocence. “Universal” education became “compulsory” not for pupils but for teachers. The favorable assessment of knowledge became a headache for them, not schoolchildren. But we should also do justice to the children. They quickly understood the situation and successfully used the chance to receive a school-leaving certificate simply because they went to school and attended classes. This prac­tice would not bring success if the Soviet teachers and their directors did not have other delusions. These are the ide­ologies of “progressivism” and the “clean sheet”, two interrelated notions.

 

The “clean sheet” vs. “diffuse knowl­edge”

 

China's Chairman Mao spoke about the people as “a clean sheet” on which the most beautiful hieroglyphs could be inscribed. But, in his state practice, he only brought out of the limits of 19th-century positivism, when people thought that morals lie in sci­entific knowledge. The Soviet system of school education was established and then accepted in the post-Soviet years precisely under this ban ner. The children were regarded as “a clean sheet”, and adults had to fill their empty heads with positive knowledge. The volume of knowledge, equal for all pupils, is determined by adults who preach the ideals of encyclopaedism in the old way.

But Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek expressed the opinion that scien­tific knowledge has a different role in people's lives, not the one defined by progressive encyclopaedists. The peo­ple's lives operate on three levels: the instinctive (the “natural morals” of small social groups), the reasonable (scientific knowledge), and “between instinct and reason”.

This system could also seem very progressivist, if Hayek did not explain that the level between instinct and reason is the sphere of individual choice based on personal experience and tradition, or “diffuse knowledge”. Capitalism is win­ning in the world because it has “the greatest ability to use diffuse knowledge”. In such a society, all its social groups seem to lie on a horizontal line.

“One opinion poll showed that 91.2 percent of Japanese respondents consid­er themselves members of the middle class. This is explained by their frugality and, inciden­tally, makes clear why there are no discontented people in any stratum of Japanese society. Since none of them belongs to the select, no group has exclusive privi­leges”. Such a conclusion was drawn by the authors of the book The Japanese for Xenophobes. In exactly the same way, an American work­er, farmer or clerk does not care much about multimil­lionaires, “egg headed” scien­tists or writers.

This is not so in Russia. The vast majority of its citi­zens think they live in a socially polarized society, with the mass of poor people opposed by officials and “new Russians”, including high ranking specialists. Therefore, as Science and Education Minister Fursenko said, the training of the scientific and technical elite is a social, as well as economic, problem.

Nevertheless, the policy of “bringing the backward up to the level of the advanced” has no absolute strength in Russia. Poverty and the aware­ness of limited social prospects is one thing, and the feeling of affiliation with a certain social and cul­tural stratum is another thing. Our work­er, farmer or shop assistant is certainly not a former cosmonaut or unsuccessful physicist. A poet is no more than a poet. An expert in the classics is no better than a pop music lover. Most people do not strive all their lives to be regarded as men of the people who became intellectuals, though this does not prevent them from becoming full-fledged citizens with high moral standards.

The same refers to children. Teachers and their directors under­stand, of course, that children come to school from various families and have different abilities and levels of develop­ment. However, little attention is paid to another circumstance: by that time, chil­dren are no longer “clean sheets”, but immature social individuals. Most of them may not understand it but subcon­sciously feel their inner, not simply real affiliation to a certain social and cultur­al environment and they have prefer­ences, which are also mainly subcon­scious at first.

This also determines to a large extent their attitude to the efforts of adults to impose knowledge on them, much of which is rejected by them, first instinc­tively and then more consciously, as needless and uninteresting, especially in the volume determined by our adult “encyclopaedists”. As a result, surplus knowledge virtually needless for the future stifles the desire and physical abil­ities of most pupils to master even what could prove useful in their opinion and what accords with their preferences and tastes.

With the lack of an obvious positive connection between progress in studies and future earnings, and with eroded public moral criteria, educa­tion has lost its former social prestige. An outwardly obedi­ent model of behavior has become established among schoolchildren. While dis­playing agreement with the orders established by elders, pupils have built a system of defence against them and devised an ideology con­demning good pupils. Pupils abuse the weaknesses of their teachers to protect their inner worlds from the crude encroachments of adults. They also protest against all previous genera­tions, who left so little posi­tive for them and are the main culprits in the genera­tion gap between fathers and sons.

We should also do justice to the teachers. Having recov­ered from the shock, they began to search for a reserve way out and, as a result, also used sabotage and protested against their position. Teachers have been deprived of the presumption of innocence concerning their work. They also protested against the increased load of work and low salaries. Compulsory coaching and bribery have spread widely at schools.

