Opening/Closing Remarks at a
Meeting of the Council for Science, Technology and Education
Held on October 15, 2008, The Kremlin, Moscow
Source: Kremlin.ru

(Opening Remarks)

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon, colleagues,

This is the first meeting of the Council for Science, Technology and Education in its new membership. Also present here today are invited colleagues: teachers, experts, representatives of the regional authorities and members of public school councils. We are meeting in this format because systemic change in schools is the issue on the agenda today, and this is something that concerns practically everyone in our country and is one of the key elements of our national development.

I think that our meeting needs not only to produce theoretical justifications but also practical results that are directly tied to the needs of those for the sake of whom we have come together today.

There are several questions we need to answer.

First is that we need to decide what is genuinely relevant for ensuring a high quality and new content of education in our schools. This is something we come back to regularly, and this is perfectly natural, because changes of a systemic nature take place in education practically every 10-15 years, and you know this as well as I do.

The second question, which follows on from the first, is what kind of schools do we need in the future, and what demands should we make of these schools? Finally, if we have settled on the kind of schools we need, what steps do we need to take to implement this model in practice?

Public opinion surveys show that around 70 percent of Russian citizens say that changes are necessary in our schools. More than half think the quality of education is declining, and the same number say that inequality in the education system is increasing. These are worrying figures.

I do not want to agree with them immediately, because impressions are always subjective, but the fact that these figures are rising is a worrying sign.

We currently have 13.7 million people studying in general education establishments throughout the country. This is a huge figure a tenth of our population. Of the almost 60,000 schools in our country two thirds are in rural areas. I will not give further figures now. All of you here know the situation rural schools face, the problems with central water supply, sewerage and so on.

They face serious problems. Around 18,000 schools are in need of complete overhaul, and around 1,000 schools are in a seriously dilapidated state and require urgent measures. This is something we will come back to.

You all know that our education system has been going through constant change over the last two decades. This is partly due to the fact that previously there was not so much reform (during the Soviet years). The urge to reform emerged after the formation of a new state. I do not think this is something bad in itself, but the results vary greatly.

Schools went through several waves of reform until finally, at the start of the decade, in 2001, a long-term education modernisation strategy was adopted for the period through to 2010, and in 2004 development priorities for the country's education system were drawn up. This created a foundation for work for the future.

I think the Education National Project has been a good idea (this is something I worked on personally and I head the Council for National Projects now). In any event, it has enabled us to give impetus to work in a number of different areas, and this is already a good thing. As I have said before, yes, these are only fragments of the whole, but they are very important fragments. Programmes such as the Class Director, Best Teacher, Innovative Schools, Talented Youth, Internet, Teaching Equipment, School Canteen, and Village School Bus programmes have all produced results without a doubt. These are all needed programmes because previously the situation had reached critical point. It is important too that along with these programme's implementation a new system for controlling expenditure was put in place. Of course, all sorts of problems came up during the implementation of these programmes, but the mechanism we created enabled us to make rapid decisions to resolve them. I think this is all valuable experience we can build on. I call on all of you in this respect. In itself, I think this experience has been quite good.

One of the basic issues to address is that of providing a healthy and comfortable environment for school pupils. This covers a wide range of areas including design and construction standards for school buildings, modern equipment, good quality food for school pupils, and finally, creating a modern, open and creative learning environment.

Much has been said already now about schoolchildren's health as one of the biggest problems we need to address. We heard some sad figures yesterday at the meeting of the Council for Sport and the State Council Presidium. Unfortunately, this is a problem we still need to address today.

The results of routine health checkups at national level show that the 10-17 age group is in a critical situation as far as their health is concerned. Clearly we need to develop the medical assistance system and create normal conditions for physical education and sport, because the situation in this area worsened greatly in the 1990s. Of course, we also need to reflect on how best to distribute the burden in school.

Colleagues, you all know that teachers' main task is to teach children how to learn, how to obtain knowledge. This is an age of ongoing and independent education. It is equally important to develop normal creative thinking and give pupils a sense of self-confidence and confidence in their abilities. These are also issues we can discuss today.

We need to provide incentives for the work of teachers (this is a subject we will also discuss separately) and also attract into schools specialists from other fields, who have higher education and an aptitude for teaching work. I am sure that graduates of our various universities, including universities giving a classical education, have much to offer schools, but for this we need to make the prospect of working in schools attractive and not off-putting.

This is not easy. Different solutions can be envisaged. I think the situation is most complicated in the cities. In the rural areas it is perhaps easier to resolve this problem because the rural schools offer a basic package of benefits that could attract young specialists.

