Russia Needs A Qualitative Leap

Slightly off the traditional new academic year rhetoric, President of Russia Mr. Dmitry Medvedev emphasized the weakness and problems that the country’s higher education currently faces along with its strenghts. According to RIA Novosti Russian news agency, he acknowledged that the Russian education system needs to be modernized to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

In an interview with the Vesti channel he said: "The situation we are in now is not as difficult as it was in the 1990s, when our teachers were being paid virtually nothing... But on the other hand, we have not yet made a qualitative leap."

He claimed that the Russian government has had some success in improving the education system, salaries have been raised, new equipment have been provided, etc. "In HEIs we have managed to create a situation where the most advanced institutions have received quite considerable allocations from the budget," he said.

The amount allocated for total education currently stands at 57 billion USD.

Discussing the Soviet education system – a subject of nostalgia among certain academics - Medvedev said it had its strengths and weaknesses.

"We understand that there were also a range of problems in the Soviet education system. Without even considering the ideological slant, which was always present, colleges were far from equal."

He said the Soviet-era discrepancy in quality between education standards in the main cities and in the provinces remains today.

"Without arguing with the thesis that we had a good education system, I believe that our goal now is to create a modern education system, worthy of Russia in the 21st Century," he said.

The president also called for students who have obtained university grants using forged paperwork to be expelled.

"We need to tackle this... Law enforcers should be involved in checking who submitted what, and punishing the culprits," he said.

Azerbaijani Ombudsperson Concerned with Education Facilities

Azerbaijani ombudsperson Ms. Elmira Suleymanova has appealed to Education Minister Mr. Misir Mardanov concerning the unacceptable conditions in some Azerbaijani schools. This is rather strange request in the oil-rich country where the authorities and the ruling Aliyev family have constantly claimed that education is a national priority.

According to Today.Az Azerbaijani news website, the Ombudsperson's Office has monitored several schools and found some of them in “emergency situation”. The schools “were unfit for the education process.”

Ms. Suleymanova informed the Minister that many schools in Shaki, Zagathala, Gabala, Devechi, Khachmaz and Siyazan need to be repaired. She asked the Minister to accelerate reconstruction and repair of the school buildings “to secure the right of children to education”.

Sulyemanova also noted the problems in the kindergartens of some regions.

Humanities to be further 'Islamized' In Iran

Iranian state news agency IRNA, via AFP, reports that Iran is set to Islamize Humanities in universities after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei charged that Western teachings make students question religion. The new campaign will surely cause further regression in Humanities related education and research in Iran.

"The Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies was tasked by the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council to revise the Human Sciences curricula," the agency said.

"In our country a large part of the syllabus... is not in line with our Iranian-Islamic culture. This calls for a revision," it quoted institute head Hamid Reza Ayatollahi as saying.

He said the body would revise the syllabus "based on the supreme leader's recommendations."
During a meeting with academics last week, Khamenei criticized human sciences taught in the Islamic republic's universities.

"If we teach a copy of what Westerners have said and written to our young people, then we are conveying to them both doubt and disbelief in Islamic principles and in our values," he said.

"Most human sciences are based on materialistic philosophies that see the human being as an animal," charged the all-powerful supreme leader.

He said he was "worried" that nearly two million students are currently majoring in human sciences.

Iranian universities are a hotbed of political activism, and suffered massive purges in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution during a 3-year “cultural revolution” aimed at Islamizing campuses and curricula. Scores of lecturers were sacked and students ejected after being perceived to be leftist or liberal.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a purge of liberal and secular academic staff in 2006, a year that saw a number of lecturers forced into early retirement from leading universities.

More Women at Turkey’s Ministry of Education

Kamilpasha, a Turkey-based blog, recently had an interesting post concerning Turkey’s first woman Minister of Education.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Mr. Erdogan, head of neo-Islamist AK Party, reshuffled his cabinet in May 2009, replacing Mr. Hüseyin Çelik with Ms. Nimet Çubukçu. Ms. Çubukçu, a lawyer, was previously minister in charge of women and family affairs and had led some efforts to improve women’s rights. She was also involved in setting up a parliamentary gender equality commission in March 2009.

According to Kamilpasha, when the new Minister came on board, she was very disturbed by the fact that women had been given no opportunities in the ministry. Of 16 general managers only one was a woman, there were no female permanent undersecretaries at all, and the number of female provincial education heads was next to none.

Now Çubukçu is about to clean house and to this end has readied a request to replace around 20 top ministry bureaucrats. Furthermore, she has announced that when positions become empty, women should be preferred candidates and when two candidates have the same qualifications, the woman should be hired.

It is rumored that former education minister Mr. Çelik, now an advisor to PM Erdogan, will try to stop her.