Returning silver medals to school graduates is a very right step. This is the restoration of a fair assessment of merit, in which not only the gold medal winners are noted, but also the second-place winners. This decision is a sign of the maturity of society.
It seems fair to me that the criteria for achieving “silver” is two to four. But I think what you need to consider is extending the validity of both gold and silver medals further than just university entrance.
For example, medal winners may be given advantages when allocating a place in the dormitory or preferences when switching from contract to budgeted education.
we are at home (At the Russian State Social University (RGSU). – Ed.) We have already decided on certain reductions in the cost of contract training for medal winners.
But almost always, when we talk about the return of silver medals, we unwittingly make a connection with the Soviet education system. And here, apparently, we should think about the objectivity of modern assessment of information. Open sources contain the following remarkable figures: in Sakhalin, every 596 students receive a gold medal, and in one of the Caucasian republics, every 18 students receive a gold medal. These data will be of interest to the regulator: either we have problems with obtaining information in the Far East, or in the south schools have unique pedagogical experiences that are still not given enough importance. And if we talk about the return of the best educational practices of the Soviet period, the previous system did not allow such distortions.
Was the Soviet school interested in medalists? Yes, of course. This created the reputation of the educational institution, but did not directly affect the finances of the teaching staff and management. And today, within the framework of monetary policy in education, almost every ruble salary has its own KPI, and against each KPI there are some indicators, including medals of graduates.
The quality of Soviet school education, which we consider to be the best in our history, reflected the end-to-end demands of the entire system. Today, the criteria for the quality of school education are determined by the Ministry of National Education; it also evaluates the results of its work. The end user is a college that can neither adjust nor influence the evaluation of the Ministry of National Education. It is no coincidence that the country’s leading universities are persistently pushing for the introduction of their own examinations or at least interviews as an additional filter. After all, the university has no idea whose student it is, what the general cultural level of the graduate is, how sociable he is – we only see the figures of the Unified State Exam! But as practice shows, this is not enough.
Although the root of the problem seems to be deeper. Neither universities, nor secondary specialized educational institutions, nor the Ministry of National Education are sufficiently confident about which specialists will be needed by the end customer, the real sector of the economy, for example, in five years. So what will happen in five years? We are not entirely sure of today’s realities. From a certain point of view, this is also a consequence of monetary policy: all planning of the Ministry of Economic Development, the legal successor of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, is based on monetary rather than physical indicators.
To achieve the effect of reuniting the Soviet education system using new technological capabilities, it is necessary to at least supplement financial planning with physical planning.
In the Soviet Union, the quality of education was evaluated by the state as the customer of experts. He also determined how many mining engineers, primary school teachers, mechanics, machinists and cooks he would need in five years. Objections are often heard that this is only possible under a centralized state economy. This is not the case: at certain periods a third of the Soviet economy was non-state; artels, cooperatives, collective farms. Despite this, the national economic complex was united and quite efficiently created and translated the requirements of the educational system in terms of quantity and quality of specialists. Today we learn to measure the processes of information transfer and control their assimilation. But we still do not have the main thing – an order from those we teach. The education system has lost signs of honesty.
And, unfortunately, the introduction of the silver medal, although it remains absolutely correct and logical, does not solve this main problem – a responsible educational scheme collected and transferred by the state.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.