Education as a Way of Life

Every year on September 1 we get into a festive mood as children go back to school, and students to colleges, institutes, and universities after the summer vacations. On this day, many feel an inner tension, wondering whether they have made the right choice. The reason is that the Russian system of education has over the last decade offered numerous and diverse forms of study the contents of which were not always clear

Confronted with a deluge of information, every young person making an intelligent choice of a future career seeks for themselves an educa­tional niche that would help them keep afloat in the stormy sea of information.

More and more young Russians have been going abroad every year to get a higher educa­tion. Do they always make the correct decision? Does our system of higher education lag so far behind that of the West?

We put these and some other questions to Academician and Professor Natalya Nesterova, rector of the Natalya Nesterova University, one of the oldest and best known private institutions of higher learning in Russia.

It became known recently that your grad­uates get diplomas recognized in the United States. Could you elaborate on this?

We have a special accord with an indepen­dent U.S. expert organization that determines whether our education meets American require­ments. In a few days’ time we expect to receive the first batch of certificates from them to be awarded to this year’s graduates. This will en­able our students to find worthy employment abroad if they wish. But the main reason why we agreed to have our study program examined by a U.S. commission of experts is to enhance the prestige of Russia’s system of higher educa­tion, seeking its recognition in other countries. We are now negotiating on this issue with some advanced European nations. Thus, we insist that our universities are not necessarily inferior to their overseas counterparts, that education in Russia is one of the best in the world.

As far as I know, your university uses the latest Western instructional methods. To what extent do you rely on the traditions of the Russian school of higher learning?

Ten years ago, when we set out to elaborate the concept of the university, we paid special at­tention to the «silver age» of Russian education – the early 20^th century. That was a time when the A.A. Shanyavsky University, the V.M. Bekhterev Institute, and the Bestuzhev Higher Cours­es maintained that the chief goal of higher edu­cation was to mold well-educated personalities with a wide mental grasp. And so Russian intel­lectuals strove to overcome the conventionalism and banality of the higher school, which had tra­ditionally aimed at training white-collar workers and functionaries.

Far from rejecting the achievements of Sovi­et pedagogics, we try to make maximum use of the positive experience of those years. But we do feel that we are inheritors of A.A. Shanyavsky’s traditions. That is why our curricula, es­pecially for the first and second years of study, include many disciplines that go to mold the in­tellectual of today.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1075