Inheritance needed and superfluous
It's no secret that our higher education system is inherited from the Soviet Union with minimal changes and additions. In turn, the Soviet system received much from tsarist Russia, including most of the teachers. The universities of the USSR worked for a long time on the human resources of the old, pre-revolutionary, with the moral foundations of Professor Preobrazhensky, because there was simply nowhere to take new ones. Hence, by the way, the direct national association of the "cultural person" with the holder of the diploma, although this is an obvious simplification, because the culture is formed from an early age, in the family, and only after it - in school, and the young man should come to a mature person already.
Diploma of higher education does not make anyone an intellectual
But Soviet higher education aspired to become accessible to all: hence the system of the workers' subordinates of the 1920s, who at an accelerated pace gave young workers the knowledge that they had not received in school so that they could enter the university. Then the same role was played by evening schools. Tender inequality among students was eliminated: so, at the beginning of the war, in 1941, 58% of students in the universities of the USSR were girls. However, this accessibility had some nuances. For example, in the whole world there is almost a direct relationship between the education of parents and children: if a father and a mother have a higher education, the child is also likely to want to receive it and the family will help him in every way.
In the Soviet Union, this dependence was much weaker, and many were wondering whether today it is necessary to have a higher education. This is due to the fact that the universities had a considerable number of benefits on social or national grounds, for example, for workers. In post-Soviet times, the dependence between the education of parents and children has become more pronounced. Indeed, even in the 1950s, those entering universities filled out questionnaires that included questions about nationality and social origin, as well as: "What did your parents do before 1917?" This feature - the declared accessibility in combination with direct dependence on the social order - the Ukrainian education system also inherited, however, now the social inequality has become an economic inequality.
No matter how much teaching staff terror, repression, emigration, hunger and wars, it is with the "old guard" and their direct students that the successes of Soviet science are linked up to the 70s. But the new government needed, first, a new political elite, and urgently, and secondly, loyal citizens, and more. Therefore, the number of universities in Soviet times increased at a stunning rate (for example, from 1927 to 1930 it increased from 129 to 600 - almost five times!), But in terms of quality, university institutions sometimes left much to be desired. This was mainly concerned with humanitarian specialties (philosophers, historians, philologists, economists suffered from the repression), and this lag defined the image not only of Soviet science but also of post-Soviet science: all discoveries in psychology and sociology, like new ideas, in history and philosophy, were invented without us. Sociology in the Soviet Union was not - there was only statistics. That is why the same studies in the field of education are incomplete - scientists simply do not have enough data.
"And with Kolya and Vera, both mothers are engineers"
"Physicists" in the Soviet Union were definitely valued more "lyricists", and holders of applied specialties - above the theoretical scientists. This led to the fact that, say, from 1949 to 1979, the number of university graduates with an engineer's diploma increased from 22 to 49% of the total output! Can you imagine almost half the country's engineers? Of course, most of them left their perestroika without work. And everything began beautifully and romantically: the beginning of the space age, the dreams of interstellar flights, the peaceful atom, the conquest of nature ... Well it's either bad, but science fiction - in a broad sense - was a social trend in the 60s and 70s. Of course, young people dreamed of expressing themselves "on the front line" and, of course, not enough for everyone.
The sources of great changes in the public consciousness, or more precisely in its attitude to higher education, are worth searching precisely in "stagnant" and perestroika years. During this period, the quantity won the quality: the level of teaching in universities that finally lost the potential of the beginning of the century, significantly decreased, and the "dictatorship of personal data" gradually led to the devaluation of the value of education as such. Intelligent families still believed in the need to learn, but most realized that the "crust" does not need to be backed up by knowledge, and certainly does not help to succeed. This was not yet a revolution - the changes took place slowly but surely.
"Wherever you study, just do not learn"
Oddly enough, the "dashing 90s" were marked by an unprecedented surge in interest in higher education: the number of universities and students increased two or three times and continues to grow. The thing, most likely, is that the diploma of higher education promised at least a small chance to get a better paid job - at that time they were grabbing and not for such straws. Yes, and the commercialization of universities led to the fact that they added students who did not by the results of examinations.
Higher educational institutions also play another important social role: the "safe", in which young people can be "put" just during the period of its greatest activity, so that it does not direct its violent energy into an unnecessary society - for example, in social protests, the probability of which in the transition period is great. Of course, this did not always work, but we all have, more often than in the West, where students are free to plan their own teaching time, and therefore free, too. Student riots in Europe in the sixties are a graphic illustration of what the energy of youth is capable of. However, the Soviet education, and after it the post-Soviet one, has always sought to drive students into a more rigid framework and fill all their time with almost unbearable burdens. In such a safe the student, especially thinking and responsible, is safer for others.
The "safe" function of universities was important for us also because for young people study means a postponement from the more not popular army, and for girls provides an opportunity to marry successfully (it is no accident, say, almost all the philafs were called "bride's faculties") and often, education and finish. In a word, all the secondary functions of higher education have come to the fore, at the expense of the main one. "Wherever you study, if only you do not study," - so many entrants come on this principle.
In addition , the system of higher education has always suffered from a general fashion for these or those specialties: if the collapse of the Soviet Union left hundreds of thousands of engineers without the means of livelihood, then by the beginning of the new millennium, lawyers and journalists practically did not need. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we were faced with yet another problem - the demographic problem. It was time to enter higher education institutions for children born in the first half of the 90s, and this was the period of the "demographic pits". There are a lot less entrants than places in universities, that is, our education is nominally public, but this fact does not inspire optimism. Most likely, a reduction in demand in the future will lead to a decrease in supply.
In Ukraine, more than 900 educational institutions with III - IV levels of accreditation. This is much more than necessary. If the trend continues, then in the future we can expect a devaluation of higher education, and employers will pay attention not to the diploma, but to other factors. And they can be anything: sex, age, political or sexual predilections ... Actually, this trend is already evident: many job announcements require applicants not just diplomas, but diplomas of certain educational institutions that invariably enjoy authority. Other employers choose in favor of, say, those under the age of 35 (although older people are more likely to receive a more thorough education) or residents of a certain region.
We faced each other face to face: it is already pointless to receive a diploma for the sake of the diploma itself. Going to learn is not everything and not everything. And education should be different - more flexible and adapted to the needs of not even today but tomorrow. From the "zapendi" there must be an exit. We've been sitting in it for too long.