Education in Age of Global Changes: Threats, Reforms or Drift

Background and aim of study:

Nowadays many states have faced with sophisticated situations related with geopolitical, socio-economic and other triggers and results of local or international conflicts and crisis situations. But, despite such disasters, we must to focus on continuous refinement of organizations, educational institutions and states in general, can be only one way for prevention different kinds of risks caused by economic, political or social aspects. Surely, today in age of digitalized global economy we need balanced and comparable on international level system of national education build up on integrity, social responsibility and transparency principles.

Research methods:

Comparative observational study and critical analysis.

Results:

Thomas Friedman, discussing global changes has noted that new model of international economic collaboration is based on supply-chaining method – horizontal networking among suppliers, retailers and customers to create value. This argument is key reason why global leading states have transformed their educational systems to produce workers for jobs that will actually exist and be needed soon in their societies. Thus, if we are able to provide free and high-quality vocational and higher education to people, than we produce educated, well-trained and more flexible labor force that can cope more readiness with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is not panacea, because of now is more important how we educate young generation than how much we educate them. Here we are totally agreeing with T. Friedman that the most important skills you can develop in a flat world is ability to “learn how to learn” or responsibility to constantly absorb, teach yourself and find new ways of doing old things or apply historical heritage to prevent new treats. Such ability is essentially needed today for everyone because of parts of many jobs are constantly going to be exposed to digitalization, automation and outsourcing, where jobs and new industries will be reshape and change faster and faster. In postmodern world it is not only what you know but how you learn that will set you apart, due to what you know today will be out-of-date sooner than you even can imagine. Nowadays Ukraine has faced with mentioned above situation especially in vocational and higher technical education. After collapse of Soviet Union were ruined within next few decades existed horizontal networks between post-soviet countries joined in the same manufacturing cycle. In result national industry now is fragmentally developed and mostly oriented on export well-trained labor forces to leading western countries. These aspects have widened the gap in development between national higher engineering education and industry. Another negative factor affected national higher technical education was trend of its humanization: increasing scope of liberal arts in curricula for engineers as like as founding in some technical universities numerous humanitarian specialties that are usually far from profile of technical university. Both of mentioned above aspects have minimized prestige of national technical education. University entrants, who are unable to demonstrate required level of obtained in school skills and theoretical knowledge on profile subjects that are needed for technical specialties, often choose easier humanitarian specialties in technical university. In result we have demand on technical specialties for national industry but most of young engineers who are alumni of leading Ukrainian universities prefer to work abroad due to high economic and social motivation. Humanitarian specialists with diploma of technical university often run into difficulties with employment on specialty due to glut of humanitarian specialists that has caused high competition among university alumni on labor market. In result prestige of higher educational institution whose alumni have the least chances for employment on obtained specialty will be minimal in eyes of university entrants even if international image of technical university is very high (high positions in international university rankings, famous professors and unique scientific schools).

Conclusion:

Despite numerous debates issue of balancing between global pragmatism, quality of vocational or higher education and its economic utility (recoupment of capital investment in this area) is still essential for many developing countries and transition economies like Ukraine because of predicted by G. Agamben inevitable “global civil war” has already started.

DOI and UDC:

UDC: 37.014.54 + [37.091.12+005.963.2-051]:005.336.3 DOI: 10.26697/ijes.2020.2.8

Information about the authors:

Garnyk Liudmyla Petrivna – Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Trade and Goods Expertise Department, National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Research interests: educational management; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0983-9323. Snihurova Irina Ivanivna – Senior Lecturer of Ukrainian, Russian Languages and Applied Linguistics Department, National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Research interests: educational management; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1284-1395.