During the past decade Georgia has received strong international support for education reform, and it represents an interesting case by which the effectiveness of particular interventions in the region can be assessed. Most attempts to analyse progress within the system have so far been concentrated on two aspects of formal education: private and public schools. This article analyses the dynamics of change from a different angle, and focuses attention on a third important, but shadow aspect of the education system: supplementary private tutoring. A representative survey of parents of school-age children and university entrants describes the scope, drivers and effects of private tutoring in Georgia. These findings are then used to analyse the effectiveness of the system in terms of the criteria of quality and equity.
The evolution of Georgian higher education system in recent decades almost perfectly mirrors the political and socio-economic developments in the country. Having emerged from the uniform Soviet system, it has been undergoing radical changes and has transformed into a diverse institutional setup, which, for all its similarities with various higher education systems existing in other countries, cannot be categorised as a typical representative of one.At the risk of oversimplification, we can divide the process of transformation of Georgian higher education in post-soviet period into three stages corresponding to the phases of political and socioeconomic transformations of the country. Immediately after gaining independence, when country sunk into the chaos of civil war, ethnic conflicts and economic crisis, higher education changed largely by inertia and chaotically, without much direction or a uniform vision. Swift transition to market economy was reflected through massive privatisation of costs in higher education and consequent diversification of the form of institutional ownership into public and private. In the following period after 1994, was settling down after the earlier turmoil. The higher education system continued to develop slowly and largely independently from the central governmental guidance. As higher education detached itself from the alliance with the Soviet economy and accordingly with various line ministries, many institutions changed their narrow profiles and started offering a wider range of specialisations thus responding to the demands of the market economy.Starting in 2004, following the Rose Revolution, the changes were more centralised, planned and fitted with the greater vision of economic liberalism of the government team. Joining the Bologna process and applying the principles of market economy to the governance of higher education happened simultaneously. The result was integration of research at universities and a seemingly ‘meritocratic’ way of admitting students and provision of funds, which ultimately define the prestige of universities.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the universities of the former Soviet states faced a lack of public funding that left them with tuition fees as their main—and sometimes only—source of revenue. In a context where universities were exclusively focused on their economic survival, the decision of Ilia State University (ISU) to introduce in 2008 a tuition‐free doctoral programme in Georgia was thus a striking exception. This free PhD programme still exists and more than a decade later, its rationale and hence, the question of whether its objectives have been achieved, remain controversial. The purpose of this article is to clarify these two aspects, using the perspective of stakeholders as primary data. Our findings challenge the dominant consensus on free higher education, in the sense that they show that the motives behind tuition‐free programmes may be more diverse and ambiguous than what the literature suggests. Therefore, they also question the relevance of a standard analytical framework to assess the performance of such programmes. Thus, although local and limited in scope, our study offers directions from various disciplinary perspectives for further analyses of the drivers and results of free education.
This article analyses the uses and representations of the term “critical thinking” in the social science literature, based on a qualitative content analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords retrieved from the SCOPUS database for Germany, France and Russia over the last two decades. Our analysis focuses on how the use of the term “critical thinking” has increased over time, in which contexts the term is used and in which part of article texts it is used. Our findings are counterintuitive on several levels. First, the term “critical thinking” is seldom used in a pluri‐disciplinary context. More commonly, it is used within specific discourses—notably education. Second, we found that it is mainly used instrumentally, rather than analytically. Third, most of the articles that use the term do not engage in actual critical analysis. There are also important geographic variation in the use of the term. In articles from Germany and Russia the term is used in similar ways—and differently in France. These nuances are difficult to analyse however, due to the different topics addressed, as well as author preferences. The use of the term “critical thinking” is diverse; indeed, at times weak and paradoxical. Finally, we discuss how editorial policy in academic journals possibly influences the discourse on critical thinking.
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