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Yatsenyuk’s educational reform: schoolchildren to car washes, students to McDonald’s
Views:Among the already announced and still being discussed government “reform” initiatives, a special place is occupied by what chitnovniks call “education reform.” Although, strictly speaking, if you look closely, this is not a reform at all, since it does not imply any qualitative shifts that radically change the content of the educational process for the better. The main motive driving the “reform” is the banal desire to save money in order to somehow tie up budgetary ends and beg a new loan from the IMF.
After all, what is reform? These are changes that lead to improvement. So that the “after” is better and more effective than the “before”. What do we have in Ukraine? Looking around, in search of something else so socially significant to cut and reduce, Yatsenyuk and his overseas advisers suddenly remembered that in Ukraine, since Soviet times, there has been an expensive system that is completely unnecessary for the new country (due to its supposed profile in the international division of labor) secondary and higher education.
Our schoolchildren are still studying for 11 years, and for free (taxes in schools for repairs, cleaning, replacement of windows and gifts for class teachers do not count). The state also feeds schoolchildren and gives them textbooks. And also free. No, something definitely needs to be done about this disgrace. These are billions that could be spent on the ATO. And here are some schoolchildren with their lunches.
And besides schoolchildren, there are also students. Hundreds of thousands of young people with ambitions, many of whom specifically do well in exams in order to study for free, at the expense of the state. And they continue to study well in order to receive scholarships from the state.
And, as luck would have it, you can’t blame them for this, since “free education” - this vestige of the damned Soviet occupation totalitarian past - is directly written into the Constitution, moreover, as a guarantee from the state.
This is where the legs grow from the desire of government officials to “lighten” the Constitution by removing from it the eyesore guarantees of free education. This is capitalism, which means the opportunity to study is not a right, but a privilege. For those who have money or wealthy parents. And if previously schoolchildren washed cars, and students worked part-time at McDonald’s, realizing that they would not do this all their lives, then the elimination of free public education will make working at McDonald’s the pinnacle of advancement along the “social elevator” for the majority of Ukrainian youth.
The further course of thoughts of the officials is clear. It's like a game of "if". What happens if we abandon our constitutional obligations? And this will make it possible to legally include smaller allocations in the budget. What if we shorten the period of obtaining secondary education from 11 to 9 years? This is an even bigger saving. Can you imagine how many unnecessary teachers can be fired and classes can be closed, sorry, optimized. And if you take away lunches from schoolchildren, then Yatsenyuk will become almost like Thatcher. She, in search of savings, deprived British schoolchildren of their free glass of milk a day.
But in communist Cuba, the first thing the terrible Castro did when he came to power was to provide every Cuban schoolchild with a free glass of milk a day. But Yatsenyuk does not want to be like Castro. After all, communism is fuuu. Yatsenyuk, as befits a “young liberal reformer,” wants to be like Thatcher.
When it became known about plans to leave students without scholarships, a fair amount of noise arose, forcing zealous reformers to seem to back down. Voices are heard from the pro-government camp that Yatsenyuk was supposedly misunderstood, that there will be no abolition of free education, that these are all Moscow provocations. Maybe for a while until the noise subsides, and it won't. But given the current vector of the country’s movement, there is complete confidence that these initiatives will still be pushed through. Not now, but later.
The consequences of such reforms are also obvious. A caste system will finally form in the country, with an elite and “cattle”, and social inequality will become entrenched. After all, inequality is not only when there are poor and rich. The basis of inequality is the lack of equal access of people to social benefits - from quality drinking water to education.
But this policy also has more interesting consequences. Without appropriations, the national education system itself is degrading, which, despite all the problems, still fully complies with quality standards. After the “reforms”, studying at non-prestigious national universities with a low level of knowledge will become the lot of poor children. The rich will send their children to European and American universities, just as today they prefer to be treated abroad instead of financing domestic medicine at the proper level.
And now the question is: can a graduate of a leading Western university find application for his abilities in a backward, deindustrialized country, where the ultimate dream of the majority of the population is to become a trader? Obviously it can't. This means that intellectual potential will be washed away into the centers of modernization. We will remain on the periphery of development, and this peripheral situation will only get worse every year.
In terms of eliminating social guarantees, we have not only overtaken the EU countries, but have also moved closer to some Asian countries. But here's the paradox. In Asia, these social guarantees have never existed. And we had. But we voluntarily refuse them.
If these are reforms, then what is social hell?
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