Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research. Education began in prehistory, as adults trained the young in the knowledge and skills deemed necessary in their society. In pre-literate societies, this was achieved orally and through imitation. Story-telling passed knowledge, values, and skills from one generation to the next. As cultures began to extend their knowledge beyond skills that could be readily learned through imitation, formal education developed. Schools existed in Egypt at the time of the Middle Kingdom. In most countries today, full-time education, whether at school or otherwise, is compulsory for all children up to a certain age. Due to this the proliferation of compulsory education, combined with population growth, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far. [1].
Education plays a very important role in our life. It is one of the most valuable possessions a man can get in his life. During all the periods of human history education ranked high among people. Human progress mostly depended upon well-educated people. Self-education is very important for the development of human's talents. Only through self-education a person can become a harmonically developed personality. A person becomes a highly qualified specialist after getting some special education. And professionalism can be reached only through it. We get our knowledge of this world and life through education. Many famous discoveries would have been impossible if people were not interested in learning something. Education develops different sides of human personality, reveals his abilities. Besides, it helps a person to understand himself, to choose the right way in this world. The civilized state differs from others in the fact that it pays much attention to the educational policy. John Kennedy said: «Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education». But it doesn't concern only one particular nation. We know that science and art belong to the whole world. Before them the barriers of nationality disappear. So education brings people closer to each other, helps them to understand each other better.
People are changing in modern life and educational system is changing, too. I think we cannot achieve pupil’s 100 % effective kickback because education is losing its necessity. The resumes is not required to indicate the level of education. Many professions do not need official paper confirmation. In most cases, a diploma simply cannot confirm real skills. Young people think they risk losing their time for preparing for exams and getting diploma. However, Ministry of Education does everything to educate professional specialists in any sphere. In this work, I am going to identify strong and weak aspects of educational system especially in Kazakhstan and Great Britain.
Educational system of Kazakhstan
The state of modern Kazakhstani education in all its structural divisions — elementary school, secondary school, secondary special educational institutions and higher education, causes serious complaints from almost all the people involved in one way or another: the teaching staff, the students themselves and their parents. Only the officials of the Ministry of Education and Science seem to be happy from year to year reporting on tremendous successes, advancement in world ratings and high results of ISC (ПГК) and UNT(ЕНТ).
First of all, this is a lack of educational institutions themselves, which is why a crowded school is a common fact, which negatively affects the quality of education and the level of knowledge of children.
Secondly, there is a problem of a shortage of specialists, especially with regard to the situation in rural areas, where sometimes, due to the lack of a specialist, training is conducted by a teacher with a different specialization: for example, a philologist give lessons of biology, a physicist — mathematics and chemistry, etc. This shortage of teaching staff is explained, first of all, by the underdeveloped infrastructure of the village and the low salaries of teachers. And it is necessary to solve this problem in a complex.
Thirdly, the general criticism is the low quality of educational literature. It came to the point that the head of state himself touched on this topic in one of his speeches. They made a kind of business out of the textbook production process in which the quality of the content does not even go to the second, but to the third, fourth plan.
Fourth, the process of bureaucratization of the educational process went extremely deep. Countless reports, monitoring and checks do not contribute to the establishment of effective work, both of the teaching staff and of each teacher individually. In fact, the teacher does not have the opportunity to devote himself entirely to the educational process — he is busy with reports, summaries, references, monitoring and other nonsense, confirming that the teacher is doing something.
Certification of teachers turns into a process of stuffing methodological and other folders with pieces of paper. All this together leads to ordinary formalism, destroying everything creative, vibrant and extraordinary.
Finally, bureaucracy, of course, cannot be destroyed, but it is certainly necessary to reduce it to a reasonable minimum. In our opinion, it is necessary to reduce the amount of regulatory documentation required by the ministry from regional education departments, choosing only the monitoring of the most significant indicators of the educational process.
Since its inception in 2004, the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan has repeatedly raised the issue of canceling Unified National Testing (UNT) and returning to traditional exams.
People’s Communists believe that the similar form of entrance examinations to universities, which is now accepted in Kazakhstan, namely UNT, is not able to objectively assess students' knowledge, their intellectual baggage and available abilities. Also, UNT assignments do not take into account the specifics of specialized education in grades 10–11 and, therefore, firstly, place graduates in obviously unequal conditions, and secondly, this form of testing students' knowledge is contrary to the goals of the Education Concept itself adopted in Kazakhstan.
