Ιt’s a popular Balkan anecdote: any young person who wants to make the parents proud, there are very specific career choices: to become “a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, or else a disgrace to the family”. It is the close family circle and then, teachers and mentors that guide young people to certain professional paths and relative attitudes, such as seeking a “permanent”, “safe” job, ideally as a public servant. The school curriculum also seems to have been designed exactly for this life plan.
Figures, however, indicate high unemployment rates among young people with “popular” university degrees, or inability to survive in the labor market and develop oneself in the long term (World economic forum, 2016). Therefore, either young people are being prepared for the wrong jobs, or they are being taught the wrong skills. Either way, statistics show a big gap between vocational reality and competences acquired at formal educational institutions (Ristova 2017).
It is a fact that many of the jobs that exist today will not exist in the future. This is the way things have always been; crafts and professions that flourished in the past tend to become obsolete as needs and standards change. In a similar fashion, today’s children will be probably doing jobs in the future that do not even exist yet. What is expected of education, therefore, is to prepare the new generation for the unknown. One of the key points of the World Economic Forum for 2016 is that within the next decade, candidates who aspire to be successful in the labor market will be expected to have certain skills, among which cognitive flexibility, negotiation, emotional intelligence, creativity, critical thinking and complex problem solving (World Economic Forum b, 2016).
To approach this rather ambitious goal, ideally, people and institutions dealing with education should be alert, open to novel ideas and methods, able to predict future needs and constantly informed about global developments. The educational system, respectively, should be flexible, innovative and universal enough to support youngsters in acquiring the kind of skills that would help them bring out the best in them and see change as an opportunity, not as a catapult.
Countries such as Finland have been constantly updating their curricula, enriching their methodologies with novel tools based on contemporary research. In these countries, schools are a projection of real life, and are, thus, in constant interaction with the “outside” world. Children are given tasks that are relevant and applicable to contemporary reality. Teaching focuses on supporting young people develop both hard and soft skills which are indispensable in today’s societies.
Even though it is still too soon for research to conclude whether these pedagogic endeavors will be fruitful and at the same time beneficial to young people in the long term, so far, the Finnish educational system has been ranked among the best in the world.
This idyllic image of how education should be is still remote from the Balkan reality (WOF 2017, Ristova 2017). Educational institutions in the Balkan countries suffer from a number of plagues, varying from lack of infrastructure to low public investment in institutions, people and values related with education. It is doubtful whether critical thinking, empathy and flexibility can be cultivated through educational models which are based on the one hand on a passive teaching methodology praising memorization and on the other hand, on nationalistic values, which rise as a defense mechanism to the pluralism that emerges in our societies due to globalization and the movement of populations. In many countries of the Balkans, national commemorations are celebrated with students’ parades and the reading of nationalistic poems; the promoted image of “patriotism” is linked with very specific ethnic and religious attributes; educational content is impregnated with religious teachings, values and practices, highlighting the role of religious leaders in national fights. Furthermore, the image of the “others” promoted through history books is quite often partial and distorted, feeding, thus, stereotypes, misconceptions and eventually hate and radicalism (Millas 2005, 2010).
Coming to the connection of educational institutions with the actual labor market, research shows that technical and practical input at schools and universities is often outdated, inadequate or incomplete (Ristova 2017). Technical skills, however, can be acquired with additional vocational training and specialization courses. What is harder to develop or reverse are embedded values about how the labor market works and most importantly, about how human relations work and how people management and interpersonal competences can make a difference in one’s career.
So, what can be done?
