State priorities in education: theory versus practice

According to a series of state strategies, "informatics, information and communication technologies are a national priority." However, according to the actual actions of the Ministry of Education and Science, the following things are happening:

1. They are forcibly closing classes in mathematics high schools in Ruse, Burgas, Vratsa and Plovdiv so that students can enroll in other declining schools that are currently facing closure;
2. The subject "Informatics" has been dropped from the mandatory curriculum of non-mathematical high schools, and (mainly due to the huge lack of teachers in this field) will gradually disappear almost everywhere;
3. It doesn't matter that the average salary for computer scientists and IT specialists is chasing the MPs' salaries - computer science and IT teachers receive the same regulated salaries as everyone else, just like all other teachers.

Why is this happening given the shortage of staff?

All this is happening against the backdrop of constant declarations by the ICT business that Bulgaria is experiencing a huge shortage of personnel – not just qualified ones, but a lack of personnel in general. The sector has constant economic growth and increasing employment, it already makes a serious contribution to GDP, but the education system does not respond to it in any way – on the contrary, everything possible is apparently being done to hinder its development.

Naturally, there will be people who will gloat over the proliferation of “software academies” that train programmers and IT specialists in the private sector. Naturally, such projects should be welcomed and embraced with open arms. The problem is that they are not complementary to public education, but have taken over its function completely, duplicating it because of its inadequacy.

Should taxpayers pay to train “specialists” for dead sectors of industry where employers pay minimum wages that are months behind?

Should secondary schools in the countryside churn out staff who have difficulty finding jobs at minimum wage, while ICT companies wonder how to import staff from Ukraine and Macedonia to hire for starting salaries of 2,000 leva?

If no one wants to enroll in a school, should it be kept alive at all costs, thus wasting our money and ruining several years of our children's lives?

Who should the education system work for – the handful of school employees, the municipal bureaucrats, or the children?

Our totalitarian education system is doomed to failure

What has been happening in the Republic of Bulgaria in recent years is a crime against people's freedom. The regulations that are being introduced are unprecedented totalitarianism. Such an attitude towards the sphere of education did not exist even during the time of socialism - yes, you heard correctly, even under the rule of Todor Zhivkov we had a much more democratic, freer and more flexible education system. Currently, our state operates in a market economy, and the following fundamentally wrong planning policies are taking place in the sphere of education:

• The system of delegated budgets was de facto ruined because mass exceptions were made so that poorly functioning schools could be saved with additional funding. Instead of buying a bus and having a handful of students from a village go to the central school, their local school is kept alive and spends the same money as schools in the burning cities;
• "The money follows the student" but only in municipal and state schools. Private schools are entitled to subsidies only on paper - in reality they are obliged to admit 20% of their students for free, which actually renders the subsidy meaningless;
• Homeschooling is allowed, but the lives of those who choose this path are turned into a constant hell of checks by social services and annual tribunals at the local school, where in most cases the parents who refused to enroll their child with them and thus deprived them of the subsidy look on with frowning eyes;
• People are deprived of a free choice of primary school because mandatory zoning was introduced. Where there were some glimmers of better schools, to which there was an influx and students applied not just from other neighborhoods, but even from other cities, this was destroyed because "sedentary" was introduced and now only neighborhood children have access to them;
• As I already wrote above, they are also starting to deprive people of access to the more desirable and nicer high schools, with the Education and Training Board starting to forcibly close classes, even though the schools have sufficient capacity for them;
• And let's not forget that "entry the second way" with fake medical certificates has become the norm. It is most visible in kindergartens, where there is a great shortage of places. Expect it soon in primary education, where schools have been deprived of the opportunity to set their own admission rules. Don't be surprised if in a few years statistics come out according to which Bulgaria is the country with the most chronically ill children and children with "special educational needs". We have already proven that we can with fake TELK for early pensions, now it is time to prove the same for the younger generation.

What is coming is that in the coming years, national statistics will report a “worrying trend” of increased emigration of young families towards normal countries in the European Union. And yes, this will not be an emigration of minority families – on the contrary, it will be an emigration of middle-class people who will seek a better future for their children. This is because our school education is over-centralized and at the same time increasingly unfit for this.

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