 

An ordinary engineer

 

One of the direct consequences of the school reform and the subsequent metamorphosis of the school was sharply increased pressure on school-leavers in state-run special secondary and higher educational establishments. These young people did not master the school programmes properly and had no desire to become specialists. They brought to college with them lackadaisical study habits helped out by cribs and bribes. This became especially obvious in tech­nical schools and in the system of educa­tion by correspondence. The unprece­dented phenomenon of engineers unable to read drawings has also appeared among the graduates of resi­dent training departments of institu­tions of higher learning.

The situation in higher educational institutions has become more difficult than in schools. They have built a system of defence against entrants by creating a gap between the entrance examination demands and the school programmes. Then follows the multistage system of coaching, influence and bribes – forms of corruption that spread on an unprece­dented scale after the population gained more spare cash.

It is possible and necessary to light corruption by introducing unified slate examinations and by other means. But, in principle, it is impossible to gain full victory in an educational system with free tuition and a low level of the differentiation of curricula and grades.

The situation has been made easier to some extent by the opening of non-state institutions of higher learning. In the past academic year, Russia had 409 non-state institutions with 1,024,000 students and 662 state-run institutions with 5,860,000 students. Interest in non-state institutions is increasing because the value of any college diploma has risen in the private sector of the urban economy to some extent.

This is explained by the dispropor­tions in the system of higher education in Soviet times. Compared with other coun­tries, we have an obvious emphasis on mathematical, natural and technical sci­ences and lag behind in the social and humanitarian sciences and in jurispru­dence. With the lack of specialists in many fields new to Russia, a diploma – the formal ground for employing appli­cants – has become a certificate of ele­mentary literacy (not guaranteed by the school-leaving certificate) and their abili­ty to study in the process of work. At the same time, there is an influx of young people to the institutes and departments that train specialists in the promising fields.

In the opinion of minister Fursenko, these fields include engineering, psy­chology and sociology. Highly skilled lawyers, economists, specialists in infor­mation technologies and managers will be needed. Larger budget sums will be allocated in spheres where the percent of graduates working in their professions is higher than in others.

 

Our aged science

 

The proposal to reform scientific insti­tutions has caused no less alarm than the proposed reform of the education system – perhaps even greater alarm because most scientists are now elderly and, unlike students, have a less optimistic view of the future. Rather, they want (or have the hid­den desire) to change nothing after Soviet times, when little if anything depended on their initiative.

Fursenko rightly believes that the reform cuts first of all at “the personnel of the academic bureaucracy, which has grown excessive in the last few years”. That has indeed been so, especially “in the last few years”. The less money that is allocated to academic science, the more is spent by the captains of the academic ship. It seems they are prepared to leave the ship earlier than others by taking its cash in the form of academic property. The idea of academic property arose long ago. “The academy is for academicians”, its president Mstislav Keldysh is rumored to have said in the 1960s.

The charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences says that it has been estab­lished by the state “as the higher scien­tific institution of Russia”. This was clear under the Soviet system. The academy was one of the drive shafts linking the totalitarian state with society. Under its charter, citizens who “have enriched sci­ence with works of paramount scientific importance” are elected members and those who have done this with “notable” works become associate members. The academy has many members.

But the tone is set by administrators because science administration has been the main road to the academy since Soviet times. The academy is not so much a community of scientists as a cor­poration of academic managers and bureaucrats who co-opt new members into their ranks. The fate of fundamental science is still firmly linked with the fate of the academy, and its leaders have no desire to make changes. Most of the Soviet scientific-bureaucratic elite was reared in the atmosphere of arms build­up and the politicization of science, and hardened in pseudo-scientific bureau­cratic games.

The Russian scientific community does not need such leaders any longer. But they firmly hold their positions owing to the opportunism of most scien­tific workers, who regard their academic chiefs as the guarantors of their way of life. For that reason, we can agree only partly with Fursenko's statement that the reforms introduced by him “meet the interests of the absolute majority of peo­ple engaged in science today”. In his opinion, to augment state financing, the academy must join the drive for money by carrying out direct orders from indus­try. If the academy fails to close 20 per­cent of the rates thanks to extra-bud­getary funds, “it means something is wrong there”.

Something certainly is wrong in the academy. But Fursenko said that orders from industry make up only 40 percent of the state expenditure on research and development work. The sluggish institutions of the academy will be hard pressed in the competition, and this will lead to mass dismissals. Like failing students, the lions mentioned above do not want to be released from the cage. In this lies the main problem in reforming education and science. There is a strong desire for uniformity in this system. This is inevitable with state organization and operation – common programmes, unified state exam, common rules to shape collective bodies of scientists, accounting for and certifying scientific workers according to formal criteria. This explains the main idea of the reforms – to shift the emphasis in the famous slogan “unity lies in diversity” from its first part to the second and from quantity to quality [12, p. 50-53].