Article
Education Practices and Maturation
The article briefly discusses the question of how we should establish special educational practices that could help students mature. In identifying such practices, the author looks to a number of empirical studies that allow us to understand what significance the concept of “maturation” has for children and teenagers. In conclusion, the author notes that modern educational systems rarely provide students with the opportunity to try on adult roles. To allow this, changes will have to be made and special mechanisms will have to be designed that enable children, teenagers, and college students to show initiative and take responsibility.
Russian school: an alternative to modernization from above. The current paper is concerned with an analysis of main challenge to contemporary school education and of examples of good responses to these challenges in different countries. The authors use results of international surveys of quality of education and comparative educational research to discuss competitive advantages of Russian educational system and its potential for development. Current school system in Russia can be attributed to the «fair» one according to the classification of McKinsey&Company. There are different strategies to reach the «good» or «great» level. Changing the whole system and elimination of a backlog were very popular in post-soviet Russia. These strategies use administration as a primary resource. They are very expensive, insensitive to local features of the system and contribute to the accumulation of «fatigue of changes». There is another possible strategy - development of strengths. This scenario implies successful initiative and interest of researchers, teachers and schools as the main sources of changes. This approach can be called «humanitarian modernization of education». The authors discuss possibilities of using this strategy and a set of measures which are necessary to consolidate and to use the competitive advantages of Russian educational system.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.