With such an education, we will no longer have factories or technologies

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When the privatization took place, everyone was silent. The communists took water in their mouths. I wrote articles for newspapers, spoke on the radio, on television, and went to the State Duma. Deputy Ilya Konstantinov read my piece of paper, praised it, and said that nothing could be done, Yeltsin would sign the decrees. Yeltsin really signed decrees …

It was then that everyone suddenly realized it, and then they were silent. However, they were not even completely silent. I remember I came from the TV studio, and my wife was crying. She received calls from the angry public, eager to get two Volgas per capita, and called me a party apparatchik who was dragged by the ears from the trough. When factories were closed, technologies were sold for pennies, and equipment was thrown away - the public was silent.

Russian people are generally very slow to think.

Actually, privatization is not the worst thing that happened to us. If we were able to build a plant once and develop a technology for it, then we can do it a second time. And our partners are well aware of this. Therefore, they are now carrying out a new reform aimed at ensuring that Russia will never again have factories, technologies, or development economies.

"The school in the form in which it is now, based on memorization, will not be able to continue its activities by 2020-22," says Yaroslav Kuzminov, Rector of the Higher School of Economics. In his opinion, it is impossible to return to the Soviet education system, it is necessary to move from memorization to "competencies" …

Here I must make a digression. Innocent people are easily deceived; they follow the wrong hand of a magician or a sharper, which replaces the card, but the other hand, writing out spectacular, attention-grabbing gestures. Dear compatriots really liked Chubais's phrase about "two Volga", they did not pay attention to the rest. Later, Anatoly Borisovich confesses to the deception, explains what the real purpose of privatization was, but it will be too late.

If circumstances force you to play cards with a sharpie, you must be extremely concentrated. The protagonist of the Polish film "The Great Shu" opened a bottle of champagne at a critical moment in the game. The victim was distracted for a split second by hearing a clap, and this was enough for the accomplice to change the card.

When Kuzminov says that “memorization” should be replaced with “mastering competencies,” you can get carried away with puns and skip the main thing: neither school nor university will teach children anymore.

When factories and factories were taken away from us, they talked about "two Volgas". When knowledge is taken away from future generations, they speak of "competencies". The word itself is not bad, but the ideologues of education reform use it exclusively to divorce suckers.

Yes, it would be nice, of course, that students receive not only knowledge, but also skills and abilities (competencies). To do this, you need to finance the purchase of appropriate equipment, increase the hours of practical training. In fact, the opposite is happening: the real hours of laboratory work are replaced by fictional "independent work".

Equipment is not bought, let alone for years or decades. Instead, papers, papers, papers are written. Let me give you an example. In the work program for physical and colloidal chemistry, I was told to write competences. One of them sounds like this: "the ability to generalize and statistically process the results of experiments, formulate conclusions and proposals." Just please do not ask me why it is written this way, I don’t know, ask Yaroslav Kuzminov.

All concern about "competencies" comes down to writing numerous ridiculous papers. My graduate student does not conduct an experiment, does not write articles, I do it myself. For three years, from morning to evening, she has been writing and updating papers for graduate school, making up "competency matrices".

When ideologues of education reform talk about fighting "memorization", they are blatantly lying. The opposite is true. Traditional exams with questions and tickets are being replaced by testing, and both the questions and the correct answers must be available to students. Thus, the ideologists of the reforms are pushing students to memorize, but not the basics of the subject, which could still be somehow experienced, but to memorize one of the answers to the test questions.

True, I brazenly violate Kuzminov's instructions, I ask students in the old fashioned way. For this, I think I will soon be fired.

By the way, about layoffs. Our department has been cut in half over the past few years, because the real hours of classes have been replaced by fictional hours of "independent work". But this is not the worst thing yet. "Distance learning" is being introduced. Branches of the university are opened in regional centers, students study the subject independently at home, and they also undergo testing somewhere there. We don't see them at all.

And now the most interesting thing: distance (that is, none) training is being intensively implemented even by medical institutes!

Those who have not yet been fired want to quit themselves. A lady from Saratov wrote that it was not prestigious to be a professor. It embellishes reality. It is a shame to be a professor, because we are forced to do hackwork instead of real work.