Higher Education: You Cannot Cookie-Cut Reforms From an Old Patterns

The new academic year began in Ukraine on September 1. That it would be an unusual year for schoolchildren was so much talked and written about earlier. And what about the college students? Nearly a thousand educational institutions have swung their doors open for them. And what is going on behind these doors? Will there be any positive changes this year in the system of higher education?

As Mykhailo STEPKO, deputy minister for research and education, stated, this academic year the ministry is mapping out the ways to solve such problems as teaching the disabled in universities, effective assistance in the employment of graduates, and improvement of the social and living conditions of students. It is proposed to award special scholarships to students majoring in critically needed specialties. It is also planned to pay special attention to training junior specialists, formerly known as secondary technical college students, as highly-skilled manpower. Great attention will be paid to conducting students’ scholarly contests (Olympiads). It is intended to more extensively use the Internet-based virtual teaching for gaining concrete knowledge. Incidentally, a virtual university has already been founded under the Kharkiv University of Electronics.

Today’s schools are going to switch to a twelve year term. A long series of innovations are to be introduced as early as this year. School reform will undoubtedly impact on higher education. Since the term of school studies will be longer, curricula in technical higher educational institutions may drop such subjects as the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian studies, and history of Ukraine, because these subjects will have been thoroughly studied in high school. After introducing the 12-point grade system for schoolchildren, one will also have to ponder on reforming the progress assessment system in colleges and universities. School reforms will also be taken into account to draw up the standards of higher education.

Ukraine is striving today to enter the international, primarily European, educational theater. The ratification of the Lisbon Convention by Verkhovna Rada last year was aimed at developing more civilized relations between our state and the countries of Europe in the field of education. From this year on, the Ukrainian diploma will bear a supplement in the shape of a European-style diploma. The Renaissance Foundation is awarding scholarships to Ukrainian students to study at higher educational institutions of the US, Britain, and at the Central European University (Poland, Hungary). This kind of education entails mandatory return to Ukraine to work as a specialist.

For example, a group of Western universities’ graduates, on coming back to Ukraine, founded the Innovations and Development Center to adjust to Ukrainian realities the innovations, including those in education, they saw in the universities of the US, Canada, and Great Britain. Executive director of the Innovations and Development Center, Oleksandr Sydorenko, graduate of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University, the Institute of Public Administration and Self-Government under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and Manitoba University in Canada, thinks that our university curricula are too overloaded with materials to memorize and that the positive distinguishing feature of Western curricula is the study of all conflicting views of a subject or a problem. This teaches students how to think and justify their points of view.

A law On Higher Education is now being prepared for a second reading in parliament. It is so far difficult to say in what it will differ from the law passed in the first reading. There are too many problems and very different opinions about how to solve them. The current system of college and university certification and accreditation requires basic updating. Excessively cumbersome procedures need simplifying. A mechanism of making unbiased conclusions is also a thing to think on.

There are many different views about what kind of tiers there should be in education. For instance, the it is suggested that the “specialist” degree be abolished because there are only two tiers in Western universities, and our “specialists” are equated there with bachelors. But there also are serious objections to this kind of decision. Also blurred is the idea of what the curricula of various tiers should differ in. And how can one determine how many masters and bachelors the state needs?

A proposal has been made to officially enact a provision that a specialist who has graduated from a second-level-of-accreditation institution should be awarded a qualification lower than that awarded to a specialist of the same level who has finished an establishment of third or fourth level of accreditation. This was heard at the all-Ukrainian workshop called The Modern State of Higher Education in Ukraine: Problems and Prospects held in Kyiv this summer.

Kostiantyn KORSAK, department chair, Institute of Higher Education, Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, thinks the main problem is that it is no longer possible today to control flows of information, which is changing the role of the teacher who has ceased to be the principal source of knowledge.

The increase in the number of students that has occurred in the past few years was not followed by an adequate increase of budget expenditures on education. This forces colleges and universities to obey the rules of a profit-making organization, i.e., to seek out the student capable of pay for his education. And what does a talented, but poor, one have to do? There are too few education loans, while aid programs for talented young people are not so comprehensive as to help all those deserving. There can be no high-quality free education: you can only find free cheese in a mousetrap. So who will pay? Abroad, investment in education is one of the most profitable investments. What is to be done to make it profitable here, too?

Time radically changes youth’s value-oriented attitudes: these are often in full contradiction with the attitudes of many teachers whose average age shows a considerable aging of our educational institutions’ faculty. Lofty patriotic appeals do not work now. Young people look at things from a practical point of view, but they continue to be brought up in the best Soviet traditions. “It is important to make a conclusion, together with the students, that,” and then go very nice and immaculately correct words about patriotism and a piece of didactic advice about how to conduct the first lesson in the 2000/2001 academic year. Why do we plan the conclusion beforehand? Why do we still teach students to expect ready-made solutions from somebody else and guess the desired answer from the teacher? Outdated methods lead to the formation of outdated consciousness. Then how can we reach progress with this kind of consciousness?

However, we only wish Ukrainian higher education would gradually go about solving the problems. The more so that very many things have to be tested in practice, for it is not always possible to forecast the results. Great hopes are being pinned in this respect on the so-far-very-young Institute of Higher Education under the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine which, after identifying its conceptual standpoints, has already begun doing fundamental research and developing serious projects. This year has seen the opening of research centers at the higher educational institutions of Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, and Dnipropetrovsk, as well as of experimental units at the colleges of Luhansk and Kharkiv. Research is gaining momentum.

It is said if you have no problems, you have missed something very important. Judging by the number of problems we are facing in the system of higher education, we can suppose we have not missed the most important things. And we do have something to hope for.

COMMENT

Vyacheslav BRIUKHOVETSKY, President, Kyiv Mohyla Academy:

“There are external and internal factors which constitute the main obstacle to progress in Ukrainian education. The external ones are economic problems that engender corruption in education. Corruption in education is a problem of the economy, not of the mentality, ethics or morals of a teacher. Education for fee (with free education only being granted to especially talented children for whom, incidentally, somebody else will still have to pay) will solve this problem.

“The internal problems are those connected with the formal introduction of tiers of education, with emphasis put on early narrow specialization. The labor market demands that specialties be changed up to four to six times in a lifetime. This requires fundamental education which will allow one to master various knowledge and skills needed for changing professions during his/her lifetime. Even today, two-thirds of the graduates of institutions of higher education do not work in the profession they were trained for.

“What also helps to solve many problems of higher learning is the system of anonymous testing the Academy has been using for more than one year. Now the Ministry of Research and Education is working on introducing this system in all Ukraine’s university-level institutions.”