Market Mechanisms as a Social Deadlock for Russian Education

Abstract

InRussia, the preference of the educational policy for market paths has been being formed for nearly thirty years. The mechanisms, consequences and prospects of so called marketization have not been yet studied. The article considers the marketization of education, including higher education, as a scientific and social problem. Basing on foreign and domestic sources, the author proves that the marketization of education is generated by neo-liberal attitude of the financial and economic elites seeking to reduce state budget expenditures in the social sphere and keep up the disintegration of society and to secure their future domination. The state, the bureaucratic apparatus of the education system, educators’ and researchers’ communities do not take up the problem of education marketization and its consequences. The marketization strategy along with its derivatives is taken in society as an axiom, without special studies and research. Due to this education is being dysfunctional, it experiences a protracted institutional crisis, social tensions and losses, whilst the search of ways out of the neoliberal deadlock is postponed up to uncertain future.

Education in Post-Soviet Russia: Marketisation, Financialisation and Bureacratisation – The Case of Universities

“…In Russia, the process of marketisation of education has received less intensive study, even though all the results of this process, including its negative social outcomes, have been plainly obvious for the past three decades (more will be said on this in later sections of this article). In Russia too, however, works have now appeared that examine the marketisation of education and its consequences from the economic, sociological and philosophical points of view (Klyucharev, 2015;Mironov, 2013;Osipov, 2017Osipov, , 2019Smolin, 2014Smolin, , 2015Subetto and Chekmarev, 2003;Zborovsky, 2010Zborovsky, , 2011.…”

“…Hence a number of the Russian scholars studying this topic, most of them economists (Klyachko and Mau, 2015; Kuzminov et al, 2019; Mau, 2012; and others), examine education as an area of the production of services and of market services in particular. A further group of Russian scholars, mainly sociologists and philosophers (Bulanova and Bolotin, 2019; Chekmarev, 2020; Grebnev, 2005; Mironov, 2020; Osipov, 2019; Pruel, 2002; Smolin, 2014; and others) regard education above all as a social good to be both formed and applied primarily within the framework of the public sector, without charge to the user, on the basis not of an elitist but an egalitarian approach.…”

“…Education becomes solely a question of economic efficiency, and those who receive it are viewed as individual participants in a free market that lacks any particular social purpose (for example, national and cultural continuity and the integration of society). (Osipov, 2019: 64)…”

“…The dominance of the relations of the 21st century market capitalist economy has brought about a situation in which education is increasingly being restricted to the study of narrow professional competencies, while activity in the field of education, along with its institutional forms, is being subordinated to the relations of the market and capital. Education is being marketised; all the components of the educational process, the interests, motives and values of its actors, and the administering of the activity of educational organisations (both state and private) are increasingly being subordinated not just to the market conjuncture, but also to the specific goals of securing a capitalist commercial result, rather than education as such (Osipov, 2019; Yakovleva, 2017). The result, in the era of late capitalism, is that education is being transformed into a sphere of alienated relations of commodity production and exchange (a ‘market’), within whose processes commercial (private) services are performed and commodities such as the labour power of private individuals or ‘human capital’ (to use today’s economic terminology) are produced.…”

From Educational Failure to Social Success

“…Отметим только те из них, которые являются общими для отечественной системы образования. Прежде всего, это усиление образовательного неравенства и конкуренции, проявляющихся на индивидуальном, общностном, организационном уровне, а также в территориальном плане [15][16][17]. Как уже отмечалось, фактором, сопряжённым с образовательным неравенством и стимулирующим неравномерность развития образовательного пространства, выступают образовательная миграция и политика «селекции талантов», реализуемая как в национальном масштабе, так и отдельными образовательными организациями [10].…”