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THE PROBLEMS OF SECONDARY AND HIGHER SCHOOL EDUCATION CONTINUITY
I.V. Gordeeva
When the continuity of secondary and higher school education is mentioned, it is the continuity of unified state requirements concerning the training level of general educational institution graduates that is presumed first of all. Any continuity in education manifests itself in the following things: (a) provision of systemic knowledge; (b) further development of training forms, key methods and content; (c) anticipatory upbringing and education that foster shaping and improvement of a person.
Nevertheless, it is no secret that the basic knowledge level of a significant share of Russian secondary school graduates is not up to the higher educational institutions' requirements concerning potential applicants. Contrary to popular belief, this problem was not engendered by the recent educational system reforms alone. Thirty to thirty five years ago, specialty lecture courses in many universities were started with the phrase: "Forget everything you were taught at school". It was said in order to emphasize the discrepancy between educational curricula and the requirements posed by high educational institutions in respect of the extent of students' knowledge. Another possible case of such a disparagement towards the knowledge learned within the framework of secondary school is university professors' somewhat arrogant and condescending opinion of their "junior" colleagues who are allegedly unable to assess in full measure all the volume of scientific information which one must take on board in order to teach at the appropriate quality level.
If we broach the problems of secondary and higher school education at present, we have to state acrimoniously that the situation did not improve in any way; on the contrary, it continues to deteriorate, in spite of the efforts made in order to form a unified continuous education pattern. The point is not only the low level of educational instructions, but also gaps in students' knowledge requiring the organization of remedial studies. Higher school instructors quite justifiably censure the fact that most first year students have poor intellectual labor and independent work skills, they are poorly prepared for active cognitive work and unable either to think critically and evaluate the obtained information rationally, or to communicate their thoughts logically and competently. It should be noted that claims similar to those listed above are often raised by the employers against higher educational institution graduates; this is another confirmation of the gravity of the described problem. The analysis of the causes of dissolution of continuity between secondary and higher education allows one to elicit several key points.
Firstly, there are significant conceptual differences in the structure of various education levels, resulting in poor compatibility of general education curriculums with vocational education curriculums. Many textbooks for general education schools cause just censure and claims - not so much because of the quality of the material they contain (in spite of the fact that problems are possible here as well,
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from misprint to manifest distortion of facts) as because of their dissimilarity, resulting in a total difference of their structures and content, in spite of their formal conformity to the curricula. This results in situations when students attending different schools learn the same parts of some disciplines at various grades, and in an absolutely different sequence, sometimes without any logical connection between subjects. For instance, the chemical composition of a cell in a school course of biology is learned long before students begin to familiarize themselves with compound organic matters in chemistry lessons; therefore the concepts of "proteins", "lipids" and "hydrocarbons" hold little information for secondary school students.
Secondly, the fact that school curricula contain a lot of excessive information that quickly becomes obsolete is still a serious problem. Tremendous amounts of information recounted in classes and requiring the same amounts of homework causes rejection and unwillingness to assimilate anything at all, because of manifest noncompliance between the subject knowledge requirements posed by the teachers and the students' actual potential. At the same time, specialized classes where only some disciplines that are necessary for matriculation to higher educational institutions of a certain specialty, do not solve the problem either. As a matter of fact, most potential university students only know what disciplines are counted in the process of enrolling in a specific department of a specific higher educational institution, but have no idea of the complete curriculum of the specialty of their choice. As a result, a student of food industry biotechnologies, newly enrolled on the basis of chemistry test results, is surprised to learn that during the first year of studies he or she is to learn biology, physics and other subjects that were not duly attended at school. As a consequence, quite often during the first year of studies professors have to fill gaps in the knowledge of a significant part of their classes.
Thirdly, when secondary school graduates are enrolled into higher educational institutions, they have no experience of working under new circumstances. School classes and university lectures and seminars differ not only in duration but in the requirements posed by teaching staff. The absence of total control and constant homework checking at university not only stimulates independence and responsibility; it also engenders an illusion of complete liberty, inter alia from going to classes with a view to "bluff it out somehow at exams". However, the practice of points-and-rating knowledge evaluation that is used at present at many higher educational institutions does not permit such students to be allowed to take the respective examinations. This brings about a lot of dramatic situations when students find out that old habit of their school days "to liquidate academic arrears and do away with bad marks towards the end of the term" does not work in the new situation, leaving the student completely perplexed. It is a manifest contradiction between the students' status and their preparedness for studying under new conditions.
Thus, we can state that the efficiency of interaction between secondary school and higher school education depends mainly on the solution of the problem of the academic activities’ compatibility at secondary and higher educational institutions, in particular: (a) coordination between the curricula and workbooks used by secondary school students and the content of higher educational
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institutions’ curriculums and workbooks (the main focus should not be directed at "filling them with information" that is often surplus and abstract, but teaching how to work with it, to find out the main content and to evaluate the obtained data critically); (b) ensuring an efficient control of secondary school students' educational levels, and their degree of preparedness for studying at a higher educational institution; (c) studying the possibility of implementing various forms of cooperation between secondary and higher educational institutions (joint research work, participation in scientific conferences on the university and school basis), reading exhibition lectures , holding tutorials and training sessions for secondary school students by higher educational institutions teaching staff; (d) determining connections between the content, organizational forms and methods of studying at general secondary educational institutions and higher educational institutions.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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