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- Introduction
to science, Information and communications technology, and Art will be offered
during the first two-three years. In
Information and communications technology course children will learn basic
searching techniques and how to use computer.
- Starting
from 2020 such courses as physics, chemistry, and biology will be taught from
the fifth grade, not seventh or eighth as it is now.
- New
courses such as Global perspectives and Project activity, will be included in
the curriculum. However, it is not clear yet what these courses are designed
for.
- Number of
mandatory courses will be reduced significantly and students will have a chance
to adjust their curriculum based on their preferences.
Being
experts in education, I bet you have been rejoicing reading this. So did I. But
when I reached the comments under the article I was shocked by the amount of
criticism and negative feedback. Here are just few of them to give you a
general picture:
“The Soviet system was perfect. Why are we inventing a
bicycle?”; “God, save our children”; “English?! We don’t even have teachers who
could teach well on Russian”; “Our Ministry of Education must be ill with a severe
decease if they create such reforms”; “Stop conducting experiments on our
children”; “How long this can last?”
My first thought was “They do not understand. They
are not experts. These reforms will bring positive changes and raise our
education quality to a globally competitive level”. However, I decided to read
the article again. This time I was more observant and noticed such innovation
as online testing to be conducted three times – after the primary, secondary
and high schools. Taking into account all the disadvantages of UNT and testing
system overall, such measure does not seem to be reasonable. I looked through
the comments again. Hmm…seems like most of the commenters are parents. Who
knows abilities and capacities of their children better than them? Can it
happen that policy makers pursuing higher indexes forget about children? They
are adults. They do not remember themselves at the young age. I tried to recall
myself when I was in the first or third grade. Is a child ready to make the
first steps into science at the age of six? Something is telling me that
children can do everything, they are a very fast learners. But would you agree
with these reforms if you were a parent? What do you think about this?
First of all, thank you, Mika for this news in schooling system. I don’t know what this government want to reach by implementing such kind of reforms. Coming to the question, what the subject Global perspectives means, it is a subject where students investigate the sphere they like, review the literature, make some experiments, write research paper about their projects. This subject is for the students of 10th and 11th grade actually. The aim of this subject as you understand is to learn students how to write a research paper, avoiding plagiarism, make some contribution to Kazakhstani academia. One of the students of the school where I worked won the first place with his projects and will present his project on EXPO-2017, Astana. Frankly speaking, I think it is a great idea to implement the Global perspectives into the curricula of mainstream schools.
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