If you pay, pay for the quality

The Soviet Union had many drawbacks as a system, but few will dispute the fact that the USSR was the most educated country in the world, and probably the system of education that we had was one of the most outstanding achievements of our country.

The new government, following the rules of a market economy, cut down sharply on financial support of education, terribly underpaying teachers. It is impossible to feed a family in Moscow for 9500 rubles and in the provinces for 3000 roubles. The severe conditions the teachers were put in made many of them leave schools for other areas of society; many of them had to look for some additional work, not related to their profession, just to be able to earn their living. However, a teacher who thinks of a lump of bread around the clock very quickly degrades as a professional.

At exactly the same time private schools began mushrooming. It seemed to be the right solution to the problem: as the government cannot pay proper salaries to teachers anymore, parents interested in a high level of education should. However, despite the improvement of the quality of teaching, quite the opposite happened.

A teacher in a private school, getting a higher salary than a teacher in a public one, is afraid of losing his/her place and often has to bear with any conditibns and humiliations. The teachers, understanding their dependence on parents' tuition fees, try to work around a fair evaluation of pupils' knowledge, overestimating it, not informing parents about failures, stressing only advances. All this drags the process of education into farce. Their primary task is to make the process of learning easy and interesting for children and to please their parents. The pupils come to school to have a good time, play games, and have nice talks with their classmates, and they do not realize that studying is hard, routine, day-to-day work.

What is even worse is that these pupils themselves understand their privilege, and use it with great pleasure. Children from rich families have always been studying at the school on Kutuzovskiy Prospect near Brezhnev's house. But in Soviet times it was considered to be bad form to boast of your wealth in public; now pupils brought to school in jeeps and escorted by guards show off, thinking they are very special and " su per important". Often they behave disrespectfully, and lose the feeling of communication standards with teachers. The idea " If you are so clever, why are you so poor" leads to the breakdown of the seniority of a teacher.

Such school conditions, though seemingly favorable for children, do not serve them well. Overstated school marks damage the life of children. Firstly, children get accustomed to getting good results without putting any effort into it. Accordingly, they lose any motivation to study. Secondly, their self-appraisal flies up to the sky, and later on they behave absolutely inappropriately and get into serious trouble in their future life. Finally, such children face difficulties when preparing for entrance exams in high school which are the same for everyone, when they have to compensate in a one-two year period of time for a huge knowledge gap -the result of years spent in the " greenhouse conditions" of a private school. Some well-off people complain about the problem of good education for their kids. They cannot trust teachers and have to check their knowledge since, it turns out, that children are given good marks " because of respect to the fathers".

Over the past 15 years it has become possible, quite natural and widespread, to buy diplomas, pay to pass an exam, or a practice of veiled bribery in private schools - actually paying for good marks. But people forget that diplomas and excellent marks are nothing, just paper with symbols on them. A diploma of an English language course can be easily bought, but unfortunately this doesn't give you foreign language skills. It is a question of attitude. In Russia we frequently pay more attention to the wrapping paper, forgetting that the meaning is inside.

Private schools are wide-spread in Europe, they work effectively; and there is nothing wrong if parents pay huge amount of money for their child's education. It is an extremely sophisticated service and needs great investment. But we shouldn't forget that we go to school to get knowledge; and since we pay that money, we want real results, not insubstantial, meaningless grades, together with happy faces.

By Irina Pavlova,

University of Natalia Nesterova,

Liuba Gribanova,

Plekhanov Academy of Economics

UNIT 2

APPLICATION FOR A JOB

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