RKSM(b) activists took part in a dissemination workshop to mark the 72nd anniversary of the Bangladesh Student Union
We were invited to give a presentation on the topic of commercialization of education, educational policy and globalization. We are talking about neoliberal reforms in Russia in the field of education and science, talking about the rising cost of paid educational programs, the segregation of educational institutions and the scandal surrounding the Ilyin schools. Below is the text of our report.
On behalf of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Union — RKSM(b) — we welcome the participants of the International Seminar in honor of the seventy-second anniversary of the establishment of the Bangladesh Student Union.
We are glad that the comrades are holding such a significant and representative event and we wish productive work and important results from the conference.
Today, the problem of commercialization of education and science, neoliberal reforms in this area affects a huge number of young people around the world. Russian education also contributes to this negative influence.
In Russia, neoliberal reforms have continued throughout the entire period since the destruction of the Soviet Union. They are in the field of education and science. The commercialization of higher and secondary education is in full swingIn recent years, the cost of paid educational programs has been growing 2-3 times faster than the official inflation rate. The issue of setting tuition prices was left to universities, removing any restrictions in this matter. This leads to the fact that, despite the government’s assurances about an increase in the number of budget places, universities are reducing them. Thus, educational institutions are segregated according to property qualifications, and their division into elite and “second-class” is consolidated. At the same time, the head of the Ministry of Education and Science considers the annual increase in the number of budget places in universities unproductive.
The cessation of participation in the “Bologna Process” did not cause an ideological revision of the attitude towards the commercialization of education by the official authorities, but rightly on the part of the Bologna Group about the exclusion of Russian universities from the Bologna System. Decisions to return elements of the Soviet education system are inconsistent and half-hearted.
All this is connected with a kind of authoritarian influence in the political field, which makes self-organization in educational institutions difficult. There are real people fighting for labor and civil rights, professors, teachers, university teachers, students. However, unfortunately, due to pressure and threats from the ruling class, at the moment they are not widespread. But the recent scandal with an attempt to create a Higher Political School named after the ultra-right philosopher and supporter of fascists Ivan Ilyin on the basis of the Russian State Humanitarian University in Moscow showed that many students are ready to fight against the obscurantism and arbitrariness of the bourgeois authorities. Tens of thousands of people signed a statement against the Ilyin School. The Revolutionary Communist Youth Union has joined this struggle and will contribute to its development and transformation into a more organized force.
Despite these and many other difficulties in the conditions of capitalism and inter-imperialist confrontation, we are glad to strengthen international interaction and solidarity, which will contribute to student self-organization in the fight for a better world — a world without exploitation and alienation!»