EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Bozhidar Marinov
The market
The difficulties for such an initiative, of course, will come primarily from the lack of funding. While the public education system can always rely on state funding from the budget at the expense of taxpayers, private programs will have to find alternative opportunities to establish themselves in the market and make a difference.
The common justification among many libertarians that “if there is a demand, the market will find a way to satisfy it” would not be very relevant here. Market demand depends entirely on the rational awareness of buyers about what is possible to find; the demand for goods and services above the level of physical survival is not some objective necessity, it is more of a psychological reality. (Just 10 years ago, no one was looking for a smartphone, right?) In most cases throughout history, buyers do not realize what they need until some innovator or entrepreneur comes along to invent and produce it. Similarly, even if there are many parents in Bulgaria who are vaguely aware of the need for an education for their children above the level currently provided by the state system, this awareness will not produce real demand for a product until real products appear on the market. This means that the initiative must come from educational entrepreneurs who can not only predict what the demand for educational programs will be in the coming years and decades, but are also dedicated to creating such demand and shaping this new market for Bulgaria by revealing to Bulgarian parents opportunities that were previously unknown to them.
The question of the economic profitability of such an initiative remains to be resolved. If there are not enough parents willing to buy such programs at the outset, the producers of these programs may find themselves in a situation where their time has been spent in production without any return. Such a danger is always present with any new venture; these are the inherent risks of entrepreneurship. Ultimately, however, it must be borne in mind that the trend in Bulgarian society over the past 20 years has been increasingly in favor of independent education and against state education. Even if the marketing of private educational programs is complete zero, the apparent failures of state education will prompt parents to look for alternatives. The future market for private educational programs and materials is not protected against risks at the individual level, this is obvious. But as an overall trend, it is a promising area for development and entrepreneurship.
And unlike many other areas, this market has one huge advantage: computer technology and the Internet make it extremely accessible, due to the low cost of initial investments. Delivering an electronic training program over the Internet is far cheaper than delivering the same program in paper textbooks, as it was just 10 years ago.
But what will be the difference? How should private educational programs and materials differ from state-run, “approved by the Ministry of Education,” in order to achieve the success that will prove the advantages of freedom and competition in education?
As with all other areas of human activity in the free market, this question has no single answer: the free market does not tolerate a single solution to any problem, because the free market is not a magical aggregate; it is a collection of individuals, and each individual has his own ambitions, expectations, and preferences for the education of his children. But if we take the failures of public education as a negative example, some common points can be noted for all future private educational programs.
Mathematics and natural sciences
Although Eastern European education has historically performed well in the academic aspects of mathematics and science, public schools have failed over the past 50 years to translate this academic excellence into excellence in the applied aspects of mathematics and science. With the exception of a few individuals, Eastern Europe continues to lag behind in the development of engineering. This was the situation before 1989: with more world-class nuclear physicists than any other country in the world, the Soviet Union could not produce enough nuclear engineers to run power plants like Chernobyl. (The engineers on duty at the time of the accident knew nothing about nuclear engineering.) Bulgaria’s emphasis on teaching mathematics and science failed to produce technological growth, and communist Bulgaria had to import—or even steal—technology from the hated capitalist West. Even after 1989, the level of technological discoveries in Bulgaria remained low – and this is due to the lack of trained technological specialists and inventors. For comparison, Colombia, which Europeans often look down on as a country of drugs and cartels, is actually one of the first places in the world in inventions in medicine and medical equipment. The Bulgarian contribution to modern technological civilization is mainly in an area that is virtual – programming. Applied sciences and applied mathematics are still a weak point of Bulgarian education.
At the same time, it is precisely applied sciences and engineering that are becoming the most sought-after professions and skills in the global economy, which increasingly relies not just on technology, but on the complex interaction between different fields of engineering. The situation is complicated by the fact that the US economy, which is the most technologically developed and therefore most dependent on technological growth, is combined with an education system that is woefully incapable of offering its students good mathematics training. American public high schools in the US are far behind in the level of mathematics they teach their students. This inevitably leads to a lack of prepared and willing candidates for engineering majors in universities. The imbalance in the market is so great that over the past decade, the salary offered for engineers in the US has surpassed the income of the traditionally elite profession of lawyer. American companies are massively hiring foreigners to fill jobs for engineers in the US. Some statistics show that, overall, certain engineering majors provide a starting salary for a graduate of over $100,000 per year.
