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.
At the end of the 1980s, the countries which freed themselves from Soviet authority faced the challenge of reforming educational policy that had until then rested on communist principles. Now, they had to develop a society open to democracy and capable of establishing and maintaining it. The expected breakthrough, however, has not happened.
Four main challenges still lay ahead of the Bulgarian education system: 1) autonomy; 2) flexibility and choice; 3) involvement; and 4) practical skills. One way to look at these issues is to investigate the income distribution in the country.
The Estonian education system maintained its peculiarity during the Soviet occupation – teaching was in Estonian, the atmosphere in schools derived from progressive ideas and democracy, textbooks were by Estonian authors, and teaching arts, music, and foreign languages were given a great emphasis.
According to the latest research by Aasvee & Minossenko, less than 20 percent of Estonian children move as much as the World Health Organization advises, which is at least one hour a day. A major challenge is to find ways to increase children’s physical activity.
Tertiary education in the Czech Republic has a been a tradition for more than 600 years. In 1348, Charles University in Prague was founded as one of the oldest universities in Europe. Having an excellent reputation for centuries, the sector has been facing a significant drop in international university rankings.
We proudly present you a collection of articles and analyses devoted to (first and foremost) the sharing economy and secondly, to the digital challenges our region faces. Because as the fictional but nonetheless real Ayn Rand once said, “If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn”. And, after all, sharing is caring, right?
A populist in a democracy has to attract support first by continuously emphasizing threats, such as terrorism – and offering himself as an effective strongman. An authoritarian leader can enforce this sentiment from above, only using threats as a justification (or even posing a threat himself).
What if I told you that the poorest EU member state is a country in which economic populism is more often the rule of a thumb, rather than an exception? Would that surprise you, or would you think it is a fate just deserved by both the Bulgarian public and its government?
