Russia’s Human Capital Drifts to Moronism

            Sometimes you can get away from the impression that the entire country has been living for the last few years in anticipation of a coming innovation revolution. At all levels we undergo a suggestive therapy to the purport that Russia, which could not create a developed industrial society, will be able to jump over that vexatious stage and master absolutely new, highly technological markets. The goal has nothing objectionable in itself, the only ensuing question is: who exactly will do all that? The process calls for nothing less than new professions, new type of investor and new relationships among people. Is the country ready for such a high jump?



            No one will give the definitive answer to this, but there are several alarming tendencies.  The new generation will be the one to build the future world, so it deserves having a closer look at.  The problem, typically, begins at school. Russia's history is characterized by a disquieting growth of mental underdevelopment among schoolchildren (see table). Against a background of current drastic depopulation this tendency is appalling. If the total bulk of students increased by 14% during 1932-2005, the number of children with intellectual deviations went 8.4 times up (51,000 to 430,000) within the same period. As a result, the share of retarded students against the total number hiked 7.4 times and is nearing 3%. If in 1932 only four kids out of a thousand were mentally backward, in 2005 the ratio was 30 out of a thousand. Here we face a declining tendency of the quality of the human material already at the initial stage of its conversion into human capital. Incidentally, The RF Federal Agency of Statistics makes it possible to accurately compare the data and the effect can't be written off due to the measurements deficiencies.



 

General Secondary Daytime Education Students, Russia

Period	Total, million	Children with mental deviations
		Thousand	% of the total
1932-1933	13.22	51	0.38
1970-1971	23.24	229	0.98
2000-2001	20.07	514	2.56
2005-2006	15.18	430	2.83

 

If 3% of the children are prevented from entering the general school, how many of them will be left out at the next stages of education? Another logical question: how many will graduate from high school?



However, as it turns out, there is nothing to worry about. Russia is gradually becoming a 100% high education nation. If the country featured 2.82m undergraduates in 1990, their number was 7.06m in 2005. The 150% hike in 15 years is unprecedented even up to the most daring standard. How is it possible, that the country which number more and more children incapable of mastering the usual school program, boasts the ever growing number of graduates?




            The paradox has its plausible explanation: Russian university students hardly properly study rather they simply receive their diplomas at the appointed time. Well, it looks like true. You can't simultaneously step up the extensive and the intensive constituents of the nation's human capital. You can either focus on the quality (and that is made singularly), or the quantity, leaving the quality alone. In that manner, by reducing the educational standards of the high schools, Russia copes, if only externally, with the tendency of mental debilitation of the nation, which problem is pushed to the back yard of the education.




            Universities, academies and institutes have stopped being filters of professional capacities of people. The problem of such policy is that today it's barely possible to separate the true professional and creative certified specialist from the equally certified semi-moron, because that would require a special test or expertise. In such conditions the building of innovational economy is not only problematical, but also dangerous, since the probability of all kinds of failures in the complex systems occurring from incompetence of the personnel will rise exponentially.



            Apart from all other predicaments, the absence of serious study at the universities leads to the loss of the very capacity to learn. It's related to the mere human physiology. If at an early stage the student fails to construct the positive models of knowledge in his brain, the very ability for create new informational patterns can soon disappear. The same applies to speech: it a child fails to dominate speech within a certain period, he will never do it. Therefore, the modern mass high education, without any exaggeration multiplies morons, incapable of handling new complex information.



            Meanwhile, in the developed countries the universities not only filter the students according to their professional capacities, but also participate in the molding of the intellectual elite of the society. That's why the British elite are largely represented by Oxford and Cambridge, and that of the US, by Ivy League universities. Russia has nothing even distantly similar. Notably, a research conducted by rating agency RatOr in 2008, shows that 1150 members of the top tiers of the governmental system of the state represent 411 various universities of the country. It's evident that Russia's ruling elite is not concentrated around a limited number of the best universities; rather, it is equally spread over a multitude of second-rate educational centers. Even the Moscow State University, which is responsible for the greatest share of the elite, provided only 6% of the total number.



            It's noteworthy, that the "mass" syndrome is typical for the entire Russian model of development. Any positive initiative is driven ad absurdum, whereupon absolutely new and exotic problems occur. For example, as far back as in 1990 the share of engineers in the total number of Russian workers was 3.3 times more than in the US. At the same time, the properly engineering professions were practiced by 12% technical-engineering personnel, and the very profession was one of the most despised and ostracized class of the society: they were mainly unskilled and normally underpaid. Logically enough, the first social shift in the country in the period of economic reform was the renunciation of the mass technical education. Which will be the analogy with today's total high education, is hard to predict. The one thing is clear: the quality of the Russian human capital is going down, which is a sorry contribution to the development of the innovative industries and professions. At the very best, all investment in those sectors should be qualified as highly venturous.

Balatsky Evgeny ,
03.07.2008. Views: 2084

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