Higher education teacher’s labor: creativity or “survival”?

Higher education teacher’s labor:
creativity or “survival”?


Sheregi F.E.

Cand. Sci. (Philos.), Director of Center of Social Forecast and Marketing, Moscow, Russia f-sheregi@inbox.ru

Kirillov A.V.

Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Prof., Dean of the faculty of management Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia a. v.kirillov@mail.ru

ID of the Article:


For citation:

Sheregi F.E., Kirillov A.V. Higher education teacher’s labor: creativity or “survival”?. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2017. No 11. P. 87-98




Abstract

In the last twenty-five years, the Russian Federation has instituted deep social-economic reforms, side by side with the modernization of social relationships, which has given rise to a series of negative consequences, including those in the sphere of higher professional education. In particular, they concern social status of teachers of institutions of higher education and the prestige of the profession, in many ways, devaluing the unsystematic “distribution” of science degrees, regardless of the field of the applicant. In the educational policy of the state, teachers of institutions of higher education, as a social group, are given the same status as employees and “instructors of industrial training.” In the article, the authors bring to light another important aspect of the role of teachers as generators of a progressive social order. Using current statistics and the results of their own sociological research, the authors examine the causes of the disparity of the economic and social status of university teachers, employing middle class criteria, as they are understood in economically developed countries. The authors show that the workload of university teachers is over and above the state standard for educational (classroom) workloads, as well as routine bureaucratic “paperwork,” which is unusual for intellectual work, and that they pose serious obstacles to increasing the competiveness of the country’s educational system. As a conclusion, measures to reform the system of higher professional education are proposed, which can help restore the status of a teacher in accordance with his social significance.


Keywords
education; higher education; university; profession; teacher; prestige; innovative production

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Content No 11, 2017