Being a Leader on the 21st Century Global Education Market
April 12, 2017, Room 327-K, М-20, HSE, Moscow, Russia
List of speakers

Today, any national education system must learn to survive in conditions when its consumer is a global customer. Each country should understand what niche it can occupy in the global education market and how the educational system can contribute to its welfare.

Every national education system that ensures the country's competitiveness on the international arena of the 21st century must find its niche in the global educational process and aim to form creative and unique personalities. Such a conclusion was made by the participants in the round table, titled “Education: How to Secure the Country’s Success Amid Global Stratification,” which was held as part of the HSE XVIII April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development.

The round table participants then discussed the Future Preparedness Index, a joint project of the Valdai Discussion Club and the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), which was presented at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Club last year. Yulia Baskakova, Director of VTsIOM research projects, said that the project’s goal is to determine the directions and aspects of state policy, to which Russia needs to be oriented today in order to remain among the leaders of the world competition in 10-20 years. This task is not simple and requires a creative approach, said Andrey Bystritskiy, Chairman of the Board of the Foundation for Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club. In today’s turbulent world, preparedness for the future comes in different types: being open and technologically advanced can have its downsides, and a country like North Korea is in a sense better prepared to respond to the challenges it faces, because its population can be mobilized more easily. But in the case of more mainstream scenarios, it is clear that adaptation of education to new market needs must be among government policy priorities.

In order to answer the question of what education system a country should have if it wants to be prepared for the future, it is necessary to understand what kind of person the future economy needs, participants in the discussion said. According to them, the key words here are uniqueness and creativity. As Evgeny Kuznetsov, member of the Expert Council of the Government of the Russian Federation, noted, while the classical education of the industrial era was aimed at creating similar people capable of carrying out similar tasks on an industrial scale, as robotization advances, there is a need to make all people different.

Kuznetsov drew attention to the fact that uniqueness and diversity have become the most important values of the world technological leaders. A good example is the Silicon Valley. According to him, 46% of start-ups there are established by migrants (mostly in the first generation), who arrived mainly from countries where they experience some kind of pressure and restrictions on the application of their talents. But this is not only an issue of the ethnic origin, a typical representative of the Valley is a geek, or abnormal in a sense. In other words, in the Valley “abnormality” becomes the norm and an expression of uniqueness.

Experts agreed that uniqueness should begin to take shape from an early age. Igor Remorenko, Provost of the Moscow City University, mentioned a study of strengths and weaknesses of the Russian pre-school education, the goal of which was to find out how the pre-school environment contributes to the development of a child. It turned out that Russian kindergartens look decent in comparison with other countries in terms of hygiene and discipline, and worse in terms of initiative and acceptance of diversity.

Development of uniqueness should continue throughout the lifetime, scholars working on the Future Preparedness Index noted. Therefore, one of the key features of the future education is its continuity. As Yulia Baskakova said, in Russia, 20% of the population is already engaged in improving education, with the majority being young people, advanced and interested in increasing their competitiveness. This seemingly good news can have a downside, namely, the brain drain. “We teach people for free and they later bring money to the global economy,” Kuznetsov said. According to him, the better we teach people, the bigger is the risk that they will go abroad, where continuing education and making a career is in many ways cheaper. Therefore, the creation of a system for attracting and retaining talent is a priority.

This is not only an issue of providing economic incentives to return talented specialists to their homeland, not to mention prohibitive measures. According to Kuznetsov, today any national education system must learn to survive in conditions when its consumer is a global customer. Each country should understand what niche it can occupy in the global education market and how the educational system can contribute to its welfare. The United Kingdom was the first to follow this path. First, it abolished education subsidies and its cost increased several times, and then it found its role in transferring talented Indians and Pakistanis to the United States. For these people, British education is the first step toward a successful career. Thanks to this, the British education system has become a more profitable industry than advertising and pharmaceuticals.

The global nature of education is a factor that must be taken into account when developing educational strategies. Humanity has become global, Kuznetsov said, and industrial tasks are formulated in such a way that no country can carry them out for merely quantitative reasons, be it the creation of a pool of narrow profile specialists or the buildup of an industrial base. Hence, the importance of various global ratings that allow for an application of uniform criteria of the quality of education in different countries. They include the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, and the ECERS-R scale, which was used for the abovementioned study of the quality of pre-school education. In a global world, the development of personal uniqueness will be assessed according to unified standards, and this is also a reality and a challenge of our time.