Prime Minister’s views on higher education and education system as a whole at meeting with Gjirokaster University professors:
The education reform is not a reform one can simply talk about and discuss based on the principles and a projected architecture, but it is a reform effort that includes thousands of witnesses among teachers, with over 11,000 of them having benefited from the fresh opportunity they have been provided to take up a job in education system through a merit-based system, namely “Teachers for Albania” portal and the transparency the web-based platform guarantees through a very competitive process.
Likewise, there are a large number of other witnesses in the higher education system, though we are still on an ongoing path. The education reform is still an uphill battle and of course there are a lot of reasons to believe this is the right path and direction and all it takes is just supporting this direction.
If we were to draw a comparison between the pre-university and the university education system, we would notice that a lot of progress has been made in the pre-university system towards delivering on our objectives and materialization of the transformation plan, as we have achieved some tangible accomplishments and there are truly encouraging data. However, a lot remain to be done.
In the meantime, we have delivered on a very bold and courageous higher education reform, significantly expanding the university autonomy, building new conditions for university students and lecturers, yet we face a very complex challenge we need to consider a common task we should deal with without shunning it and without further delaying it, because any possible delays of the efforts to face this complex challenge would come at a cost for the young boys and girls who enrol in the universities and remain at the very edge of the labour market or even outside it.
First of all, we need to further strengthen the role and the competence level in the pre-university education system. If significant progress has been made when it comes to teachers, the process is still on the go regarding the school principals, as we should obviously push for more commitment of the school principals in terms of enhancing their managerial capacities.
It is a new era posing more fresh challenges for parents, the schoolchildren themselves, who need to be guided to move forward on the right direction. It is a new and quite a complex era as the pace of life itself, the communication channels and ways to cope with the reality have all radically changed in recent years. Moreover, the duality of children between reality and the virtual world, the direct physical contact with the senses they see, touch, feel, face the physical reality has dramatically changed, where naturally the tradition of communication and the daily life and the virtual reality are all combined on a path with billions of surprises and unknowns via the virtual communication means now massively available to children and which make children’s education a much more complex task that it was previously.
It is fundamental for us to understand and do whatever it takes so that we further strengthen and give power to the school community, make quality of life within the school community more important and seek to take advantage of this community values and the community connections to balance as much as we can the relations that develop outside our control and that spontaneously develop between the child and the iphone, ipad or computer screen.
We wish to bring to life and deliver on two new programmes primarily in our pre-university education system; a huge and broad national programme on sports and another national programme on art and craftsmanship, so that we create as many opportunities for children to engage in physical activity in harmony with their wishes, because the physical education classes we restored back to school are sometimes merely a routine.
Likewise, the national programme on arts and craftsmanship should make up for a certain time after the normal classes, because we all actually see and I believe anyone who has little kids clearly understands it is really an incredible challenge we face on how to interact with little children, how to keep them in touch with the reality, while children are always in search of ways to escape from reality and immerse themselves wholly in the labyrinths of the virtual world and live there among heroes and all sorts of characters, who approach them in a completely uncontrolled way.
Sports, arts and crafts can play an extraordinary role in this aspect, but on the other hand special attention is needed so that they don’t become a sort of a routine and ordinary thing. For example, I have been constantly discussing and I think it is absolutely necessary – just to illustrate it – that schools, wherever possible and wherever there are enough spaces and there are many schools that offer ample spaces, especially the new educational facilities that we are building now, provide the space for the land, the land cultivation, thus providing children the opportunity to follow natural process of land cultivation and see up close how plants, crops and fruits grow and how they are harvested. It is an activity we used to engage with during our childhood, though in a fragmented way and through elementary experiments. We need to take such activities to a whole new level now. Or the children’s contact with nature, their contact with animals and so on and so forth, the children’s contact with all those opportunities of creativity they would find in arts and crafts. Various arts and craftsmanship activities operate throughout the territory of our country and schools should establish relations with them, while we as the government, the Ministry of Education should help to make it as easy, as attractive and interactive as possible. By this I mean the network of craftsmen, who should also be stimulated to develop further, the artisan women who create and sell various products. Fantastic examples have been set here in Gjirokaster. Likewise, other sports activities, races, music and theatre festivals and exhibitions should be supported and promoted. And to this end we need a new generation of school principals with managerial skills so that schools usher in a new phase of understanding their role.
The principals’ school has been founded and is currently operational, but we need to be more active on this. We need to dedicate a special place to this aspect of the school.
There are certainly a lot of problems to be tackled regarding other aspect of this process, but I believe we have laid the initial tracks with the textbooks. Beyond the prejudices or the superficial opinions, we actually have a pretty qualified educational staff.
A closer cooperation is needed when it comes to the universities so that a more strategic approach is adapted, because we have constantly talked about a profiling system to adapt it with the labour market needs, the degree programs to address the market needs and the indispensability for us not to leave aside the parts of education a nation and a country need, even though being not very attractive subjects as they do not offer a profitable future like other subjects do. Moreover, we should strongly aim to take the ties with international universities to a whole new level, because we currently pursue a superficial level of exchanges and programmes without a truly profound impact. To this end, we will earmark a funding to stimulate universities and the funding will be made available to all universities that will move faster forward on this path and succeed in signing quality accords with international universities. The Gjirokaster University faces the fact that it should definitely alter its approach because things have spontaneously reached a situation with the university itself experiencing a sort of anxiety to add as many degree programs as possible so that self-funding opportunities are created. It is for sure that in a considerable extent, universities mainly operate under a self-funding system, but which, on the other hand, due to the self-financing cannot be part of a king of inertia that fails to produce quality and leads to a fall in the quality of students, declining interest of professors and of course, in this aspect the university needs support and should not be left on its own. But the university must become fully aware that autonomy is also a responsibility, autonomy is not just doing what I want and then whenever I need one more breath to run, I surrender and ask for the state’s help. This cannot work that way.
