Compared to grade school results, colleges have catching up to do
Thursday newspapers in the Czech Republic point out a wide gap in the performance of Czech students at the grade school and college levels. While younger students excel in school compared to the rest of the world, in higher education both enrolment and results are unimpressive. Radio Prague’s Christian Falvey reports on the situation and one of the ideas to improve it.
The good news is that primary and secondary school students in the Czech Republic are doing great; the Programme for International Student Assessment for example ranks them 15th in the word in maths and sciences. But the picture at the college level is more grim, starting with the fact that only 14% of Czechs actually finish university, half the average of other well-educated countries. While elsewhere in the EU competition drives more than 1 in 10 to continue their education after college, only 6% of adults in the Czech Republic do so. As the economic press raises the stakes for college educated workers in the country – who make 92% more money – some education specialists, like Lukáš Sedláček of the Anglo-American University, are pointing to a crisis. Grade schools in the Czech Republic are excellent at getting their students to learn facts and figures, but further education does not require of the students what it should.
“It’s more important, in tertiary education especially, for the students to use information in some useful manner and to think critically about the issues they are presented with, to write essays, to present their arguments, and that’s something that I’m afraid students are not led into in the Czech Republic. We don’t train them that much in reflecting on the texts they read, in thinking up their own arguments and presenting them in the form of an essay or presentation – that I think is the main problem.”
“The trouble is that once there is not much money in the state universities what happens is that the professors get very low salaries and then they also teach either at private universities or they work part time or some of the time in business, which means they don’t view the teaching as a priority. It’s quite a difference if you teach a class and you have to do five things during the day; you don’t spend as much time overall preparing for the class and you don’t put as much into the students.”
With a 10% cut on state employees’ salaries lurking on the horizon, teachers’ financial lives are not going to be getting any better in the next couple of years it seems. One interesting proposal is garnering a great deal of support left, right and centre. The government’s economic council has proposed subsidizing students’ stays at learning institutions abroad – they’ll pay for you to go to Harvard, screams the headline on Hospodářské Noviny, for example. In return, the student will come home to serve as a state employee for, say, two years. Lukáš Sedláček believes that may be just the thing to breathe a bit of new life into the education system.
“I think it’s a very interesting idea. A lot of attention has to be paid to this topic of universities, because it’s quite bad. Unless the government really invests in innovations and high-quality tertiary education and squeezing the best out of the population we have down here, then in like five or ten years time it will show on the ranking of the Czech Republic’s economy in the world, and I’m very happy that the council has come up with this proposal.”
The proposal however remains a proposal for the time being, it lacks detail and has plenty of room for pitfalls, Mr Sedláček says. But in a time of reform and austerity in the Czech Republic it at least seems a constructive idea that enjoys general support.
