EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Every new thing is a well-forgotten old + a pinch of salt. Can you imagine how an educational initiative during the socialist era was regularly branded as "pro-Western" and "American", a few years after the fall of the regime it was closed by revanchist-minded politicians because it was "communist", and today everyone is stubbornly trying to implement its basic ideas (rewritten with new terms so that it is not obvious), because its practices have already been implemented in other countries, and we have irrevocably fallen behind?
I will start my story from a distance. Blagovest Sendov is a prominent Bulgarian mathematician. In addition to his scientific contributions in the field of mathematics, he is also well known as an extremely great innovator in education. As a preface, I will mention, for example, that back in 1970 he implemented a new organizational model in higher education in mathematics and mechanics, dividing it into three blocks - A, B and C. Block A lasts 4 years and is equivalent to the current "bachelor" degree. Block B lasts 1.5 to 2 years and is equivalent to the current "master" degree. Block C lasts 3 years and is equivalent to a doctorate. For reference, the famous "Bologna Process", through which European countries unify their higher education in exactly these three educational levels, was carried out only in the late 1990s. That is, Academician Sendov was farsighted enough 25 years earlier to assess that the optimal model for degrees in higher education was exactly this one.
What is the "PGO" educational model?
Let's move on 9 years later. With the seemingly modest task of "writing a new primer for the 1st grade", an initially small team led by Blagovest Sendov begins working on a project called "Problem Group in Education" (PGOE). The fundamental idea implemented in this primer may seem banally simple to you - the driving force of the educational process should be the curiosity and cognitive need of the child, not coercion and the threat of punishment. Also, that creativity should be encouraged and the child should be an active participant in the rediscovery of knowledge, not a passive listener. As well as that the lessons in the textbooks should arouse interest in students so that they themselves want to learn them, and not be "dry and boring". How simple and natural these things are, right? You will be surprised, but to this day most authors of educational content have not even reached these elementary ideas. Strangely enough, what is today called the "research approach in education" and is the main topic for demonstrating innovations at a number of scientific conferences around the world is essentially exactly the same, but presented with new words and terms in a slightly more modern, information technology-supported form, of what PGEs presented back in the 1980s...
Another of the main ideas in the proposed new system of PGE is to blur the boundaries between the previously different subjects. Instead of teaching separate subjects such as Bulgarian language, Homeland Studies, Mathematics, Drawing, etc., common subjects are beginning to be formed, such as "Nature" (Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Geography) and "Reading, Writing, Thinking" (Mathematics, Bulgarian Language and Literature). The idea here is to strengthen the so-called "cross-curricular connections", i.e. to show that what is studied in one subject has application in all possible spheres of practice, and is not isolated and unrelated to other sciences, i.e. it is used directly, albeit in a different form, in other subjects. What could be more natural than for subjects to support and build on each other? It turns out that it is not so simple.
For example, even in 2007, in his monograph, Prof. Iliya Gyudzhenov showed in his research that many university professors are still not ripe for this idea - when asked what knowledge from other subjects they use, they indicate too little (as if their subject can be self-sufficient and depends little on others), and when asked in which other subjects their own knowledge is used, they indicate a huge field for its application (as if other subjects cannot exist without theirs). It is precisely this difficult-to-overcome problem - the lack of teamwork among teachers - that has been overcome by the PGE at least at the primary education level. The textbooks, which are slightly playfully informally called "by Vschiskolologia" are illustrated by the famous cartoonist and artist Donyo Donev. Adhering to the ideas from above - they are not only fun and interesting, but also entirely pragmatic, with numerous practical examples of the applicability of the studied knowledge, i.e. interesting for students. If you look at today's MES curricula, you will see only a partial realization of these ideas (for example, the subjects "The World Around Us" and "Man and Nature" were born from a similar unification of other subjects a few years ago).
The positives of earlier inclusion of children in education
Another idea that the PGE implemented at the time was that children should be included in the education system earlier. The practice at the time was to start in first grade at the age of 7. Instead, the PGE proposes to start at the age of 6. The reason is, on the one hand , research that shows that children have a significantly greater potential for earlier inclusion in education, but on the other hand, it is purely pragmatic from the point of view of something that we rarely think about – if they start at the age of 7, their education ends in the 12th grade at the age of 19. All teachers know how problematic the 12th grade is today, because they have to deal with people who already have the self-esteem of adults. Starting earlier would also partially solve this problem.
That is, the PGE system allows for a more seamless extension of children's school education so that it is competitive with those from other countries (from the Western world, where 12 years of schooling is common). There is really nothing more natural than for the completion of secondary education to coincide with the coming of age. Unfortunately, today's education system in Bulgaria is not yet ripe for this idea. On the contrary, it is going in the opposite direction, because with the introduction of mandatory preschool preparation (which in most cases is simply mandatory kindergarten for 5 and 6 year olds), the possibility for parents to send their child to school earlier was practically interrupted.
All-day education – oh, this topic that has literally wiped keyboards from typing in offices in ministries and journalists’ desks in recent years. The introduction of this natural practice, which not only relieves working parents, but also introduces a system into the lesson-self-preparation cycle, is a problematic topic today, which was resolved during the PGE. The afternoon “care center” (as we know it today) was used both for games and sports, and for preparing “homework”.
