How well does our schooling prepare us for the future? This is the subject presented on “Absolute 4” as the school year comes to a close and the average for students wishing to study for the teaching profession has decreased to 6.5.
This indicates that more students with poor grades will become teachers in the future. This is not good news for this sector, which many regard as critical not only to the country’s economy but also to the fabric of Albanian society.
“This measure has not reduced the average required marks for instructors,” activist Rigels Xhemollari adds. ” The number of branches with access to instruction has been reduced. The paradox is that a student who starts with a 7.5 average can possibly finish with a 10 and not continue his studies to become an instructor, yet a student with low performance will become a teacher.
Ermal Hasimja, an educator and analyst, believes that the problem begins with a loss of status. “The difference with communism is that while the teacher was once considered as a tool of the regime and defended himself for it, there is now no one who can protect them. There are parents who, feeling that their children are outstanding, strive to pave the way for them with flowers, and when they earn grades deemed unsuitable, they go and hold the teachers accountable, not the children. If there are 6-7 students who push for grades in a class of 30, the instructor is obligated to lower the assessment bar for everyone, removing the chance of the 8th or 9th grade student increasing “because it gives the 10th, delivering the message that there is no need to get exhausted anymore.”
Hasimja also provides a specific example. “We are the only country in Europe with no competition in the field of medicine. Everyone wants to go there to emigrate to Germany, and those who are best able to earn bogus grades in the three years of high school and replicate the exam end up there. The state’s approach has been roughly, ‘You want maximal grades, here you go, as much as you want!”
Meanwhile, economist Dritan Shano considers the low average to be one of the most concerning indications. “I enjoy talking about education, but not only education” As a citizen and an economist, the drop in the average is cause for concern, because the main requirement we face in the twenty-first century is for quality education, which cannot be supplied by teachers who are not quality in themselves. We have 44 thousand teachers; pay them at the level of deputy ministers. Education is not only a public service; it is the country’s only strategic resource.”
One of the primary issues, according to professor Ilir Kalemaj, is the fictitiousness of the grade. “Foreign people who want to study at our university here are unable to do so since they do not meet the state graduation requirements. You have three years of high school plus graduation as a foundation for evaluation, and we have a grade fiction in which Gramsh has been the finest high school in Albania for years. Meanwhile, for the high school graduation, there is no centralized system, such as the SAT in the United States or other countries, that can enable the internationalization of these grades, allowing the student to relocate, even abroad. Teachers are seen as the cream of society in nations that perform well in PISA, such as Finland, yet here there is a degraded status where you must enter the government’s portal after several requests and permissions.
Beyond Albania’s issues and paradoxes, the problems in education, according to journalist Agim Baçi, stem from a lack of knowledge. “The school has lost touch with its meaning. I know kids who can speak three or four languages but don’t understand a word. Children no longer know how to think for themselves, and they don’t know how to answer away from the internet,” he argues.