The kindergarten and primary school that my children attend are next to each other. Opposite the school buildings, there is a huge plot of land which belongs to the municipality and is usually used as a parking area for the school staff, parents during the arrival and departure of the students, as well as the neighbors. In short, this space mainly serves an audience that is indirectly or directly involved with the school units I mentioned above.
In the context of a modern concept of the school that has been envisioned and successively implemented by all the governments of the last decades, this space is used, in addition to parking, for educational purposes. For example, when it rains, children have a little Venice outside their yard, and even the monotonous routine of daily arrival and departure takes on a tone of adventure and strong doses of survival lessons under adverse conditions. Experientially, children come into contact with phenomena such as floods in the winter and sand dunes in the summer! They get a dose of basic education of the Greek schools and then, with energy and a lot of zeal, they enter the reality of the Greek school!
I imagine that this is how the Prime Minister would describe the Greek public school. After today's announcements on the occasion of the intention to create a legislative framework for the operation of private universities, but also the reformulation of his will to make the public school modern, innovative and competitive at an international level.
"We have a lot of work to do in our schools to implement the legislative framework that we have voted for, to make them more creative, more in tune with modern technology, to put interactive whiteboards in all schools, with quality content, to strengthen and to implement the new curricula, the multiple book. I believe that the next four years will be four years of a real revolution in the way our schools operate."
Eeeee!!!!! Brrrrrrrrr!!! Where are you going, Karamitro! What does this guy say? What schools is he talking about? Where will he put an interactive board? I wonder, has he entered school? Public; Greek; In these, where half the teaching staff is hired in September, October and fired in June and who during their work makes the tourist from one school to another to cover holes. Where teachers and professors do not have their own office and technological support to organize and prepare their work. Where many students take lessons in isoboxes. In schools so unsightly and dysfunctional that they cause depression and disgust. In these schools, the interactive whiteboard sounds like an authentic Matisse in vintage tweed!
Of course, he also talked about technical and professional education.
"There we have many steps ahead of us to take. Very important infrastructure work has been done in the last four years. It is very important to convince young children, as well as their families, that there are many paths to success in life and that it does not necessarily go through a degree from a Higher Education Institution. The upgrading of technical education at all levels is a personal bet of mine and I believe that we can, indeed, by strengthening this public education at all levels, give not only different professional perspectives, but also the dignity of dealing with a subject which for reasons of social stereotypes in our country might not have received the recognition it should have".
And I understand, as you do I imagine, that the child, our Prime Minister, is at odds with reality. "Um, what did you expect?" someone will tell me. “What reality? Here half of Greece is burning, and the Prime Minister announces his initiative for the establishment of Private Universities". And what about private universities, huh? Not anything in the series. On the contrary!
"We are now ready to file a comprehensive legislative initiative that will enable the establishment of non-state universities in our country as well, but with very high standards - we are not going to make any discounts there," the Prime Minister said on Thursday. No discount, ya hear? No, don't say that he will turn the IEK and private colleges into universities, like the Cypriots did. Of course not. Here our private universities will be of high standards.
I wonder, how will he achieve this goal? Will branches of foreign universities of recognized prestige be established in Greece? For example, will Harvard, Yale or Cambridge, INSEAD and others come to Greece? Or are these new universities that will be established from scratch and will operate for the first time? In the first case, why would Harvard do such a thing? He won't do it. Anyone who wants to go to Harvard goes to Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the other hand, a new university that is being set up from scratch, how high standards can it have? I say this because the specifications are proportional to the educational staff, the infrastructure, the research project and so on. To achieve this, resources and a lot of capital are needed. The cost of establishing and running a really good university is very high. Now tell me, how do private universities in the US accomplish this? First of all, we are talking about another "market", a huge one. American universities appeal to applicants from all over the world and secondly, their universities have decades of history. Since I mentioned Harvard repeatedly, here are some useful facts about its funding.
To achieve 79% of its funding, Harvard relied on a highly successful track record over time. Only 21% comes from tuition. All the rest are the result of a successful course over time. The Harvards of the world, have not been founded in the logic of a commercial enterprise, but as a cradle for the promotion of knowledge and scientific research. Does this vision really require private universities?
And why should we follow the example of the USA and not the rest of the world's universities, the vast majority of which are public?
Of course, Mr Kyriakos Mitsotakis he pointed out that "supporting the public university is a given priority of the government and now we are precisely in the period when we are implementing the legislative framework, the law - framework passed by the previous leadership of the Ministry of Education, with universities that will be open to society, towards the business world, with extroversion, universities which will give degrees with real value".
My question is, since the support to the public university is a given, why is there no effort to improve them, instead they need to be established privately? Really, what is the need that the private universities cover that the public ones fail to cover? I am very afraid, that this is another big fiasco, an industry of graduates of the bad hour, who will come to join those of the public universities. Don't be under any illusions, the vast majority of public universities also produce such graduates: at a bad time. And how else could it be, since the paper is an end in itself, and not knowledge.
The problem with education and literacy in Greece is not the lack of universities. The problem is the absence of a social vision for education itself. We have not adequately assessed where we are, where we want to go and how we are going to get there. No, the government is not concerned with this. She is concerned with the possibility of establishing private universities.
Mariori has everything, she just misses her feretzes!
*Frontpage picture: pinterest
