The cost to education development: A personal story

 At the beginning of 2021, commenced preparations to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where I wasthe founder and director at that time. We were very proud of the results of our work, as the first graduate school of education in Russia, created from scratch, had become one of the largest research centers in education in continental Europe within 10 years. Our institute had more than 500 masters and doctoral students and over 140 researchers. . Despite our critical view of university rankings, it was also important to us that in 2020, according to one of the authoritative international rankings, our university entered the top hundred in the academic field of "education." This was undoubtedly an indicator of successful growth. However, perhaps the most important for us were not these formal indicators, but the fact that for the first time in the post-Soviet era, Russian educational research was represented in leading scientific journals and publishers around the world.

So, it also showed that real evidence-based educational science is a critical factor for the successful precedent. We really managed to turn a very weak school in a working-class district into one of the most popular schools in our city, while categorically refusing to select children. It was there that I first understood the issue of inequality. I grew up in a middle-class family, my parents had higher education. And at first, it was even unclear to me how to work with children, among whom only 15 % had at least one parent with higher education degree. To solve this problem, we had to turn to Western sociology and theory of education, since neither Soviet nor Russian academic literature discussed the issue of inequality in education. It was assumed that uniform standardized programs ensure equality. But it was not so, and working with children from groups with weak cultural and social capital required us to search for new tools and approaches. We initiated the first discussions of this issue in Soviet pedagogical science. It also shows the power of precedent.

But in 2011, when the university’s rector Yaroslav Kuzminov offered me to create a faculty of education, the university had stable position as a think-tank for the Government of Russia in developing social and economic policy, including education. In my first conversation with the rector, I asked him why he needed a faculty of education. I received two answers: Oxford and Harvard have faculties of education, so we need one too; education is too important to entrust the preparation of the best personnel for it to weak universities. As a result, we created not just a pedagogical faculty, but an Institute of Education that trained masters and doctoral students and conducted research in the field of education. Like the first projects in my career, this was quite an adventurous attempt. We created this institute without having enough researchers in this area in the country and became a precedent for training new types of education specialists and conducting research integrated into global practice.

 If an innovation is becoming and norm too quickly, it does not become part of mass practice, and it is very easy to abandon it. Precedents proved to be much more sustainable. In the case of a precedent, we care less about the dissemination of a particular model, but rather about its full and deep implementation, its effectiveness. Then, the dissemination of this model occurs not due to normative changes but due to isomorphism, which causes rationally acting actors to use more effective approaches. Therefore, it seems to me that in the development of education, we should pay more attention to creating real precedents of new practices, supporting their development, and widely discussing and comparing them with the results of less effective traditional structures. An important lesson I learned regarding the factors of sustainability of educational and innovative premises is related, in my opinion, to attention to various stakeholders, primarily parents and students.

The absence of modern alternative is one of tragedies of the post-Soviet era. Of course, there were wonderful schools and universities where this was given great attention, and new practices were developed based on the unique humanistic traditions of Russian education. However, in most educational organizations of post-Soviet Russia, this vacuum of social and moral education was not filled with anything meaningful, and therefore, it was quickly filled with primitive ideas of "us against them," "patriotism must necessarily be military," "human rights are Western influence"… The fact that this happened should be an important lesson regarding what we should seriously assess the contribution of education to peace preservation and the ability to resolve conflicts constructively. We should complement the very important efforts to achieve mass literacy and useful skills with no less intellectual effort to support social and moral education.

Muhammad Raeshard Daffa Jenaro