What is better for modern-day schoolchildren: take the Unified State Exam (USE) or specific entrance exams to a tertiary institution? Is it necessary to take into account the Grade Point Average as was the custom in Soviet years? And what is happening to our education in general and to the teaching of Russian in particular? All these questions were discussed last weekend in St. Petersburg State University at the VI session of the Public-Pedagogical Forum organized by the interregional public foundation “Center of National Glory” (CNG) in collaboration with SPbSU and Herzen University with the assistance of the Russian Academy of Education.
“The Forum works along the four lines: developing the education law, developing the system of moral and spiritual education as the key element in bringing the society together, the role of media in shaping the personality and vocational education,” explained Zalina Medoeva, vice president of CNG, head of the task group for the forum organization and conduct. “We’ve prepared recommendations for the government, State Duma, and Federal Assembly, which hopefully they will heed.
In the opinion of Chairman of the State Duma Education Committee and Management Board Chairman of the Russkiy Mir Foundation Vyacheslav Nikonov, however paradoxically it may sound, Russian school education 'looks decent' – as for fourth-grade students we are in the top four alongside Singapore, Hong Kong and Finland. The situation with eighth-grade students is worse – “Asian tigers” are ahead of us here; in other words, our kids slow down from grade 5 to grade 9. And we are far behind the Western nations in the level of tertiary education, even though according to rector of SPbSU Nikolai Kropachev, the average level of our enrollees and students has improved.
Mr. Nikonov proposed to take into account Grade Point Average (GPA) in order to encourage high school students to learn the entire range of subjects, and to include an essay composition into the USE on Russian.
And this is justified, for this is what statistics reveal: about 30% of Russians did not read a single book in 2011. “We should hold a different attitude towards the language and do care about the mother tongue,” insists SPbSU President and Chair of Russkiy Mir Foundation Board of Trustees Ludmila Verbitskaya. “When the composition returns to school, there will be fewer complaints against the USE.”
Among the recommendations prepared by the forum participants is developing the new project “Youth of Russia”, creating an educational channel and social network for discussing moral issues, organizing the monitoring of media activities and stiffening the punishment down to criminal persecution for propagating in media of deviant behavioral patterns, especially among teenagers.
SPbSU rector Nikolai Kropachev:
“The commercialization of education must not have a negative impact upon the level of education. But unfortunately, commercialization does not guarantee the level which budget students have. Sometimes university administrators are more concerned about preservation of commercial students, than about the quality of education. And this is a formidable threat, because in this situation the very notion of quality education is eroded.
As for the dwindling number of institutions of higher learning, when people are longing to get quality education, the decision of any particular administrator will not mean anything, since demand begets supply and the number of quality colleges and universities will not be diminishing.”
Vyacheslav Nikonov, Head of the State Duma for Education:
I believe the passions currently seething around the problem of creating an integrated textbook on history go too far. In reality we need 14 textbooks on history if we mean two line-ups: national and global history. I believe these line-ups are to be harmonized, since now they do not seem to have any junctions. Today we have 238 textbooks, but more than 70% of schoolchildren use 14 textbooks and the gap between these and other 238 is not very wide, so actually a universal textbook on history already exists, though its quality leaves much to be desired. It must be a multimedia reference guide to various historic resources that would widen the student’s horizon and it should not be boring.
As regards the school uniform, for now this is at the discretion of schools. All good schools in the West and in the East have a uniform and bad ones do not, so if our schools are good they should have their own uniform.
Lyudmila Klushina
Source: Vecherniy Petersburg
