At the end of the Hellenic Examinations and admission to the Universities through an academic diploma, Professor of Linguistics and former Rector of the University of Athens Giorgos Babiniotis was mentioned, during the program “The GPS of Current Affairs” on the First Program of ERT.
As Mr. Babiniotis typically stated at the beginning of his conversation with the journalist “Already since 2009 when we held the national dialogue on Education, I have been saying that this system with the Panhellenic women is no longer working. It’s unfair, it’s inhumane, it’s cruel, it’s unreliable. You can’t judge a child in a 3 hour exam that something might happen. However, we should look at the potential that a child has in his three years of performance and his high school performance. This is how all of Europe works. This is how large universities operate abroad.”
They ask you, continues Mr. Babiniotis, for your high school diploma and your score in the last classes of the Lyceum, in the three classes of the Lyceum. “So there they have an image of you and the schools that have a very limited number and cannot open it, also do an additional examination on some subjects, if necessary. In most schools you don’t need this and the way you get into the university is your identity, as shown by the academic, let’s say, high school diploma. So what I propose is to have an admission system that will be based on the high school diploma, which will be based on the overall performance of the student in the three years of high school.”
“With the upgrade of the Subject Bank will come the resurrection of the Lyceum and its strengthening”.
It is a fact, said the professor, that a high school has become useless in which all the lessons no longer count, that is, no one counts them, he looks when he will be absent, how he will read something more to take exams.
“So those of us who have a perception of what is happening in education, we are living this thing and it is the worst thing that has happened to us. Now one will say yes, but there will be pressure on professors to give grades etc. There is the safety valve called the topic bank. So there, from time to time in the school they are given the same with correction by the teachers, subjects from the subject bank for which objectively you now have a grading”.
That is, if the professor has put 19 and in the exam with the subjects from the subject bank, he goes to 14 from there and then there will be an intermediate grade and then again. So, we are talking about a parallel upgrade of the theme bank, which must be something substantial for justice to exist.
“And I think that the Lyceum will be set up again educationally in this way. Therefore, for there to be a resurrection of the Lyceum, decisions must be made which will possibly have a backlash from some people who are profiting from the current system but should the government, the Ministry of Education, venture into this solution, which will be for the good of the students themselves and will slowly lead to the abolition of the entrance exams”, then noted Mr. Babiniotis about the Subject Bank, commenting at the same time on the situation prevailing in High Schools.
“Actually, Education today stops at High School. School is not only information and knowledge but also education.”
Finally, when asked if he sees immediate changes being made in the education system and in the way students are evaluated, Mr. Babiniotis answers the following: “We must overcome the brackets and distortions that have created some interests, some people who have become comfortable in this way or gain money. These, if you have the courage to overcome them, you can provide solutions. Otherwise, you stay in the establishment and go through what you go through, that is, you have lost three years of education”.
We are all constantly told, he continued, that it is a matter of education or a matter of education that. “What kind of education?” An education that actually stops at high school? An education that has now ceased to have character and education?”, he asked.
Because, when you talk about forms of behavior, about values, about rules, about principles, you are considered right-wing, conservative, Juntic and I don’t know what else. “In other words, when will the teacher be freed to do both his education and his lesson and have a comfort and a respect from the people and also a good salary? That is, to be able to stand in society without having to have two or three jobs? (…). School is not just information and knowledge. School is also education. It is a way of life, behavior, education, character. And that second piece is lost.”