I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists, since they “feel” quite mechanistic.
0. I was attending an elite gymnasium and we deliberately used old "hard science" (math, physics, chemistry) textbooks from 70'-80', because they were much more advance level than modern ones. Most of math/physics taught during first/second year at university now, was taught in 11-12th grade back then.
1. Anecdotally, but all teachers complain that every year students are getting less motivated, performing poorer, having shorter attention spans. With local "no children left behind" equivalent it's enough just to attend some percentage of classes to get passable grades.
2. Every few years some kind of "reform" is performed to reduce the difficulty of final exams to maintain failure rates at bay and keep statistics nice.
3. Combined points 1 with 2 this leads to universities full of students that have neither motivation nor skills to perform there. Since such students make up majority in most less popular programs, the difficulty level is also reduced to adapt.
4. Degrading higher level education quality reflects on its prestige as potential employees no longer trust universities to produce prospective candidates. This closes the loop back to point 1 as current pupils deem education "worthless".
5. Fun fact: entrance exams to non-prestigious universities from 70'-80' were (maybe still are) widely used as assignments in national level competitions when I was at school (late nineties to early 00'). To paraphrase that -- a skill level that once was expected from anybody who wanted to be accepted in university now puts you at the very top.
Instinctively, I tend to factor in a certains bias for "kids these days." Seems a lot of us have a tendency to think educational standards and/or kids' level of knowledge is poorer than before. That said, in the 80s/90s I had a lot of Russian school friends in my neighborhood. Even for primary school age, they had special "russian math" classes taught by a neighborhood parent in the afternoons. They basically followed the old 70s-80s curriculum that you guys are talking about. So basically, I'm convinced it's not just the codger instinct. They were 3-4 years ahead of the 3rd & 4th graders.
These days, I have a few eastern european (polish, slovak & lithuanian) friends with schoolkids of their own. They had the same view of the modern/western curriculum as my childhood friends' parents had. It's substandard. Two years ago one couple moved back to lithuania. She reckons the modern standard for math is as bad as it is here, these days.
To hazard a guess, I think that the old/soviet-ish system was very rigorous but not very enjoyable for the kids, especially below average kids. For example, it was very sequential and intolerant of a bad week. But, it probably produced a much better educated top half. Also, I think the old educational systems of the later soviet era got a lot of criticism for being too focused on math & science, with not enough creativity, humanities and such. Soviet era "liberal arts" were ideologically impacted, and I think people developed a tendency to just stay away.
But much of Eastern Europe has a strong tradition of arts and humanities, and a cultural tendency to promote it. From a purely traditional-cultural perspective, many Lithuanians would like as much art and philosophy in their kids education as French parents, the European high watermark for teenage philosophy classes. I think there was pressure to get these subjects into the system, with due respect.
Anyway, there's plenty of proofs-of-concept that math & science education could be a lot better. We're nowhere near the ideal pedagogical system.
Most of these points smack of rosy retrospective bias. Kids have great attention spans if content is delivered to them in a way they can engage in, for instance, interactive computer games. Teachers are just out of touch with kids, and really they always have been. It's why kids almost always like younger teachers more.
Well, accusations of bias can go both ways. Maybe it feels bad to admit that there is a serious problem with no obvious solution in sight; and pretending that we don't see anything is how we bury our collective heads in the sand.
Instead of accusing each other of biases, let's discuss evidence. As was mentioned in a few comments in this thread, high-school textbooks in multiple countries are gradually dumbed down, so much that 20 or more years old textbooks are now considered a material for gifted kids. (I can confirm this.) Your turn.
> Kids have great attention spans if content is delivered to them in a way they can engage in, for instance, interactive computer games.
If the only problem is that humans are losing the ability to learn without playing computer games, perhaps we could fix it by making all the necessary games. But we better start making them really fast, because there is a lot of knowledge to cover.
And while we are at this type of solution, we could also fix problems with nutrition by genetically engineering a broccoli that will taste like heroin. Situation is not that bad if kids are still willing to pay attention to addictive things.
And what do you think that proves exactly? Did you prove that the kids using the old textbooks actually absorbed the more advanced material? Did you prove that outcomes using the old material are better than with the new material?
Perhaps the new textbooks simply distilled the relevant material that the vast majority of kids actually grasp, without all the unnecessary detail that was just skipped over. I can think of plenty of different scenarios to explain the evidence that's been listed here, and only one of those explanations are "dumber kids and/or dumbed down education".
The exact same arguments have been trotted out about the dumbing down of liberal college education, where in the 1900s, every college degree meant exposure to poetry, art, history, philosophy and more. Modern college education is then portrayed as poor substitute, completely ignoring the fact that our body of knowledge is at least 10,000x larger than it was in the 1900s, and a direct comparison is frankly laughable.
> If the only problem is that humans are losing the ability to learn without playing computer games, perhaps we could fix it by making all the necessary games.
Talk about missing the point. As evidenced by my use of "for instance", that was merely an example. Even among adults, interactive systems are clearly more engaging, and given the environmental factors that shape modern kids, you obviously are already too old to grasp their thinking process if you can't understand that different environmental factors entails different learning processes.
Which just proves my point that adults are and always will be out of touch with the kids of their day.
Well, yes, at least some pupils did. See my comment about degrading exams difficulty and problems in contemporary national competitions. Math problems are fundamental, so it's a good indicator of skills, despite changing times. Science is boring at most times, you can't gamify everything.
(Foreword: Hungarian here) I didn't know that this happened in other Easter European countries as well. We used to have the same thing, that people in 11-12th grade learned (around 70'-80') the first-second year university curriculum.
But by the time I got into secondary and university education the system had changed and we adopted our system to the crappy Western-European credit and whatnot system (Bologna process anybody?).
This had the obvious drawback that the first semester of university still assumed the same knowledge in 11-12th grade from me, which I completely lacked by the time I arrived to starting my undergraduate years. In turn the first 1-2 years sucked big time in uni (for me at least).
I guess this also answers the previous commenter's question how did it get worse and worse.
The same is generally true in the USA. I’d recommend going back to the 40s–60s for many undergraduate-level textbooks. (Of course, there are also many wonderful recent books, but you have to hunt for them.)
Another metric, particularly for math education is the representation of the country at International Mathematical Olympiad.
Bulgaria used to score almost always in top 10, even being number 1 in 2003, beating China, USA and Russia, until the beginning of the new Millennium. Now can barely make it in the top 20.
"forcefully decreases teacher authority and freedom"
"the wages are still very low (even though multiple raises had been promised)"
Just curious (I don't know anything about actually living in Communist times/system) - isn't that what it was like under Soviet [rule|influence]? What's different this time?