What conclusions can we draw? First, we really do need to help schools with their human resources, and aside from the human resources issue we also need to support schools in developing areas such as remote technology for distance learning. We also need to create the possibilities for independent and modern education. I think that we need to work on developing various areas in schools, but we must not forget about fields such as maths and science, fields in which we have long excelled, and which create opportunities and lay the foundations for our country's development. We should not forget President Kennedy's often quoted words about how the USA lost the space race to Russia in the classroom.

We will discuss all of the different points I have raised. I think this meeting will help us to define our priorities. I hope that some of them, the priorities in the key areas, will be set out too in the Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, which will take place soon.

(Closing remarks)

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Colleagues,

I would like to briefly sum up the results of today's meeting. I first want to say a few words about several of the ideas put forward today that I think deserve support.

Two such proposals came from Viktor Antonovich Sadovnichy [Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Rector of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University] regarding a coordination council and the idea of declaring 2010 Teachers' Year. I see no problems with either of these proposals. Teachers' Year is a good idea in general, and most importantly of all, it should go hand in hand with a real change in teachers' status and a real increase in opportunities. So, if we take up this proposal, we must make sure that it is not just an empty event without real substance. I will issue an instruction accordingly.

There was a proposal (I think it came from Natalia Vladimirovna Kamenkova [a teacher from Chelyabinsk Region] about having teachers do a year as an intern. This is an interesting proposal. I am not sure how feasible it is in terms of the current rules the Education Ministry follows on work placement and the arrival of new graduates in schools. We should examine this proposal. There might be something good in it, at any event, the opportunity for graduates to really test themselves and see if teaching in schools is what they want to do, because this is perhaps the biggest problem.

Svetlana Yevgenyevna Smolentseva [a teacher from the Republic of Chuvashia] said that there is a shortage of qualified professionals in schools. This is something that everyone has spoken about. We need to ensure that specialists from various fields enter school teaching. The trendy word 'loser' also sounded today.

Our job is to make sure that teachers are not seen as losers. How can we do this? Money is not the whole solution. After all, when a graduate from a teacher's college, and even more so from a classical university decides to take up school teaching this is not at all an easy choice.

Whether there is an internship period preceding the decision or something else, this decision is one that people take fully aware that teaching is a difficult and not very profitable profession, a profession that saw its prestige fall drastically during the 1990s. I think therefore that one of our goals must be to raise the prestige and popularity of teaching as a profession. I mean making it more popular, using the media and literature to help achieve this goal. Teaching is one of the most respected professions in the world, and it really is a vocation. I think that this is an area we also most work on.

Regarding the dual-level USE (Unified State Exam) system, the minister just informed me that this issue was examined at the collegium meeting today, if I understood correctly. I ask that this work continue.

Zhores Ivanovich Alfyorov, [State Duma deputy, Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize winner] raised the issue of rural schools. This really is a very big area for work and we realise what difficulties many of these schools face and what lack of resources they are dealing with. But strange though it may seem, it is sometimes easier to attract people into working in rural schools than in the city schools because if you go to work in a rural school you stand a good chance of getting housing, and this is not as expensive relevant to the conditions in the corresponding locations.
Schools in the cities, and even less so in the capitals, offer no such opportunity. In this sense, developing rural schools should be one of our priorities. In general, as I said already today, we really need to put in place new approaches to reconstruction and construction of schools too. They are all so different at the moment.

I was in the Moscow Region yesterday and took a walk around a schoolyard. It was really a very fine school indeed, a real pleasure to see, but when you see a school like that you realise what a miserable state most of the others are in. We need different schools, but there should be a common set of educational and consumer standards too. I think it would be good to look at measures whereby if businesses spend money on construction of schools and engineering infrastructure this could be counted as expenditure for profit tax calculation purposes. This would be a support measure we could use. This would require instructions from the Finance Ministry.

The last thing I want to say is that we are all working on developing the schools of the future. We need to remember that the future starts now and not in 2020. If we always put things off until the future we will have nothing of any worth in 2020 either. Concrete work and concrete instructions need to be carried out today. But this does not mean that we should not also be looking ahead. The initiative we formulated and discussed here today, the idea for a new school, is a good idea overall, but it should be implemented alongside our routine business. We have no need for projects that are not accompanied by concrete work, and so we should continue carrying out the national project and at the same time drawing up this new initiative.

I will continue the discussions on this subject in another format at the meeting of the Council for National Projects, which will take place at the start of November. I ask all you who have an interest in a detailed discussion of this issue to present your proposals to the Council for Science. We will continue work on the national projects. I say once again that this is probably one of the most successful examples of work in recent times.

Finally, before we leave, I would like to congratulate some of our colleagues on their birthdays. It is Andrey Gennadyevich Lisitsyn-Svetlanov's [Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for State and Law] birthday today, and we congratulate you most sincerely. It is also Alexander Oganovich Chubaryan's [Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for World History] birthday.

I did not give him the floor today but will do so next time. His birthday was yesterday. We congratulate you too.