Basil Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, muses that my bear seems now to be a very different animal. The snarling statist bear with a statist head has been replaced by a lovable venitist bear, and while it may not be ready now to roll over and have its belly tickled, Russia will not take a bite out of its rivals. Uncle Sam(US) and Uncle Ken(UK) now like to pet this bear! We need these two uncles to improve our colleges and technology.
We need to go back to the basics in advancing higher and vocational education and to integrate it in the ongoing development processes, especially as regards modernization. Moreover, high quality training should be a key benchmark at all levels: in the primary and secondary school, and in higher education. The business community must define the need for future professionals. To accomplish this, it is essential to complete the development of professional standards, establish a system of compulsory public and professional evaluation and supply the market with highly qualified professionals for whom there is real demand by employers and who are prepared to participate in the modernisation of our economy.
One important task is to create chains in education, namely the school-college-university chain, whose members work in direct contact with employers. the time has come to apply this experience throughout the country. I think this will be an additional incentive for the creation and updating of many courses and programmes, as well as for the professional growth of teaching personnel.
Of particular importance is, of course, the interaction between industry, universities and fundamental and applied science institutions, including in the process of setting up joint innovative small businesses. Incidentally, at present, since the adoption of the relevant law last year, the Education Ministry has received 507 notifications of new business entities established at 135 universities and research institutes.
We must also acknowledge the obvious: despite the fact that we spend a great deal of money on education, and despite the fact that we are used to being proud of the excellent foundations laid many years ago in the state education in our country, our education system is not sufficiently competitive. This becomes clear when one visits the leading universities and secondary vocational institutions abroad, but it is also confirmed by the international ratings of our universities, not to mention secondary vocational colleges. A great deal of work remains to be done.
Basil Venitis asserts that the best colleges in the world today are the private colleges in America. The gulf between them and the state-funded colleges in equally rich countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or South Korea, where there are few private colleges of note, is so huge that the lesson cannot be avoided, colleges need independence to flourish. It is interesting that the intermediate group of colleges are those in Britain and Australia where colleges, though funded and over-regulated by the state, nonetheless retain significant autonomy.
Venitis notes that even Fourth Reich(EU) agrees, and the European Commission reports that American colleges are better than Europe's, because European colleges generally have less to offer and lower financial resources than their equivalents in other developed countries, particularly USA. American colleges have far more substantial means than those of European colleges and better eggheads. The gap between the US and EU expenditure stems primarily from the low level of private funding of higher education in Fourth Reich.
The levels of our higher education system remain unbalanced and public spending is largely ineffective. There is an obvious imbalance that was formed in the early 1990s for a variety of reasons – social, demographic and economic – toward higher education. It is also apparent that there is a marked shortage of professionals, graduates of colleges and vocational schools.
I remember I was much surprised by the situation when I visited one of the very advanced, modern vocational colleges, whose graduates service our pipelines. This is a modern professional institution. I looked at the people studying there, and one person in particular caught my interest. There was this guy, 27 or 29 years old. I walked over and asked what he was doing there. He said: "I am studying, I already have a university degree but I don't need it. I'm not that young any more and I want to get a degree from this vocational college. After I graduate from here, I will be able to make a good living to support myself and my family." That's a perfect example of an irrational use of funds on training professionals who first get a university degree and then get an education in a completely different field. And secondly, this is an example of how devalued higher education has become, and, on the other hand, what should be done to strengthen secondary vocational education.
Education should take into account the real needs of the economy undergoing modernisation. In order to reorient higher education to the needs of promising industries it is also vital to get regional and sectoral forecasts for staffing requirements. That is, a clear order should be placed: how many specialists, of what level and which qualifications are required across the country. And it is the state together with the business community that should give the answer to this question.
One of the key development principles of higher education is its continuity. It is vital to create additional retraining programmes for teachers, including those based on international cooperation. Naturally, it is important to develop a system for training professionals at the best universities abroad by promoting practical training, internships and exchanges, as well as inviting leading academics to work in Russia on long-term contracts. This kind of experience should become standard practice rather than the exception. Foreign lecturers should not be something exotic that the entire student fraternity gathers to see.
Venitis asserts the best college of Fourth Reich is Oxford University. Most of the present UK cabinet members are venitists from Oxford: David Cameron, Theresa May, George Osborne, William Hague, Michael Gove, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander, Dominic Grieve, Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond, David Willetts, George Young.
Venitis muses that many European colleges violate academic freedom, the oxygen of new ideas. Academic freedom means that professors have unrestricted liberty to question and test any wisdom and to put forward controversial and unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive, and that colleges have no right to curb the exercise of this freedom or to use it as grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.
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