In addition, the preparation of UNT and participation in it causes great emotional stress both for students and their teachers and parents. Is that why teenage suicide is on the rise? In addition, the very form of the UNT is not able to effectively resist corruption offenses, as evidenced by systematic annual corruption scandals. Moreover, the UNT system itself serves as an additional catalyst for the penetration of corruption into the education system.
But Kazakhstani educational system has strength, too. In March 2010, Kazakhstan officially joined the Bologna Declaration and became the 47th member of the European Higher Education Area and the first Central Asian state recognized as a full member of the European educational space. After joining the Bologna process, serious changes took place in the higher education system of Kazakhstan that brought, for my opinion, only positive results. [2]
In the ranking of the quality of higher education, the most authoritative is the world ranking of QS universities, which includes the 1000 best universities in the world.
Only ten Kazakhstani universities managed to get into this rating. The best position at the Kazakh National University named after al-Farabi (207 place). By 2025, the challenge is to enter the first 150 universities of the rating.
At the beginning of the year, the Voucher cloud portal compiled a list of 25 of the smartest countries in the world. According to the last indicator, Kazakhstan managed to take the ninth place. [3]
Awareness of the possibilities of using compulsory education has caused in society the development of a movement for non-state and even family education, for a larger share of courses on responsible student choice (with the participation of parents and teachers) in the program of secondary schools, support for self-education, lifelong education throughout a person’s active life, out-of-school, distance and additional education, etc.
At the moment, our world is going through hard times with coronavirus and our country is not exception. Distance learning is actual for the moment and Kazakhstan goes well with such way of education. Kazakhstanis has been already using apps such as zoom.us, platonus, kahoot, quizizz to follow grades, do homework, give lectures and games for development.
Scientists at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Eurasian National University have developed a system for online learning. The technology has been used at the university since 2019 and is relevant today during distance learning.
The platform allows conducting lectures online and offline, chatting with teachers and students, tracking lecture attendance, completing tasks, setting grades, conducting trial tests on the materials passed, etc.
According to Daniyar Kozybaev, Dean of the IMF of the ENU, the teacher sees attending an online lecture, how many times the student watched or delivered the lecture, how many times he went into the system, whether he downloaded the assignment or just got acquainted with it, the number of assigned assignments, questions [4]. All statistics are available in the user's account. Most importantly, students can watch the criteria for evaluating their work, as indicated in the assessment section.
Development is popular not only at the university, but also at school. It is interesting that in the team of developers and programmers of the platform there is not a single IT specialist, only mathematicians. The main developer is A. Tanirbergenov, Senior Lecturer, Department of Algebra and Geometry. The development results were reported in January 2020 of the University Methodological Decade. In the future, scientists want to use the system to conduct distance school olympiads and apply in the creation of a virtual (correspondence) mathematics school of the faculty.
Educational system of Great Britain
Great Britain is a country with an education system that has been actively developed for thousand years. Moreover, the UK education system submits to a strict quality standard.
Main advantages of British educational system are:
- The educational process begins at the age of 5, and the child is systematically beginning to instill a love of knowledge, they are preparing to become a diligent student, they are instilling good manners.
- In most of the British educational institutions, highly qualified teachers with academic degrees who help to fully open the student teach.
- From an early age, children are accustomed to the test form of knowledge assessment, while in Russia they are only trying to attach to this. But, despite this, tests are not an indicator of knowledge, therefore, this item can be attributed to shortcomings, both in the UK and in Russia.
- Education in the UK is consistently maintained at the highest level and is constantly confirmed by international general educational, which facilitates attempts to copy the model of education in other countries. [5]
It is believed that one of the main disadvantages of studying in the UK is its cost. Indeed, not everyone can afford to send a child to a private English school or pay for university tuition themselves, but the cost of studying in the UK is lower than, for example, in the USA, and by prestige it is not at all inferior or even surpasses it.
Secondly, English boarding schools are known for their strict discipline, which is both a plus and a minus. On the one hand, the child will not be left unattended and will not be left to its own devices. On the other hand, such a system provides less flexibility and more adherence to the curriculum and school schedule. The British also consider household asceticism not as a lack of comfort, but as a necessary condition for the formation of character.
