Is it necessary to reduce the number of subjects in school: the opinion of the educational ombudsman
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Education ombudsman Serhiy Gorbachev commented on the possibility of reducing the number of school subjects. He stated that it is not necessary to care about subjects, but about the level of education and the quality of knowledge. “Recently, the topic of the number of school “subjects” has been the subject of heated discussions in society and in the educational community. Moreover, this discussion, from the presentation of not very competent or clearly interested persons, is manipulatively translated into the direction of “what subjects do you want to deprive our children of,” he wrote Gorbachev. He believes that a school “subject” is a somewhat artificially isolated part of the content of education in the interests of organizing the educational process. “The short answer is that we should not care about “subjects”, but about the level of education of our children. And these are related, but far from identical things. For us, the main thing should not be “subjects”, but what knowledge and competences our children will get as a result of getting an education. And here there can be a lot of variations – depending on the requests and needs of our children,” wrote Gorbachev. Photo: oksun70/Depositphotos The Ombudsman noted that the set of items is very different in different countries, but Ukraine has the most of them. “And, if you look at the whole, Ukraine, unfortunately, has one of the dubious first places in terms of the number of “subjects”. And at the same time, we have quite mediocre, not to use more unpleasant definitions, results in terms of the quality of education: it is enough to look at the results of the international PISA study,” the ombudsman writes. According to the 2018 PISA study, Ukrainian students showed lower average results in reading, mathematics and science than students in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Estonia and Poland, and higher than students in Georgia and Moldova.About 3% of students in Ukraine performed at their best in reading, i.e. reached levels 5 or 6 on the PISA scale with reading (9% of such students on average in OECD countries). 74% of Ukrainian students achieved at least level 2 or higher on the PISA reading scale (on average 77% of students achieved level 2 or higher in OECD countries). About 64% of our students achieved level 2 or higher according to the PISA scale in mathematics (compared to 76% of OECD students), Serhiy Gorbachev proposes reformatting the content of education – many educators will have to resolutely update their skills and methodical approaches, master new teaching methods, seriously retrain. According to Gorbachev, “this is not to everyone’s liking”, that is why there is opposition. “But we will still have to do it, no matter how much resistance we overcome to renewing education. Because children need to be taught what they really need in life. And teach with interest: so that school is the place where the child wants and will go with desire, so that to develop and acquire new knowledge. This knowledge and the ability to use it (it’s called competence) that a person needs in real life: not only as an adult, sometime later, but here and now,” added Gorbachev. It will be recalled that earlier the Minister of Education and Science, Oksen Lisovyi, suggested that the number of subjects in schools should be reduced. “The number of subjects at school should be rational, and it should not be increased, but reduced,” he said on the air of “Breakfast with 1+1”. On Facebook, Lisovyi added that there are various arguments “for” and “against” the reduction of subjects, and called for a discussion. According to the Law “On Education” of 2017, starting in 2027, children will be able to choose the direction in which they want to study in the senior specialized school. Lisovyi says that this should change the approach from multi-subject to a specific profile that is interesting to schoolchildren. Read also: The Minister of Education wants to simplify education for children studying in foreign and Ukrainian schools at the same time
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