We are a network of 15 think tanks from CEE countries. Our members actively work to promote liberalism on a daily basis in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Georgia. We do our utmost to make a liberal perspective from our region more accessible and available both in Europe, and the world.
4liberty.eu website is a platform where experts and intellectuals representing liberal community from CEE (chiefly from our Network, but not exclusively) share their opinions and ideas. We publish topical expert articles, commentaries, and analyses on a regular basis.
4liberty.eu Review is a half-yearly journal published in English by our network. The issues are available for free both in print and in an online version. Each volume is devoted to one key topic that is analyzed from various perspectives by our contributors.
We have the pleasure to present you the sixth issue of the 4liberty.eu Review. This time, in the light of the ever-changing nature of education systems, we have decided to devote our magazine to the topic of education from the point of view of the CEE states in an attempt to provide an overview of possible solutions in this regard.
Although, as Dorothy Parker once said, “you cannot teach an old dogma new tricks”, we choose to believe that it is still possible. After all, to quote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “It is a good lesson – though it may often be a hard one – for a man (…) to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized”.
Egalitarian politicians tend to lower standards in order to make degrees available for everyone — thereby decreasing the value of those degrees. Governments might have different ideas about what education should achieve than parents.
One of the crucial problems in Slovakia – and elsewhere – is an educational system failing to adapt to the challenges of modern society. There is one ultimate reason behind it: the prevailing central planning approach has resulted in rigidity, bureaucracy, and purely formalistic requirements disconnected from the real world.
Even though there is no coordinating center and no “minister for IT,” the industry runs like clockwork. There are ever newer and better-quality products and efficiency puts downward pressure on prices. The same is true with food, cars, clothing, housing, and so on.
The current government does not care about quality of teaching or the competitiveness of Polish graduates on the European and global job markets. It wants to influence young people’s worldview and shape the party’s future electorate from the early stages of education. This dramatically illiberal agenda must be stopped and reversed.
According to the adherents of conflict theory, schools reproduce the social order and transmit the ideology of the dominant group. The education system is susceptible to political changes. Every government has its own vision of political history that gets promoted through the school system.