Comparison
Every education system is different from each other, because cultural and mentality difference play an important role in forming that system. So, education systems of some countries have some features which are similar between most countries, however there are some peculiarities that make the education system of a country to stand out from the crowd of other systems. In this report, the distinctiveness of education systems between Kazakhstan and Great Britain would be discussed. Moreover, some similarities and differences for those countries would be shown.
|
Questions |
Kazakhstan |
Great Britain |
|
1. When do children start going to school? |
from 6–7 y.o. |
from 5 y.o. |
|
2. What exams do children take? |
ГИА, ЕНТ, КТА |
GCSE, A-levels |
|
3. What are the levels of education in schools? |
Elementary (primary)school, Secondary School, Higher School |
Primary School, Secondary School, Further education |
|
4. What type of marks is at schools? |
Five point scale: 5-excellent 4-good 3-satisfactory 2-unsatisfactory |
A-90–100 % B-80–89 % C-70–79 % D-60–69 % E-0–59 % |
|
5. Is a school uniform required or not? |
Yes |
Yes |
|
6. How old are children at school / institute? |
At school 11 years, at the institute 4–6 years (bachelor and master) |
At school, 11 years old, at the institute 3–4 and another 1 year (master's program) |
۰In Great Britain children start going to school when they are five and continue studying until they are 16 or older. Compulsory education begins at the age of five when they go to primary school. Primary education lasts for six years. First they attend the infant school from five to seven.
– In infant schools children don’t have real classes. They get acquainted with the class- room, desks, play and through plating. They learn numbers and how to add them. When children are seven they go to junior school which they attend until eleven. Boys and girls study at junior school for four years. There they have classes, read and write, do mathematics.
– At secondary school pupils study English, Maths, Science, Geography, History, Art, Music, Foreign languages and PT. there are some types of secondary schools in Great Britain. They are grammar school, modern schools and comprehensive schools. One can attend modern school but of a modern school don’t learn foreign languages.
– If they go to grammar school they will have a good secondary education. This type of school is most popular in England. At secondary school pupils study English, Maths, Science, Geography, History, Art, Music, Foreign languages and PT lessons. English, Maths and Science are called ‘core’ subjects. Pupils take examinations in the core subjects at the age of 7, 11 and 14.
– There are some private schools in England. Boys and girls do not together study at these schools. The son and daughters of aristocracy go to these schools. Their parents pay much money for the education in private schools. The teachers of these schools pay personal attention to each pupil.
Education in Kazakhstan.
– We started school at the age of seven. After four years of primary school we went to secondary school. Primary and secondary schools together comprise eleven years of classes are compulsory in our republic.
– Our school year began on the first of September and ended in May. It lasted 9 months. We had four holidays a year: winter, spring, summer and autumn. On the 1st of September we got acquainted with our teachers and had our first lessons. Every lesson lasted 45 minutes. Every day we had 5 or 6 lessons.
– The primary school curriculum included such as subjects Kazakh, Maths, Russian, Drawing, PT and Music. We had also Nature classes. Our school was not English but we had English classes which started in the 2nd form.
– Recently Kazakhstan has also developed several types of schools with greater specialization such as gymnasium, technical, lyceums and private schools. Education is free, except those which work on a commercial basic.
– Today the educational system in Kazakhstan is presented by two languages: Kazakh and Russian. Primary education is the most developed of the state’s educational system. Pupils receive their primary education in schools of three different levels. Primary 1–4 grades, middle 5–9 grades and junior 10–11 grades. After finishing the 9th grade children continue education in high schools in technical- professional institutes, or in special schools.
Conclusion
Education is analyzed as being an important role in the society, where the structure of teaching, learning, and environment is frequently debated as factor responsible for the development of people. This is why education system, and the structure for teaching shall be considered seriously.
In conclusion, to have a good education system, the society and government must work as whole, because the future of society and progress of country is comparatively reflected by the success of students in their education.
We can learn a lot from other countries education systems. No country has all the answers, and what works somewhere will not necessarily work elsewhere. However, it definitely poses questions about what best practice looks like. Areas that are definitely worth considering include banning mobile phones, developing a growth mindset, starting school later, not streaming by ability and adopting a more collective culture.
References:
- https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ %D0 %9E %D0 %B1 %D1 %80 %D0 %B0 %D0 %B7 %D0 %BE %D0 %B2 %D0 %B0 %D0 %BD %D0 %B8 %D0 %B5
- The Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “On Education”, 2007
- Minister of Education and Science of Kazakhstan Askhat Aymagambetov, magazine “Forbes”, September 17, 2019 https://forbes.kz/process/education/ministr_aymagambetov_nazval_plyusyi_i_minusyi_shkolnogo_obrazovaniya_v_kazahstane
- Official site of ENU: http://www.enu.kz/ru/info/novosti-enu/59657/
- https://studyglobe.ru/countries/great-britan/
