Last spring, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the improvement of the higher education system, the aim of which is to qualitatively improve the process of personnel training for the long-term needs of various sectors of the national economy. One of the six participants of the pilot project was the Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University, whose first-year students are already studying under the new curricula as part of the transition to basic higher engineering education.
Forpost decided to find out what specific changes have taken place in them and whether the country has really started to abandon the two-level system imposed on us by the West in its time. By the way, the Europeans themselves put a peculiar point in the discussion about the timeliness and relevance of this step. In March, they adopted the so-called "Blueprint for European Degree", which was directly related to an attempt to correct the obvious shortcomings of the Bologna process. It is no secret that they were provoked to this decision not only by the widespread decline in the quality of technical education, but also by the start of a pilot project in Russia.
Some postulates of the innovations proposed by the European Commission almost mirror the model implemented at Mining University today. These include closer integration with employers, obtaining additional competencies, and the principle of cross-curricular education.
All young men and women enrolled in the 1st year of the oldest technical university of our country study according to the unified curriculum. This is the "Core" of higher engineering education, the mastering of which takes the first 4 semesters. Within its framework students study a module of 13 general education and 12 general technical disciplines, including the program "Basic Scientific Competence".
Each study group, and the university administration emphasizes this, is assigned a pedagogical mentor, i.e. a supervisor with extended powers. His/her task is to help young people adapt to a new academic environment, to assist in the development of their creative potential, as well as moral education of the mentees, which is one of the cornerstone pillars of education in general.
At the end of the 4th semester, students obtain certificates of mastering the "Core", after which, if they wish, they can change their previously chosen training profile. This initiative is connected with the fact that at the end of the second year the students are undoubtedly able to make a more motivated choice than immediately after graduation. Then, starting from the fifth semester, they start studying disciplines in their specialty, obtaining additional professional competencies, such as familiarization with software in demand in the industry, as well as mastering the necessary practical skills.
The time allotted for their formation has been increased to 40 weeks, including pre-diploma practice (at least 10 weeks) and work as an engineer-intern (up to 8 weeks). The qualitative content of internships has also changed due to the introduction of a new format of relations between the university and its business partners. In particular, the production site, where young people gain experience, is managed by both a company representative and a university lecturer. This is no longer a supervisor, but a professional supervisor who replaces him in the 3rd year, coordinating all the work of students in terms of acquiring skills and experience.
The requirements to the content of the final qualification work have also been changed. Its defense is now conducted in three sections: technological, economic and scientific, and is held on separate councils. The participation of a representative of the company where the student had his pre-degree internship became an obligatory condition. This, by the way, is very similar to Soviet standards, which envisioned a closer integration of higher education and the real sector of the economy.
Forpost asked Vladimir Litvinenko, Rector of St. Petersburg Mining University, about why Europe is beginning to look more and more closely at them, gradually abandoning its own ideas set out in the Bologna Declaration.
- Vladimir Stefanovich, are we really seeing a partial return to the Soviet model of education? The creation of the institute of mentoring, the increase in the period of industrial practice - all this is very similar to the times of the USSR...
Vladimir Litvinenko: The task that the President has set for us is to take the best of the Soviet experience, but not to lose the achievements of recent decades. I am sure that this symbiosis, which we are creating now within the framework of the pilot project, will allow us to achieve our goals. As for the quality of Russian and, especially, Soviet education, it has always been and still is the main object of attention for the entire world community.
The ideology of the state during the Soviet Union was aimed at educating individuals capable of creation through analog thinking. The teacher-mentor at all stages of the educational process formed in them the ability to find parallels and logical connections between different objects, phenomena or concepts. This approach developed practical thinking skills, the ability to consider and solve actual problems in detail and to evaluate them in a multifaceted way. This contributed to the effective realization of the creative potential of students, increased their communicative abilities, both at the professional and personal level, instilled interest in reading, allowed to properly manage emotions. As a result, they began to make more thoughtful decisions, relying, among other things, on their own opinion, which made their lives more vivid and lively.
- Are today's applicants different from their peers of 30 years ago?
Vladimir Litvinenko: Based on the results of the first session, we conducted a detailed analysis of the underlying problems of school and higher education. It should be noted that our first-year students - participants of the pilot project, and there are more than 2 thousand of them, had a relatively high USE score, and mostly were enrolled in the educational program of higher engineering education (six years of study - ed.) on the first priority. That is, these are students with a level of school education above average.
At the same time, many of them do not formulate their thoughts well, cannot express them clearly in oral or written form, cannot relay clearly what they have seen or heard. Some students do not feel themselves a subject in their destiny, i.e. they do not set clear goals, are not ready to resist external pressure. Gadgets, tablet school education has numbed them to write, to think. They expect from the teacher variants of the right answer and often can not think abstractly. As a result, a pedagogical mentor - a supervisor, who actively participates in the work on adaptation of a former student of a secondary school to new requirements and a new environment for him, has to deal with the elimination of gaps in school education.
Such gaps are the result of the bias in the methodology of our school education towards the development of digital thinking in children and adolescents. In my opinion, higher engineering school is a hostage of digital thinking of our applicants. Fundamental knowledge in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and in general, the idea of the world around us, should be laid down in young people not within the walls of the university, but much earlier.
Critical functions of consciousness, such as "I believe", "I suppose", are limited due to low speech activity and the transition to a test-based system of residual knowledge assessment. This, by the way, is not as simple a problem as we think. We at the university also use tests, but they are preceded by an admission procedure, which allows the teacher to get all the necessary information about the depth of knowledge of a student in a particular discipline.
The test system itself requires serious changes. Its main task is to determine a set threshold of requirements, not the level of mastery of a subject or topic, which is what we should strive for. Digital thinking is a world of scientific creativity and a world of exact copies, not likenesses; artificial intelligence is a program, not a mind. Education must return to analog thinking if there is to be any hope of a renaissance of creators.
- The main complaint about the Bologna process was that it was not focused on training highly qualified engineering specialists. It seems that Europe itself also realized this. At least, this is the conclusion one can draw if we analyze the new initiative of the European Commission: the "European Diploma Program"...
Vladimir Litvinenko: It is obvious that the European Commission envisages a bias of European education towards the engineering component. At the same time, all EU stakeholders are well aware that such an ambitious plan will face a shortage of qualified teachers who can not only impart theoretical knowledge to students through lectures, but also reinforce it through personal industrial experience.
Such an educator must have the skills of a mentor and be able to put them into practice, putting into practice an ideology focused on self-realization in the productive sector. For this purpose, the European Commission envisages improvement of the legal and administrative framework, improving the mechanisms of quality assurance and attractiveness of careers both in higher education and at work. The program itself will represent new financial instruments to support the implementation of the European Diploma.
"Forpost will soon continue to publish materials dedicated to the modernization of Russia's higher education system.