Vladimir Filippov holds a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences. He has been Education Minister since the late 1990s – a difficult period to say the least – and, since then, has devoted himself to keeping Russia’s educational system up to speed.

Filippov, 52, looks far younger than his age. Born in Uryupinsk, a town in Volgograd Oblast, he moved up the academic ladder and and credits hard work and determination for his career achievements.

The energetic Filippov heads a huge ministry, and more than 40 million people – teachers, students and schoolchildren – are associated with it. It has a larger budget than any other ministry, including the Defense Ministry, and its reforms and debates reflect the state of Russian society as a whole, balancing between red tape and giving a free hand to development.

The Russia Journal: You became education minister at the end of the 1990s – not an easy period for the country – but most observers say that you have managed to do a great deal to develop education here. What are your guiding principles?

Vladimir Filippov: I have a simple principle – leaving behind all the "isms": socialism, capitalism and so on. The only "ism" I would leave is pragmatism. We have to base ourselves on what is best for the educational system and the people studying and teaching in it, and we need to act accordingly. We began by making sure teachers were paid on time, reduced utilities payments for schools and approved the basic documents that provide the foundation for developing the educational system.

Very important documents have now been approved. These include the National Education Development Doctrine and the Federal Education Development Program. These are major programs that deal with education in general.

We also had to define a whole range of concrete aims, tasks and measures at every different level of education, from pre-school to higher education, and the government approved just such a program two years ago – a concept for modernizing Russian education through to 2005.

I think the fact that this program contains concrete measures is a sign of pragmatism. This approach has the support of the people working in the educational system, and, through our joint efforts it enables us to deal with the problems we face.

TRJ: The educational system is complex. Which level gives the ministry the most problems today – pre-school education, school, vocational education, higher education?

VF: There is plenty of work to do at every level. Regarding pre-school education, there are still unresolved problems of education content and financing. We still have to approve standards for pre-school education, that is, set out model programs for kindergartens, because without these programs, kindergartens start to ask parents for money for everything and anything, including for what is supposed to be free, such as teaching children to count to 10 and learn the alphabet.

Once we have approved pre-school education standards, we can guarantee that certain services will be free and, at the same time, give kindergartens the chance to earn money by offering services beyond the standard program, for instance Spanish lessons or dancing and so on, for a certain fee.

The biggest difficulties are in school education. For a start, this is the level with the most people – 20 million of the total of 33 million students in Russia. There are still basic problems to solve in this area, such as what to teach in schools and how to teach it. And the main problem: How to evaluate it at the end of the process. At the moment, the teachers teach the content and they give the grades. Once we have the single-exam system in place, one teacher will teach, and another will hand out the grades.

Today, schools in Russia are controlled entirely by their directors, but the Law on Education calls for a more public organizational form. We also have to change the way schools function economically. Teachers’ wages are tightly pegged to the number of hours they work, and this encourages them to give children as many hours of various subjects as they can.

There are also a lot of problems still to tackle in other areas of education. The government-approved education-development concept, for example, states that the priority over the coming years should go to vocational education. Now, the system has been skewed in favor of higher education. Too many children finish school and want to go to a university, partly in order to get a deferral from military service. As a result, there are too few students in vocational establishments learning trades. Industry today is beginning to recover, and there is a real shortage of workers.

TRJ: How much budget money goes to education? How does it all work in practice, and is this money enough?

VF: We get about half of what we actually need, but since the educational system can also earn its own money, we make up for a part of this shortfall through our own efforts. In higher education, half of the students are studying for free, and the other half pay fees. In 2002, the budget for higher education was 33 billion rubles, and the higher-educational system earned around 30 billion rubles.

There can only be enough budget money in a system of developed capitalism or developed socialism. Russia isn’t about to see either system in the near future, and so we cannot count on having enough budget money to cover all our needs. This means we have to develop ways of attracting money from other sources into the sector, as is done in many other countries.

TRJ: You mentioned modernization of the educational system. Why is it necessary, and what is involved?

VF: We called this process "modernization" rather than "reform" because we wanted to emphasize that we will not change the essence of the Russian educational system – its fundamental principles will remain in place.

The Russian educational system is has at its foundation a systemic approach based on standards for higher and school education and so on. Many countries follow this principle of state standards, and we will keep it in place. We will continue to teach mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology and so on, that is, continue to give students a solid foundation in math and science. We will also keep to the principle of having a system based on free education.

