Problems in the Belarusian education system

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the former soviet countries were able to decide by their own about politics and therefore about education. Most of the countries are still using the old soviet education system and did not modernize them, which leads to big problems.

To show which problems in the post-soviet education system exists I choose, as an example Belarus.

In Western European countries we are used to have new school books with modern information. In Belarus it is different. Hanna a Belarusian volunteer from my project told me that they have new books, but with information from the time of Soviet Union. They absolutely do not fit in that time. As well she explained me; the government does not want to spend money on books with actualized information. In their opinion it would be too expensive to write all of them new.

Additionally the teachers are not motivated to teach which leads also to a low level of education. The demotivation of teachers has two causes.

On the one hand the salary of teachers is very low. They earn between 100 and 350 Dollars per month. Out of this reason most of the good teachers become a private teacher, since they earn a lot more money, around 15 Dollars per hour.

On the other hand a lot of the teachers had no other option as to become a teacher. In Belarus the marks for pedagogical university are the lowest why a lot of the students become a teacher. Thus you will young teachers who were not the best at school and are not proper for teaching.

Consequently the lessons are not on a high level and according to Hanna about 80% of the students have a private teacher to prepare themselves for the entrance exams for university. If you have no money and are not very smart you will have troubles to pass them and you end up unmotivated in the pedagogical faculty, like your teachers before.

However the biggest problem is that the teachers need to do a lot of useless work. Hanna told me that they need to do a lot of paperwork. Moreover if the minister tells them that for example his son has a hockey game they need to go there. In conclusion teachers have issues which constrict them to be a proper teacher.

Indeed universities have similar problems and the level of knowledge is not very good after you have finished. Mostly your knowledge is not good enough and not suitable for the real and modern job market, clarified Hanna.

Summarized the problems of the Belarusian education system are huge. The government is not able to modernize the education system because of missing knowledge and money. They pay teachers not enough salary and a lot of them are just teachers as it was their only option.

Certainly not all post-soviet countries have these problems. For example Georgia changes step by step its education system and now it is more modern.