The author takes it for granted that freedom of school is a necessary pre-condition for development of independent and responsible behavior in students. Assuming that, he undertakes a study of the Basic Curriculum for Russian Schools, more specifi cally, the dynamics of its changes as compared to similar processes in other countries. Comparing Basic Curricula from recent years and the Federal State Education Standards with one of the latest Soviet school curriculum, namely, that for the academic year 1988-1989, the author investigates changes in the following indicators: optional courses, maximum admissible load, amount of time designated for specifi c courses, etc. Then these indicators are compared to similar ones in the curricula of developed countries. The fi nal conclusion is that despite all fi ne words in concepts and programs, the Russian education system is only faking changes, falling behind more and more each year with regard to developed countries.

The author investigates specifi c features of managing bodies’ eff orts to increase the quality of education. The case of high school profi lization is used to illustrate the purposes of the increase in the quality of education services and to show the necessity of the restructuring of urban school networks in order to achieve these goals. The author describes organizational, fi nancial, work power, and control mechanisms likely to be involved in the task. Besides that, he considers ways of interaction with the external environment of local education systems to be used by the local managing bodies.

The authors suggest a new concept of evaluation of general school students’ achievements. The concept is based on a three level model of the individual progress. In the article, they provide a detailed structured defi nition of the individual progress, and provide arguments for the methodological and technological possibility of its measurement using an original method ‘Delta’. The authors present the routines and results of test material validation. They discuss prospects of usage of grades obtained by the ‘Delta’ system in the interest of various participants of the education process, namely, teachers, students, and their parents.

The article examines potential demand for education credits. The authors consider the connection between the conditions of credit provision and the readiness of consumers to use the credit, the eff ects of sociodemographic characteristics of families are taken into account. It is shown that in the pre-crisis period, a majority of households did have a reasonably detailed idea of conditions of education credit provision and were ready to use these fi nancial service of Russian banks, if the need would arise. It is empirically proven that the relative uncommonness of education credits in that period had to do with the specifi cs of credit provision conditions.

Implementation of the Bologna agreement, which now embraces all European countries, leads to an overhaul of national education systems. Anticipating the organized transition of Russian universities to the multilevel education model, it is highly relevant to analyze structural transformations of the higher education in the countries that initiated the Bologna process. The author studies the German experience, as the education system there is the most similar to the Russian one. Besides that, Germany has accumulated a vast experience of reforming the education system in accordance with the Bologna agreement, while intense educational and scientifi c ties between Germany and Russia stimulate a particular interest to the practices of the German higher school. The article considers all principal components of the reform: the three level system of higher education, the credit transfer, the European supplement to a diploma, double diplomas, and academic mobility.

The main direction of changes in virtual learning in recent years is related to the increase in the importance of the student’s independence. A few years ago it was the students’ joint use of digital data collections that received most attention, while the collections were created by institutions and professionals. Now it is web cooperation and joint creative eff ort that are considered most important. The article analyzes the development of the web community of collective hypertext developers in the WikiWiki environment, http://www. letopisi.ru, in 2006–2008. Participants of the training project add new articles to the encyclopedia and link articles together. The analysis uses the most successful projects carried out by the community, data on the internet activity of the audience, and numerical characteristics of the connectedness of the hypertext and of stability of the web community.

Community involvement in education is one of the state priorities in current education policies of Russia. The article investigates the question whether school sites provide opportunities for sides involved to search for common ground and to get feedback. In order to do that, the author analyzes the content of 100 Russian school sites.

This is a continuation of the article Co-operative model of innovation competitions in pedagogics as a mechanism of reform advancement in education published in no 3 of Issues in Education in 2008. The previous article dealt with the eff ectiveness of competitive and cooperative models from the viewpoint of their correspondence to managerial expectations of the organizers. The present article describes the results of development and trial of co-organizing competition model in the framework of the project ‘Introducing computers in education’ in Krasnoyarsk region in 2005–2008.

The authors suggest a non conventional technique of teaching political science. The idea is to use fi ction in the study of basic topics of political science. The main purpose of this technique is to develop the creative thinking in students, to teach them to form their own defi nitions of political processes under the way, to analyze the causal connections between them, and to fi nd non-standard solutions for problems of diff erent complexity. To illustrate the use of the technique, the authors describe exercise sessions in the course ‘Introduction to political science’ taught to freshmen at the Faculty of Applied Political Sciences at the HSE.

Introduction to the report of the Lisbon Council, published on November 18, 2008 on the website www.lisboncouncil.net.

The article employs regression models on the data of the Education Economy Monitoring in order to study factors infl uencing the propensity of university teachers to engage in research. As independent variables, the authors take both personal characteristics of teachers and institutional factors, like management policies, contract completeness, and characteristics of research environment at the university. It is shown that participation in research cannot be considered solely as a source of extra income: the research is largely an investment in human and social capital (reputation). The benefi ts from these investments can be obtained in other spheres, including those producing profi t, like teaching and consulting. It is discovered that in Russian universities, it is the favorable academic environment rather than the type of contract or the management policies that more aff ect research achievements of teachers.

The paper is based on a poll of students at two business schools: Higher School of Management of HSE and Higher School of Financial Management ANKh. Under scrutiny are strategies and priorities of investment in business education, and indicators of students’ satisfaction with education. The author shows that it is possible to construct a typology of student groups with respect to socioeconomic features, on one hand, and with respect to time, money, and eff ort investments in the increase of their human, social, and symbolic capital.

The article presents a collection of documents shedding light on relations of Russia with other countries in the fi eld of education in 16th-18th cc. In textbooks of history, it was long assumed that the idea to teach Russian youth abroad emerged in early 18th century, the time of Peter the Great’s reforms. However, the documents show that as early as in the 16th century, young people were sent abroad in order to study and become translators and interpreters for a number of Russian ministries (prikazes). The documents refl ect another important aspect of Russian relations with European countries, namely, the study of these countries’ subjects in Russia.

Translated: Delbanco А. The Universities in Trouble // The New York Review of Books. Vol. 56. № 8. 

In public opinion, educational innovations are still only restricted to introduction of novel technological and methodological devices in teaching. The author argues that the path to essential change in education must go through a change of the communication paradigm: from a monologue to a dialogue, from the paternalistic approach to partnership, from opposition to interaction. Schools and universities need to introduce specifi c courses aiming at development of communicative skills of both students and teachers.