The modernization program concentrates on three main priorities. First is to make education more accessible, including quality education for talented children. Good education should depend on the children’s abilities and not on their parents’ wallets. We want to make kindergartens more accessible (sometimes there are waiting lists to get in at the moment), and also gymnasiums and lyceums (which sometimes go by ability to pay rather than ability to learn) and make higher education more accessible (it can be hard for students from Siberia and the Far East to get into universities in the European part of the country).

The second priority is to improve the quality of education at every level so that schoolchildren do not need to get tutors to help them get into universities and so that university teaching itself is of a better quality, as there has been a drop in standards in many cases since paying for education began.

The third priority is to make more effective use of budget money for education. We still have a socialist-style system in place: We finance educational establishments based on past estimates of their needs. In Volgograd Oblast, for example, where I’m from, the tractor plant has cut production three-fold, the chemicals plant likewise, but the local educational establishments continue training people to work in these areas. Not one department and not one chair has closed. At the same time, half of the graduates of pedagogical institutes do not go on to become teachers, but pedagogical institutes are not very well-funded. In other words, funds are not being distributed effectively.

TRJ: Work has begun to introduce a single-exam system that will set a common state exam for all final-year schoolchildren, but there is still a great deal of debate among specialists about the merits of this system. How long will it take to get it working throughout the country?

VF: This is a major innovation that has two aims: To make higher education more accessible and to improve the quality of school education. The experiment is proceeding at an active pace. In 2003, 47 of the country’s 89 regions took part. In 2004, 64 regions will take part, and three-quarters of all final-year schoolchildren will take the single exam.

At the same time, we have developed a system to seek out talented young people who compete in contests held by regions, with the winners then going on to universities without having to take exams. This has hugely increased the number of talented students getting into universities. There are now additional contests for different specialty areas (engineers, teachers, doctors, etc.).

The fact that Moscow and St. Petersburg are now joining the single-exam experiment shows that it is a success. None of the 47 regions that have tried it out have then backed out of continuing to use it. For the regions, the single exam is not so much about getting into university as about getting an objective assessment of the quality of school education.

When people talk of debate surrounding the exam, what you should remember is that children and parents come out in favor of the exam because it gives children greater possibilities for getting into different universities. They don’t need to travel anywhere, they don’t need to go call on the guy from the university-acceptance commission, and they don’t need to make sure they have the right tutor from the same university like today.

But tutors and various university-acceptance commissions are against the exam because it cuts them off from the lucrative business of entrance exams. And school directors and teachers protest against the exam because it establishes greater control over their work. But school directors and teachers who do good, honest work and know that their school will do well support the exam.

The exam will support good schools and good teachers. We had wanted to have the exam in place nationwide by 2005, but we won’t manage to do it and will probably have it in place by summer 2006.

TRJ: It’s no secret that there is little work for scientists in Russia. Many Russian science graduates end up finding work abroad. What is happening now with the brain drain, and will education reform do anything to help stop it?

VF: Russia is integrating into the world economy in all ways, including the flow of intellectual capital. Like financial capital, intellectual capital goes where conditions are good.

Of course, Russia must try to create these attractive conditions. At the 50th anniversary of Novosibirsk Technical University, the president said that we should try to create a certain mentality in our society, and that if a talented young scientist works here, we should pay him $3,000 [a month]. But the average university lecturer is still making only 3,000 rubles. Unfortunately, changing mentalities is a long and difficult process.

But though the state cannot give a lot of money to science overall at the moment, it must ensure more effective training for scientists. There is a new program that will start working from next year. Under this system, students will be able to enroll in a university under this program and have free tuition, but after their five years of study, they will either have to work for a time where the state sends them or pay back their tuition costs. This will give the state the chance to send teachers to villages and doctors to hospitals and so on. This system could also be used for scientific professions to encourage scientists to stay in Russia. The law on this program makes this possibility available. We will use economic methods and this kind of targeted program for spending the limited funds we have.

TRJ: A lot of universities, even the most prestigious ones, do not have all the modern equipment they need, making it hard to teach students up-to-date skills. What is being done in this area, and what is the ministry doing to help?

VF: There is only one way forward here, and that is to integrate universities and science. Rather than buying good equipment separately for universities and for scientific-research institutes and the Russian Academy of Sciences, there should be more integration. For example, we have signed agreements with the sections of the Academy of Sciences on locating our faculties in the academies more and more. This will eventually create a group of universities that are involved in research and training researchers but, instead of having their own laboratories, are working with the Academy of Sciences, which still has a huge potential. Like elsewhere in the world, we need to bring science and universities closer together and ensure, for example, that the best clinics are university clinics rather than particular city hospitals, which will lead to better medical training in medical schools.