This creates serious opportunities for Bulgarian curriculum developers. A Bulgarian mathematics and science program, in order to be extremely useful for students, must be based on a few simple principles: first, to preserve the good traditions of academic, systematic teaching of mathematics and science; second, to reorient students to the applied part of mathematics and science, to prepare them to think like engineers even before they enter university; third, to prepare students for work in global markets by teaching English (and technical English); and, fourth, to align its standards with the admission requirements not only of Bulgarian, but also of leading American and European universities. As we mentioned, it does not need to be in paper textbooks; it will be cheaper for both the manufacturer and the parents to be online. Online can also be the sessions for helping students when a better understanding of the lessons and solutions is needed. When all these factors are combined into a curriculum, the product will be far superior to anything that public schools can offer, and therefore worth the money that interested parents would pay for it. (After all, thousands of parents in Bulgaria are already paying for private lessons so that their children can “catch up” on their studies.)
Humanities and social sciences
The situation with the humanities and social sciences is more critical, since it is not possible to teach them without ideological indoctrination. The common opinion in Bulgaria now is that because we rejected an official ideology more than 25 years ago, our society today – and therefore education – is “de-ideologized.” This is far from the truth. Communist ideology has simply given way to a multitude of other official and unofficial ideologies, not as systematically organized as Marxism, but just as effective and sometimes dangerous for the development of society. Overall, at least one characteristic of Marxist ideology continues to dominate Bulgarian schools: statism. The results are visible in society: for the overwhelming majority of Bulgarians, it is practically impossible to imagine a society in which the state does not control absolutely every area of life. This blindness is not natural; it is the fruit of the dominant statist, collectivist ideology in schools. Most people don't notice it because they grew up with it, but it is actually present in Bulgarian education.
Although it may not be immediately obvious to many, the ideology of a child's education plays an important role in his or her formation as an individual and in his or her economic and social fulfillment as an adult. As I have indicated above, children educated in an ideology of collectivism and equality will have a different attitude toward life, society, and individual initiative than children educated in an ideology of individualism and personal growth. This means that in order for private curriculum designers to break the vicious cycle of producing new generations of practical collectivists, they must consciously begin to base their textbooks on the presumptions of individualism and freedom.
History of Bulgaria and the world, for example, is taught entirely from the perspective of statist ideologies. I remember how in the 1990s Bulgarian teachers mockingly mentioned that even the most educated American children did not know the names of many American presidents, while Bulgarian children knew the names of Bulgarian kings and khans. The truth is that educated American children know the names of American and world inventors and entrepreneurs, such as Thomas Edison, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Samuel Morse, Andrew Carnegie, while Bulgarian children cannot say a single name of a Bulgarian inventor, entrepreneur or educational figure. And between the second half of the 18th century and 1944, Bulgarian history is a history of intellectual, scientific, religious and economic rise, as well as a history of resistance of individuals and organizations against the growing pressure of the state in public life. This true history of the Bulgarian people is missing from Bulgarian textbooks, replaced almost exclusively by the history of political struggles until 1878 and state politics thereafter. World history is also predominantly political and collectivist-oriented: economic history, history of science and technology, and history of intellectual and civic movements are usually limited to one lesson per entire historical period. Contemporary interpretations of the years of communism in Bulgaria need not even be mentioned; there the need for a complete change of official interpretations is obvious.
Economics and economic geography are also taught solely from a statist perspective. The economic ideas of the Austrian and other schools of anti-statist economic interpretations are gradually entering Bulgarian universities, but so far this has not had an impact on secondary school textbooks.
The very choice of titles for analysis, as well as the methodology of analysis in the literature program, are always in accordance with the school's ideology regarding history. Therefore, a change is also necessary in the literature program, both Bulgarian and foreign. It is true that the standards for literary analysis can be considered a technical issue, unaffected by ideologies (although this is not certain); but these standards still work with a certain ethical system in the analysis of works, and this ethical system is necessarily based on some ideology. Ethics is not a technical problem.
And so on, the list goes on. The dominance of statism and collectivism in the curriculum creates a certain mindset in students. The social and political apathy of today's high school seniors—and, if you will, the prevailing "chalgadzhi" vulgarity—can flourish only in a collectivist environment; they need the psychology of peer pressure and blind imitation. The courage to be different, innovation, the entrepreneurial spirit, personal activity flourish only where the individual is psychologically free from the influence of the crowd; they need the ideology of individualism. Humanities and social science programs must reflect this shift from collectivism to individualism; such a shift may be the best service that private programs can do for children whose parents have chosen freedom in education.
