The end of the university

What awaits successful graduates of schools in the Russian undergraduate

• The first serious lesson that a citizen of the Russian Federation receives is the ability to study past the university, the ability to live past the state, the ability to distance, coolly about the institution in which you are.
• Bachelorials are becoming more and more like standard Soviet schools. Therefore, graduates of elite lyceums and gymnasiums feel like if they returned to their provincial schools, from which they fled in the 9th grade.
• In a good school, especially in lyceums, in gymnasiums, they don’t teach you there, they live there, and they love you there. There you are value. And when you come to the university, you find yourself in the system of conveyor of mass production.
• If you could go to the university, write four thesis and leave, I would do so. But outside the main educational flow.
• We are present, when young people do not just leave universities, do not just disappoint, they, like Alice, dive into a hole and see the world inverted, go into a portal of another reality.
• The life path of each of us is the history of rejected alternatives.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Today we will talk about disappointment that awaits some of today's applicants, if they do even a good, as they say, top Russian university.

This problem has several aspects, but we will consider only one that, perhaps, prevents the formation of a new intellectual elite - right at the entrance to the university.

In the Moscow studio, a psychologist, director of the humanitarian policy of the RANEPA, Alexander Asmolov and former students - art critic Anastasia Lviv and programmer Vladislav Stepanov .

Tamara Lyalenkova : Nastya and Vladislav successfully graduated from a good Moscow school, entered the prestigious Moscow University. However, they were disappointed - everyone in their own direction. Why?

Anastasia Lvova : Firstly, the point was that I studied on the history of art, and for some reason my dream was oriental studies: I really wanted to teach Japanese. But the orientalists all turned out to be very smart, the passing points were high, and I went to the history of art.

This, as it seems to me, was also a disappointment from fellow students, since the school had a formed team, I was fine there. There everyone understood you, all on the same wave.

Tamara Lyalenkova : This is a clear story, a natural moment for a person who enters the university after school: another environment, other people and, perhaps, not so comfortable. Nastya eventually coped with this and graduated from the university. But Vladislav left the second year. Why?

Vladislav Stepanov : If we talk about disappointment, the problem was that everything turned out to be too formal than I expected. I thought that they would teach me modern science, modern technologies - yes, they taught, but they amounted to 20 percent of the total class. There were compulsory objects like "safety of life", absolutely formal. There were extra objects, which, in general, did not carry anything bad, like, for example, "economics". It is clear that some of the programmers will then go to work in the bank, and this economy will come in handy. But when each programmer is forced to count complex interest, demand, sentences, and so on, the question arises: is it necessary?

And when it turned out that most of my classmates study more to obtain formal confirmation that they received higher education, and not for the sake of knowledge, I was disappointed and left.

Tamara Lyalenkova : From the second year, which means that this was not a hasty decision. How did parents react?

Vladislav Stepanov : At first I left, and then after a couple of months I told them about it. At that moment, nothing could definitely be done.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Such two stories: Nastya somehow lost, and Vladislav decided to continue to live without higher education. What is the matter? Maybe young people do not have experience in principle and therefore cannot cope with the first experience? Or is it a problem in the higher education system?

Alexander Asmolov : As any problem, this is a problem for which there are many solutions of the solution and there is no one answer. What we are discussing today is the tonality of disappointment and tonality, I quote

Western University died! It's hard to believe, but this is reality

The word characteristic of all our mentality has “suffered” when we have to endure this higher education - in fact, unique things associated with a change in the world order come across all this. Neither Google nor Microsoft will look in the IT area, what a diploma you have, but they will watch how you solve problems, you are a master or not a master. They will check your business, not your certificate. This is the first moment.

Second. In a good school, especially in lyceums, in gymnasiums, they don’t teach you there, they live there, and they love you there. There you are value. And when you come to the university, you find yourself in the system of conveyor of mass production.

In fact, we are present at the era ... I will quote Ronald Barnett, a professor at the University of London: "The Western University has died! It’s hard to believe, but this is a reality. The end of the university! But another university will appear."

Tamara Lyalenkova : There is such a version that good schools give too good education, while the undergraduate is imprisoned under all, people with different levels and baggage come there, since even a high USE does not reflect the complete depth of skills and knowledge.

