The Greek knowledge deficit is taking its toll…
Why is the Greek educational system so slow in responding to reforms in education and has this had any kind of impact on the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) field in Greece?
Taking a look at the infrastructure of Greek society, there are some very solid assumptions to be drawn and conclusions to be made before that question can be answered.
At least two generations have been conditioned and raised in a completely obsolete and unchanged-for over 40 years- educational system whose personal experiences and conditioned perceptions have led them to believe that learning is what happens at home and where learning takes place.
This is representative of a very low accountability system that has very few expectations from the public education system and its teachers.
This fact led to the development of an extensive and pervasive private tutoring system that functions outside the regular mandatory state school system, unsupervised by anyone, largely unregulated and created to plug the considerable gaps of the existing education system.
Thus, Greece probably has the biggest private tutoring industry in the world if not the only one of its kind whose sole purpose is to supplement the inadequate and insufficient state education system with a parallel, shadow one.
Only in the Greek TEFL field there are over 8,500 private schools and over 20,000 Foreign Language tutors currently being employed.
There was a plethora of reasons that created this massive private education industry:
- The public education system was never seen as the source from which future entrepreneurs , scientists, musicians or athletes would spring from.
- It was and has been a rigid streamlined test driven system via which those who could memorize the most succeeded.
- The social, financial or other motives to improve the educational system were simply never in place to begin with as this was part of a system where the main employer was for over four decades the state itself.
Why would we need creativity, imagination, foreign languages or any other qualifications, skills or skill sets?
The only hiring requirement for a very highly paid government position was to know your local MP or know somebody who did.
It was not until the late 1990s that the criteria changed as the positions in the public sector were facing a severe case of saturation and a huge surplus of underqualified staff.
The end goal was only the face value of the certificate you produced.
Still, the criteria became to have a certification of some sort. It really did not matter what certification you had or how you had acquired it, as knowledge was not the key element. The end goal was only the face value of the certificate you produced. Needless to say, many forged certificates and degrees of all sorts surfaced and were accepted, never to be questioned.
There were no assessment mechanisms in place, no personal development plans, no motivation no drive to improve even for those who had already been hired in the public sector.
A streamlined education system not aimed at creativity, initiative, imagination and personal drive and a system where any kind of passion or deviation from the educational norm was quickly stifled.
TEFL suffered the mirror effect of this poorly thought-through social construct:
- Public schools delivered poor standards of English teaching if any.
- Private schools stepped in and started delivering a service.
The product (i.e. TEFL teaching) was at the early stages pretty much standardized. Students came in and left the school speaking and writing English of some standard.
The English Language assessment was carried out by the two leading exam boards in the world, those of Cambridge ESOL and Michigan as somebody had to step in and assess the students.
Once again this was the result of a very low trust and zero accountability society that needed visible sources of Higher Authority to step in and validate what they could not do locally.
What has changed?
The whole world has,education,teaching approaches and methodologies and student needs.
Yet, Teaching English as Foreign Language in Greece has remained settled in its old ways of teaching English via grammar books and phonetics with greek translations on the board.
The Greek society remained pretty much unchanged in its ways and mentality until the very crisis struck them and suddenly they all woke up to a new reality…..or have they not?
The whole world is fast pacing itself through the information revolution and the digital era.
The knowledge economy is here, it is now.
Today, Greece is finding itself trapped in a drastically downward spiralling and deteriorating economy and yet we fail to comprehend that the only glimpse of hope may come from making sure the next generation becomes digitally literate and that they can speak and write in English.
Private English Language schools have also been both slow in responding, in developing and evolving and those who have, have left parents and communities uneducated and unaware of the changes.
For the time being, Greece probably has the highest rate of highly certified yet unemployable workforce in Europe, if not globally.
The acquisition of the English Language and digital skills are of vital importance to any Greek today and between them and their ability to become employable lie these exact skills and the level at which they have been acquired and mastered.