TRJ: The higher-education boom has led to a bribery boom, which is in part due to teachers’ low wages. Is something being done about this?

VF: There is a lot of truth in this. There is a general state strategy for fighting corruption, because it’s not possible to fight corruption in one sector alone. Of course there is a problem with corruption and the use of connections for getting into universities. It is partly for this reason, but only partly, that the single-exam system is being introduced. This leaves the problem of bribery within the university system when students pay to be given a passing grade in exams – and not even always out of laziness but because the teachers demand it. This is a question of developing democracy within Russian society and within each educational establishment.

As part of the Bologne process that Russia is now involved in, we want each educational establishment to create a quality-control system that involves students and employers and for final exams to be graded by different teachers than the ones who taught the course, as with the single-exam system.

We hope to resolve many problems in this way. I have already set up a special commission that journalists have dubbed "the quality police." If I hear, say, through the Internet of problems at some university or other, than this brigade will go there. They will take with them a list of questions on the courses taught, give them to the students, collect the answers and bring them back to Moscow. If the answers are good, then it shows the university is working normally. Bribes, after all, are a problem where the teaching quality is poor.

TRJ: Now, there are many private universities and for-pay sections at state universities. Does this lower the quality of education?

VF: It hasn’t done anything yet to improve the quality of education. These newly created universities do not have the years of tradition that make higher education what it is. This is a problem because there are so many private universities now. But a civilized market for education services is now beginning to emerge, and the competition is forcing state universities to make more efforts to attract students away from the private sector. More and more graduates are going to state universities, even if also on a tuition-paying basis. They have realized that studying in private universities gives them a piece of paper but won’t guarantee that they find work afterward.

I think the problem of the number of students in private universities is exaggerated, for they are only 8 percent of the total. There are hardly any separate fee-paying sections in state universities. The fee-paying students study together with the others, and it is prohibited to separate them. They enter the university in different ways – some compete for free-tuition places, and others pay fees – but after that they all study following the same program.

This is a problem in any country. I wouldn’t say that we have a higher-education boom; it’s just that higher education has become more of a mass phenomenon. When something takes on a mass scale like this, no matter whether it’s shoes, clothes or education, it’s impossible to keep the quality the same throughout. You end up with differing quality; better in some places, average in others, not so good in others again.

TRJ: There has to be demand for education from society and employers. Do you have statistics on which graduates from which universities are in greatest demand with employers?

VF: There’s a paradoxical situation today of having too many graduates in law and economics. These professions have been fashionable for too long. At the same time, there are not enough genuinely good economists and lawyers in Moscow and elsewhere in the country. There are a lot of law and economics departments, but they produce few good graduates.

All professions connected to information technologies are in demand – computer-security specialists, [and specialists in] statistics, applied mathematics etc.

The main thing is that it is clear today that one diploma is not enough on the labor market. It’s good to have a second diploma, or at least to have some proof of additional skills as well.

This is why we need additional education services. We are only at the beginning of this road at the moment, and universities are making money the easy way by offering for-pay higher education. But they have not yet developed a system of additional education services. Unlike many American universities, which are a lot richer, ours are empty over the summer. Everyone is on vacation, and there is nothing going on. But they could hold language courses, for example, invite specialists, organize camps and so on. Unfortunately, we have not yet learned how to do this.

TRJ: During the Soviet years, people said that Russians read more than anyone else in the world, but now young people do not read much, especially not the classics. Does this mean that the quality of education now is lower than during the Soviet years?

VF: You know, I liked President Vladimir Putin’s answer when someone complained that today’s generation is worse than the previous one. He said that each new generation is better than the last, because if we take the opposite logic, the Neanderthals were better than us. I think it was a good answer.

Each new generation is always better overall – and also different. We used to get a lot more information through paper, through reading books, but children today have far more information at their disposal. They get it not just from books but also from television and the Internet, and they do read, even if not the classics, and they read a lot more than before.

The thing is that there was a simpler and more understandable system before of education through literature. Today, we cannot use only books to educate because the world we live in has changed. Times have changed and so have people. We need to find new approaches to children and new teaching methods, and we need to move away from authoritarian teaching to a more co-operative teaching style.