A hasty approach to education reforms
No one is doubting the good intentions of the current government as regards the reform of higher education. After all, all the previous reform efforts attempted by successive governments had precisely the same aim. But the very fact that so many ostensible reforms have been made over such a short period of time leads one to conclude that none of them actually changed anything. In all countries where educational reforms have been undertaken and have yielded spectacular results, these achievements had been preceded by many years of painstaking political dialogue between the state and educationalists. Also, crucially, the creation of this new educational policy started from the very foundations: that is, from primary school if not from kindergarten, rather than from much later down the line, in the university system. In those cases there was a serious and responsible approach to debating the problems in the existing education system and clarification of goals that needed to be set; detailed plans were designed to be implemented over several years, to bear fruit when the schoolchildren of the time would be leaving university – virtually a generation away. But we Greeks evidently know better. We always start our reforms from the very top, without giving much thought to the need for strong foundations. And as soon as the first cracks appear in the structure, our strategy is to push through a fast renovation before turning our attention to some other problem.