Viktor Vakhstein : This is partly due to the fact that, firstly, in university education, compared to elite school education, they do not see anything new. In addition, expectations are not justified that the lyceum is better than a school, and a university is better than a lyceum.

The expectations are not justified that the lyceum is better than a school, and a university is better than a lyceum

The last minimum of 15 years, and really much longer, in the system of school and in the university education system, fundamentally different processes are going on. On the one hand, there is a differentiation of schools. The best schools (lyceums and gymnasiums) are trying to be as few schools as possible. They use fundamentally different teaching methods and create a special, unique intellectual environment, if they do it. Thus, the distance between the best and worst schools increases.

On the other hand, thanks to the Bologna process (division into undergraduate and magistracy), undergraduates are becoming more and more like standard Soviet schools. Therefore, graduates of elite lyceums and gymnasiums, finding themselves in the undergraduate of even a top university, feel like if they returned to their provincial schools, from which they fled in the 9th grade. Often they find themselves at the same desks with those people who did not follow them to elite schools, but entered the same university.

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Viktor Vakhstein about school and university education

There are two ways to be disappointed in education. The first is to be disappointed in the education that you receive when you find yourself in a university that did not live up to your expectations. The second is to get a very good education that creates a sense of intellectual superiority, and then, by switching to the next educational step, of course, to be disappointed in contrast.

An important skill that can be obtained in this situation, being a graduate of a good school and being in a mass basicariat, is the ability to learn besides the university. In the end, this is probably the first serious lesson that a citizen of the Russian Federation receives the ability to study past the university, the ability to live past the state, the ability to distance, coolly about the institution within which you are.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Vladislav, maybe today you understand that you missed something by leaving the university? Is there a regret?

Vladislav Stepanov : I have no feeling that I missed something that is valuable professionally. Starting to work, I received quite a lot of professional skills in the first year, an order of magnitude more than at the same time at the university. But I missed, it seems, part of communication, about mentoring. I listen to colleagues who had good scientific leaders who wrote interesting thesis ... I also wrote, and my supervisor was interesting, and if I could go to the university, write four thesis and leave, maybe I would do it even now, but outside the main educational flow.

Tamara Lyalenkova : They say that the diploma matters when you are moving on to the leadership. Have you thought about it?

Vladislav Stepanov : I am already a leader.

Tamara Lyalenkova : That is, career growth does not depend on whether you have a diploma or not?

My authorities did not have questions about the availability of higher education

Vladislav Stepanov : Until it prevented. I am the head of the group and develop projects. My authorities did not have questions about the availability of higher education. And when I interview people, I do not remember the line about education from almost one resume, because it, as a rule, does not correlate with the result of passage.

Tamara Lyalenkova : So, when hiring to work, a line about education becomes unimportant, how the line about the female and male gender became unimportant.

Alexander Grigoryevich, as you think, maybe now the price for higher education is too high - not only in monetary dimension, but also temporary. Because young people are now a different way to the resource. Or is the impatience of the mind characteristic of age?

Alexander Asmolov : Firstly, impatience of mind is a magical thing. When there is impatience of the mind, you can critically check the world, put real, mental, and virtual experiments with it. This is a gift!

Second. The pace of time says that young people do not want to be chained to one day. They are different than my generation feel the rhythm of time. Therefore, they do not want to sit like a gallery for four years in undergraduate, then jump into the magistracy, and then, Lord, save you, spend three more years of graduate school, which has degenerated in three years of study, where you are repeated in almost the same form what was given in the magistracy and partly in the undergraduate. Now let's count: how much does it work? It turns out that you were sitting at school for 11 years and further for another 9 years. Why did you put you so much?!

Tamara Lyalenkova : Studies show that for Russian students university life is just life, it is almost nothing to do with further professional activity. That is, higher education is not transferred to the value in the labor market.

Maybe this continues the post -Soviet tradition when higher education was considered almost basic? Or is the ability to study independently - using courses, books, communicating with experts, especially if you are a humanitarian?

Anastasia Lvova : Perhaps it is easier for us to learn well. But despite the fact that I like to study, I like to read, I am interested in investigating, I still think that the university gives a system-systematizes the learning process. It seems to me that if I had not gone to study at the university, I would not have gained all these skills, firstly, because I am not a very disciplined person.

