INESS has recently presented its views on the steps necessary to reform the education system in Slovakia in the study titled The Separation of education and politics. The proposal does not consist of prescription of exact content and form of education.
The study puts forward institutional conditions favorable for generating new solutions/methods/approaches/curriculum to an ever-changing society. The Slovak educational system does not need the exact answer – mythical ‘best solutions’, written by the best experts at the Ministry of education; rather, it needs an algorithm for generating correct answers in a fast-changing environment. So far, the best-established algorithm for generating innovations, order, and progress is the market mechanism or, as we call it: the decentralized model of reforms. Basic description of the differences between the two institutional setups are described in the table bleow.
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Centralized Model |
Decentralized Model |
|
|
Preparation of the reform |
Lasts for decades, requires long discussions. |
Lasts for months/years, require ideas of small group. |
|
Implementation of the reform |
Only one ongoing reform can be present at given time. |
Hundreds of parallel reforms can be present at given time. |
|
Feedback |
Evaluation takes years, no simple interpretation of the results. |
Evaluation is faster, easier to interpret. |
|
People involved |
Responsible individuals do not bear the costs of decision |
Responsible individuals do bear the costs of the decision. |
The proposal does not suggest that all current rules and regulations of the educational system should bediscarded. It suggests voluntary principle, where actors in any part of the educational process can decide whether to accept prescribed principles or not. If there should be some evaluation of educational outcome, it should be based on evaluation of skills.
The full proposal is available here (in Slovak).