What are the other innovations of this system?
Do you know about the periodic journalistic programs about “heavy backpacks”? Not only did the students who studied under the “Sendov System” not have heavy backpacks (the unified subjects with one common textbook also contributed to this), but they also… almost never carried them. The children took their textbooks and notebooks to school on Monday and took them back on Friday. Outside of the weekends, they didn’t need them at home. You’ve all seen American movies that show “lockers” in schools, where each student keeps their personal belongings, right? Take a walk in an average Bulgarian school today – such lockers are still almost nowhere to be found. Under the system of acad. Sendov, not that they succeeded in making them en masse (the purely physical limitations of poorly designed Bulgarian schools, which are not provided with wide corridors, make this task difficult to achieve), but they struggled with alternative approaches to solving this problem even at that time. And they often succeeded – for example, with wardrobes in the classrooms.
In recent years, a practice has been implemented in our country that children from the 1st to the 4th grade do not repeat, as well as do not receive grades on the six-point system. Well, you guessed it – this was implemented by the PGO in their model back in the 80s of the last century. The main idea of the system of Acad. Sendov was not to teach children to "note-taking" from an early age. Looking around the world today, it can be said that they were right!
In recent years, it has become very popular to use information technologies in education. Yes, this was deeply embedded in the 80s by the PGE. Today, training with first steps in programming through software products such as Scratch is implemented in the fifth grade (we have recently been doing it in Bulgaria as well). Well, in the system of Acad. Sendov, the same thing was done, but on the then current Logo system, exactly in the fifth grade.
What are the disadvantages of this system?
Naturally, this story can continue with many more smaller details. Perhaps it is time to focus on a summary. Undoubtedly, from the distance of time, it can be unequivocally said that the PGE headed by Acad. Sendov have looked at some of the best practices around the world and accordingly created an extremely modern educational system, many aspects of which were introduced in other countries years later. As you have seen, we continue to fail to implement many of them in our country today, even though we want to. Then why did the "Sendov System" fail and was closed?
Like everything in this world, the system of Academician Sendov had its drawbacks. One of them, for example, was that over time, some teachers noticed that the “handwriting” of children definitely suffered– students trained under the new system generally wrote uglier than the others. Today, at a time when even young children already write more on smartphones, tablets and keyboards than on paper, it may seem small to us, but the problem was definitely serious for its time and could not be easily replaced by the better mathematics successes that the “Sendov children” achieved. All of this, of course, was easily overcome with minimal reforms (introducing more hours of writing at the expense of others), but nevertheless it was used as a weapon by the opponents of the model.
Another, more serious problem was the unpreparedness of teachers. It is extremely difficult to break the thinking of an adult who was taught in one way and then worked his entire working life to teach other people in it. That is why, with every major reform, the internal resistance within the teachers' guild is enormous. Many of the "affected" teachers, who had to teach children in the new way, simply did not want their already achieved comfort zone to be disturbed. Many did not want their "central role" of lecturer - leader and manager of the educational process, which gives them self-confidence - to be shifted in the direction of more group activities and student creativity, due to purely selfish feelings and, I will say it deliberately too harshly, a delusion of grandeur.
What lessons can we draw from this story?
The resistance of the guild, combined with somewhat insignificant statistics, nevertheless gave a weapon to the political opponents of Academician Sendov, with which to destroy the system he created (it should be mentioned that in addition to his academic career, he also had a serious political career). Ultimately, the PGO system was closed in the early 1990s.
History is a science that forces us to systematize the knowledge gained from our experience so that we can use it to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. The PGE system certainly teaches us such lessons:
- Innovative practices today can lead to a qualitative revolution tomorrow. Therefore, they should not be stifled, but on the contrary – they should be supported. There is nothing tragic in a failed experiment. The tragic thing is that you had a powerful weapon that you did not use, but freely handed it over to the competition. Freedom in education must be supported at all costs;
- Even socialist Bulgaria was in some ways more democratic and decentralized in its education than our country today. Well, then there were no private schools like there are today (although very few), but on the other hand, some of the leaders realized that not everything should be too regulated and centrally planned according to a single template. Yes, there was sometimes an opportunity to create alternative projects - both small and large, such as PGE. Yes, people took into account that there were different groups of students with different needs, and there were, for example, completely different standards, curricula and textbooks for different types of schools. And today our politicians continue to talk about how "all schools should be equal" (we are talking about primary schools) and do not allow alternative projects to exist. Or we can notice that participation in PGE by parents was voluntary during socialism - they themselves assessed whether or not they wanted their child to study in such a school. And today, Bulgaria is introducing a centralized "zoning" of schools based on address registration, which practically obliges people to be able to enroll their child only in the school closest to them, without being able to choose.
- When things are planned by proven specialists - from academic circles, from creative individuals, from successful professionals in their field, in general, from people with demonstrated competences to the general public - this will always yield much better results than those of anonymous "expert committees", deeply hidden behind soundproof doors in ministries, which usually serve the current narrow party interests, and do not follow clearly stated goals.