Secondly, this is due to how the education process is now arranged. On the one hand, a lot of things have happened over the past few

There is a closed system that teachers support in order to maintain the uniqueness of university education

years with courses and with the possibility of self -figuring, and, on the other hand, I remember that at the university I regularly had the feeling that if this teacher sent his presentations to us by mail, he gave in electronic form those books that he set to read at home, then everything would be much easier, accessible. And, perhaps, then it would be less obvious - why go to the university for this. But so far there is a closed system that teachers often support in order to maintain the uniqueness of university education.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Sociology of higher education shows that this situation is far from very new, as it turned out.

Viktor Vakhstein : The situation in which graduates of the elite, primarily Moscow schools who entered the top universities and disappointed as education and in the very content of the educational process, discovered. Actually, this situation was well described in the sociological literature 15 years ago by David Konstantinovsky and Dmitry Kurakin, who called this "effect of the SUNC of Moscow State University." Sunz is a very good school at Moscow State University, in which children, living in a boarding school, are preparing for admission and get a quality education. However, it turns out quite strange: having entered the selected faculties, two years later, a significant part of them either goes or is not among the best students.

Sociologically, the problem is not in high expectations and not in the overstated sense of the importance of graduates of good Moscow schools. There is a common hypothesis that dissatisfaction with higher education is primarily associated with a change in the request to higher educational institutions that were formed in the new generation. But this hypothesis is not confirmed by data.

There is no such thing that today graduates relate to the university as customers who are not satisfied with services

In fact, a radical change in attitude to education over the past 15 years has not occurred. Indeed, there are changes, but these are not so significant differences that we could talk about the cardinal change of generation. There is no such thing that today graduates relate to the university as customers who are not satisfied with the services provided, go by slapping the door. No! Rather, the problem is what the education system has become over the past 15 years. For how, on the one hand, the distance between ordinary schools, lyceums and gymnasiums has increased, and, on the other hand, how much the distance between the mass bachelor's bachelines and an elite magistracy increased.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Nevertheless, if there is an idea to further move in the scientific direction, then you can’t do without a magistracy. While you study at the university, you have time to choose, think about it. But Russian school graduates are forced to choose their directions very early. Vladislav, when did you realize that you will be a programmer?

Vladislav Stepanov : I did not think about work at all. Rather, from childhood it was interesting for me to do something with equipment, with computers. My parents sent me to the radio engineer at the Palace of Pioneers, when I was probably seven years old. Then I went to a technical university, left there, and they called me to the company.

Anastasia Lvova : Only a rather obvious thought came to me on the third that if I have been engaged in museums in museums since childhood, and then I enter the history of art - this is a good way to go to work in the same museum after release. When I acted, I, in general, had no idea.

Tamara Lyalenkova : Well, thus, it was possible to avoid another disappointment, which usually occurs after graduation when they go to work.

In general, this is a common, not only Russian trend, when a certain number of students are leaving the first, second courses. It’s just that universities do not really like to talk about it, because these are budget places that can cut. Alexander Grigoryevich, maybe this is such a normal situation? Maybe the peak of emotional, intellectual development is now in school age, and then interest in knowledge fades away?

Alexander Asmolov : Our development is a movement in peaks. It occurs when you hit you about three, at 30, 70. You have a movement between different peaks all the time, not only at school. I love to repeat

We are today in a situation of great mutations

That the life path of each of us is the history of rejected alternatives. And in this sense, see what our two colleagues had. The magical thing is visiting circles in the museum and classes of radio engineers on the Sparrow Hills. We are faced with the fact that a unique development driver is the education where you are motivated. It was called extracurricular or additional, and I would call it a personal education. And this is the most important thing - an education where the choice of itself is going on, and it pierces all his life.

Who is a successful specialist today? This is one who happily relies on uncertainty and makes uncertainty in the literal sense of the condition for being and himself and making decisions. Therefore, the fact that they solved the tasks of a kind there and there-this school of vague tasks gave a very, very much. We are present, when they do not just leave universities, are not just disappointed, they, like Alice, dive into this hole and see the world inverted, go into a portal of another reality. We are today in a situation of great mutations, this must be understood.

Tamara Lyalenkova : And for this you need to be prepared for those guys who are now giving their documents to a particular university. They will encounter these problems.