Text I. Education and economics
Educational reform is in the air everywhere, from France to South Korea, from Australia to Germany. The three powerhouses of the world economy – Europe, America, and the Asia tigers – are competing to educate their workforces and to attract and create high-value-adding jobs.
Half a century ago, you knew you were on the road to nowhere if you were made minister of education. Today education ministers are usually on their way up. Margaret Thatcher used the education portfolio as a stepping-stone to the premiership. Bill Clinton first captured national headlines with his reforms of Arkansas schools. George Bush tried to salvage his do-nothing reputation at home by dubbing himself “the education president”.
Such politicians have a shrewd sense of what will go down in the bar rooms and boardrooms. Chief executives of multinational firms hold earnest conferences on skills shortages and training strategies. Serious newspapers and heavyweight magazines devote pages to education and national competitiveness. Throughout the rich world, voters put education near the top of their list of worries.
This concern for change has its origins in the 1960s, when the aim was to turn elite educational debates have shifted. Governments now treat education not as a consumer good but as a productive asset.
They are particularly worried about cost and quality. The West and the East converged on the issue of quality from opposite directions. In Britain and America conservative governments turned against child-centred teaching and called for a return to basics. They wanted more rote learning and less creative writing. In East Asia governments now feel that they have solved the quantity problem. They aim instead to increase the quality of education, particularly the quality of the education of the brightest. Hence a current Asia fashion for such things as creative writing.
Governments have also moved their emphasis from education to training. If education reform in the 1960s took aim at the university, it is now the training college which is in the sights of the reformers. A mixture of technological innovations and demographic trends is persuading governments to improve the vocational qualifications of their workforces.
There is no consensus on how to improve education. Many prominent reformers are pushing in opposite directions. The most comprehensive reform programme has been the one implemented by the British government since 1988. This is mixture of centralization (imposing a national curriculum and reducing the role of local-education authorities) and competition (giving schools an incentive to compete for pupils and encouraging pupils to compete for result). This has attracted many imitators and would-be imitators. Sweden is reorganizing its school system into an internal market. Denmark has introduced per-capita funding for technical colleges. Singapore is going for league tables to stimulate competition between schools. American reformers would like to introduce educational vouchers and national tests.
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Other reformers are doing just the opposite. In South Korea and Japan the education ministries want to delegate power to local government. The Japanese authorities strongly disapprove of league tables of schools. Still, even if governments disagree about how exactly to proceed, they agree on the need for reform. Are they right to invest so much time and effort in doing it? Does education pay, or have the politicians merely been seduced by the professor?
Vocabulary notes
powerhouse –сильная группа, сильная команда, хороший игрок
to create high-value-adding jobs –создавать рабочие места для высококвалифицированных рабочих (создающих высокую добавленную стоимость)
stepping-stone – ступенька (у входа)
to salvage [‘sælvidз] –спасать
to dub –дать прозвище, окрестить
competitiveness –конкурентоспособность
productive asset –производительный актив
rote learning – механическое заучивание (не понимая смысла)
hence –отсюда, следовательно, с этого времени
training –профессиональная подготовка
training college –специальное училище, техникум
vocational qualification –профессиональная квалификация
curriculum [kə’rikjuləm] –курс обучения
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incentive –стимул
league tables – списки школ с распределением их по классам согласно результатов экзамена
educational voucher – свидетельство об образовании
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