Success of country depends on nation's intellectual potential

ASTANA. February 5. KAZINFORM /Rizvana Sadykova/ Recently the Academy of Public Administration under the RK President held a seminar ?The competence and organization of local akims? activities? in the course of retraining and upgrading of public servants? qualification. The participants were akims of rural districts. While delivering a lecture Director of the Department of Strategy Development under the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan Serik Irsaliyev proudly noted that, according to the UNESCO data, Kazakhstan ranks 1 out of 129 countries in the world on the accessibility of education for the population.

Serik Aztaevich, the education system in our country raises a huge number of issues and gives rise to unfavorable criticism in our country today. It is not mere chance that your meeting with the audience gave you a lot of food for reflection. What can you say about it? There is an axiom, not disputable - the success of the development of any state depends on the level of the nation's intellectual potential. We have a lot of examples where the state with no competitive advantages other than their own human resources, have achieved success on a global scale due to the fact that the Governments of these States have heavily invested in education. Well -known example is South Korea, which in its development made the emphasis on human resource development... As for our country, the government made education its priority and invests in this field each year. In comparison with 2007 the state funding has been increased by 25%. Thanks to our President and government?s attention to education, last year we became participants of an international comparative study of mathematical achievement of our fourth grade students. The studies brought together 67 nations. More than 30 countries participated in the studies of the fourth grade students. We took the 5th place in math. Ahead of us are only China, Singapore and some other ?Asian Tigers?. Behind us were the USA, Russia, Great Britain, and many other leading powers. For science, we have taken the 11th place; in the team classification we won the 7thplace. Just two weeks ago, we received good news from UNESCO. According to the UNESCO report published in 2009 Kazakhstan ranks 1 out of 129 countries in the world on the accessibility of education for the population. We are the first among 129 countries in the world. It might be surprising because there is a lot of criticism of our education. But there are things to which we are accustomed, and which we really do not feel in everyday life. These are such indicators as gender, i.e. girls and boys should receive the same education. For us, there are no problems with gender inequality in access to education. And there are many related problems. Another indicator is the level of adult literacy. We really do not notice that all around us know how to write, read and think. This is a great achievement, as there are 776 million illiterate adults in the world. This is 16% of the adult population. I remember August 23, 2007, immediately after the elections to the Majilis. I said that victory in parliamentary elections of the leading party is a huge responsibility for the implementation of the pre- election program. ?There are four important areas in which we must focus our efforts. This is - education, health, science and the villages?. Indeed, our government pays great attention to education and health, let us take, for example, ?100 schools and 100 hospitals? project. What should be, in your opinion, the strategy of education development in Kazakhstan? Demographic experts predict growth of number of children population. In this regard we have adopted strategic plan within the framework of the new budget where defined the key problems of education to prevent with lack of schools, kindergartens and how to deal with them. The urgent issue is preschool education. Researchers of Japanese Center of Babyhood and corresponding organizations of the UNESCO proved that as earlier we involve a child in academic activity as much he develops his skills. Unfortunately, economic woes of the beginning of 1990s lead to seven times decrease the number of kindergartens. We lost preschool education of a whole generation of children ahead. In many countries preschool children attend kindergartens at age three. In this regard the President stressed that the development of kindergartens is a priority in the development of education as a whole. We initiated construction of new kindergartens. We also encourage new forms of preschool education such as mini-centers, development of private education. Together with UNESCO we established a new standard of preschool education. About 50% of children will be covered by the preschool education by 2011. Of course, the support of the government is important. But state money only is not enough. In this regard we developed a project to rich placement in kindergarten to 100% coverage by 2020. Since Kazakhstan gained independence our education system underwent several reforms. One of them is introduction of 12-year education? Will the system of primary and secondary education gain much due to it? After all many countries with high quality of education, as the Netherlands for example, have not changed their education systems for the decades? Actually since 1988 many countries, particularly English-speaking ones, started transition to the new ideology of education. Its concept is that our world changes constantly and brings in more and more new knowledge. In this rapid changing world the school student should obtain competence quite different from knowledge he could get before. Thus the transit to the 12-year basic education system provides with change of all programs and standards. We have prepared a concept of e-learning development. We hope that in 5 years this concept will allow to approach standards of the most developed countries. It?s no secret that our society has made a cult of higher education. Generally speaking it is one of our achievements. But the society needs skilled workers for factories, construction sites and farms. Since we can not encourage migration of this labor from abroad, what should your ministry do to solve this problem? Actually, 18 per cent of school graduates have access to university education on government tuition fees. The problem is that despite the high rate of unemployment, 20 per cent of colleges graduates are not able to find a job because of unsuitability for the position. Meanwhile the country is overwhelmed with foreign labor. Thus within the framework of the state program of education development adopted last year, the system of vocational education should undergo significant transformation both in its content and infrastructure. For today out of 220 specialties of vocational education 72 are transformed to the new standards developed with participation of foreign experts and employers. Since the country has introduced the Unified National Test more children prefer to enter colleges rather than universities. It is high time to transfer quantity to quality. Thank you for the interview.