The Present Scenario in Education Part-II

 

Secondary school leaving certificates qualifying for university entrance and sharp competition for university admission are forcing young people to make an effort to get the highest possible average marks. The result is that many senior secondary school pupils avoid mathematics and science subjects. At vocational schools, particularly public ones, teacher training and technical equipment are rarely sufficient to provide the necessary basic education in science and technology. Relevant in-service education and training programmes are still rare, even though an attempt is made in classroom work to compensate for this lack of science in technology literacy. Practical application and use of this knowledge seems to be very limited.

Pupils and students in vocational education tend to learn how to use computers at home or on the job, and frequently do so better, more rapidly, and on more modern equipment than is generally the case for adults or teachers. Young people are often taught the use of the new information and communications technologies with entertainment-based methods (e.g. computer games) something that does not promote serious use of these new potentials and in practice their application in on-the-job situations leads for the most part to rigid, uncritical and purely application-related uses. There is a lack of background knowledge and in most cases no critical interest in the potentials and limitations of these modern tools. In public adult education ("people's universities" etc.) there is not always a systematic compensation for what schools fail to provide in the way of basic education in science and technology. Assistance is provided on an ad hoc basis only, e.g. in the form of computer courses (based on a unit-credit system at best). There is a general lack of courses aimed at refreshing knowledge and skills previously acquired and at familiarizing the generation approaching retirement age with technical change.

The situation in the private adult education sector is not much different. Institutions operated for example by political parties sporadically offers ad hoc courses of organize working parties which do such things as ensure a discussion of the respective party's policies on the Internet. Seminars and training courses organized by private industry only provide knowledge applicable on the given job. The media do not meet the demand for promoting basic education in science and technology either. Television offers some popular science programmes, but they are often obscured by easily recognizable prejudices. Systematic programme series are still fairly rare. Newspapers and magazines often use of specialist jargon difficult to understand which makes it impossible for the average layman to obtain access to basic knowledge. The Internet would offer ideal conditions for disseminating basic and advanced knowledge, but in actual fact it is not used for this purpose.The book market offers a large number of good books and articles aimed at raising the level of general education in science and technology, but people today no longer read as much as was the case in the past. This literature addressed itself more or less to already interested cases, but not at the vast majority who is in need of a basic knowledge of science and technology as well as continuing education.