Economics and finance are an inevitable part of everyday life for every individual. Economic decisions accompany us at every step: when buying products, saving money for education, retirement, or vacations, choosing a profession or a job, paying utility bills, loans, taxes, and so on. And how well-informed these decisions are directly impacts our individual and collective future.
Education is like an enormous oceanic ship where no one can change the course quickly, even if everyone can see that they are heading for an iceberg. Enough politicians have been burned in Slovakia who have taken command, announced a new course, and started turning the steering wheel, but nothing happened to the ship.
It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or “merely” mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers.
Starting in September the Polish Ministry of Education and Science will introduce a new school subject and a new school textbook. It is called ‘Historia i Teraźniejszość’ (History and the Present). The author of the book is Wojciech Roszkowski. He is a historian and a former member of European Parliament. He represented the Law and Justice (PiS).
In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.
In Slovakia, we have a long-term problem with adult education. On average, only 4.5% of adults are involved in the lifelong learning process, while the OECD average is around 11%. How to solve this problem?
Uganda became the fourth country in the world that joined Lithuania and started teaching economics using material provided in the award-winning economics textbook created by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI).
After having spent more than two hundred pages on Kantian philosophy, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and a number of obscure German Pietists, Jennifer A. Herdt hurls the reader of her newest book back into a seemingly very different present.
The Slovak education system has a number of problems but the generally low teacher salary is not one of them. Those who claim the opposite refer to an international comparison: the share of teachers’ wages in wages of university-educated people.
If I were the Minister of Education, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second when it comes to autonomous schools. They create a relatively small opposition among the interest groups in Education, they can achieve a lot in the long-term perspective.
