Uzbekistan all out to reform education

By Park Moo-jong

Education is said to be a plan of the state spanning a hundred years.

It cannot be overemphasized that all countries, especially underdeveloped and developing ones, should make more efforts to inspire and educate their new generations in order to survive the ever-intensifying global competition.

When it comes to education, South Korea, as U.S. President Barrack Obama stated previously, could be a role model for such nations in terms of securing human resources.

Korea’s rapid expansion of educational opportunities and the improvement of the quality of such is a marvel to many policymakers worldwide.

The rapid accumulation of human resources through the expansion of the education system has been a crucial part of the growth engine in the nation’s rapid economic expansion.

Uzbekistan is one of the developing countries seeking to take lessons from Korea’s education experience. The central Asian country established diplomatic ties with Seoul in January 2002 after it became independent from the former Soviet Union in September 1991.

In an ambitious effort to upgrade and reform its educational system, the Uzbek government, under the initiative of President Islam Karimov, hosted an international educational conference last month: “Fostering a Well Educated and Intellectually Advanced Generation – A Critical Prerequisite for Sustainable Development and Modernization of a Country.”

Building a new society

About 300 education experts, officials and journalists from 48 countries, eight international organizations and educational foundations attended the forum held in Tashkent. Among them were Vice UN Secretary General Noylin Heiler; Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda; and Ahmed Mohammed Ali, president of the Islamic Development Bank.

From Korea, 15 university presidents and professors participated in the conference. They included Lee Joon-koo, president of Daegu Hanny University; Lee Bo-yeon, president of Joongbu University; Synn Ilhi, president of Keimyung University; and Sihn Hang–gyun, president of Seoul National University of Education.

Addressing the global forum, President Karimov emphasized that the “National Program for Training of Specialists” his government adopted 15 years ago “stands as an inseparable and integral part of our own Uzbek model of economic and political reforms based on a step-by-step and evolutionary principle of building a new society in the country.”

“The program is aimed at completely rejecting stereotypes and dogmas of the communist ideology imposed in the past, consolidating democratic values in the minds of the people, and firstly, among the young generation,” he said.

The program features 12-year universal compulsory and free education via a “9+3” plan, namely nine years of study in a secondary school and the next three years in specialized professional colleges and academic lyceums where students obtain vocational training in the two to three specialties demanded by the labor market, he explained.

Intellectual treasure

Noting that more than 1,500 new professional colleges and academic lyceums have been built, Karimov said, “We attach great importance to giving pupils not only a broad-scale knowledge and vocational skills, but also to compulsory learning foreign languages.”

“This is the most important condition for active communication of our young people with their counterparts from foreign countries, and allows them to get an extensive knowledge of everything that is going on in the modern world and enjoy a huge world of intellectual treasure.”

The higher institutions play an important role in reforming the educational process and training highly qualified personnel required in the labor market, he said. During the last years their number has increased twice and now there are more than 230,000 students studying at 59 universities and other higher educational institutions, he added.

“The annual expenditure for reforming and developing education in Uzbekistan makes up 10-12 percent of GDP and their share of the spending side of the government’s budget exceeds 35 percent, and this by itself serves as confirmation of the huge attention being paid to this sphere,” he said.

The President also said, “I would like to especially emphasize the growing volume of foreign technical assistance being channeled to the development of education, which was made up of more than $500 million over the past period ― the Asian Development Bank’s $290 million, the Republic of Korea’s $110 million, the World Bank’s $33 million, $42 million from the OPEC Fund, the Saudi Fund, and the Islamic Development Bank, and other donors’ 100 million dollars.”

In-depth debates

“The new generation, the educated youth who are free of any vestiges of the past are today turning into a vital driving force for democratization, liberalization and renewal, and the confident growth of the country,” Karimov told the forum.

Wrapping up the conference that featured in-depth debates at five subcommittees, the participants agreed that the competitiveness of any country in the world market is not so much dependent on the availability of natural resources, but on the highly educated and disciplined labor force that is able to develop modern, constantly updated technology.

They recommended that the Uzbek authorities actively promote the practice of establishing branches in the country’s prestigious foreign higher education institutions. In particular, they stressed the need to establish an effective system for training teachers, in accordance with changes in the structure of the economy and the basic needs of society, and to enhance the prestige of the teaching profession by increasing material and moral incentives.

In their final report, the education experts asked the Uzbek education policymakers to ensure full access for all students and teachers to information and communication technologies and widely adopted e-learning.

They also called for the expansion of the teaching at all levels of education in foreign languages that will provide better access for young people to information resources, as well as adaptation to the conditions of the international labor market.