The qualities we prize in our children

A recent international study has shown some surprising results on the question of the priorities parents around the world have when raising their children. While the survey showed that some virtues are universally prized, interesting regional and national trends emerge when parents are asked to rate the importance of various qualities they wish to instill in their children.

Parents around the world seem to agree that good manners, a sense of responsibility and respect for others are important qualities to teach their children. But while West Europeans give all three qualities more or less equal importance, East Europeans and North Americans rate a sense of responsibility as by far the most important, and relegate respect for others to fourth place.

Interestingly, a sense of imagination ranked the lowest priority worldwide, although West Europeans gave the quality of flexible thinking twice the importance any other group did. The Italians stress the virtue of cultivating their youngsters’ imagination more than most others surveyed, with the exception of Switzerland. The supposedly staid Swiss prize imaginative youth.

Etiquette-minded Belgians, Spaniards and Greeks placed the highest premium on politeness, while the Danes and Swedes put good manners lowest on the list. The Swiss and the Turks prized the ability to communicate with others.

The virtues of tolerance and respect for others were most highly regarded in Scandinavia, France, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain. This was not the case in Greece and the former Eastern bloc nations, which rated these as being of lesser importance.

Germans, Austrians and Swedes esteem personal independence, but the industrious French hold the quality of conscientiousness at work dearer than any other European nationals. The responses, in the industrialized nations of Sweden and Britain showed, perhaps bewilderingly, that nationals of those countries gave little importance to conscientiousness at work.

Polite Belgians answered that for them, obedience is among their paramount values; this sentiment is shared to a lesser degree by the British, Greeks and Irish. The Italians, according to their questionnaires, ranked this very low.

When rearing their children, the Greeks, Turks and Irish are alone in their emphasis on instilling strong religious beliefs.

One of the primary difficulties the researchers faced was translating the questions as perfectly as possible in order not to distort the result. “Imagination”, for example, can be translated into Dutch as “conceitedness”; perhaps this explains why the Dutch appeared to give imagination a low priority.

Also, some qualities are so ingrained in certain cultures that they are taken for granted, while others are given great emphasis because they are felt to be lacking in a particular society.

Education in Russia

Education is very important for every person. It gives information and opportunities for further life. Every country has its own, unique system of education. We can note examples of many different systems.

Education in Russia is provided predominantly by the state and is regulated by the federal Ministry of Education and Science. Regional authorities regulate education within their jurisdictions within the prevailing framework of federal laws.

Eleven-year secondary education in Russian is compulsory The eleven-year school term is split into elementary (grades 1-4), middle (grades 5-9) and senior (grades 10-11) classes. Children are accepted to first grade at the age of 6 or 7, depending on individual development of each child. Children of elementary classes are normally separated from other classes within their own floor of a school building. They are taught, ideally, by a single teacher through all four elementary grades except for physical training and foreign languages. The school year extends from September 1 to the end of May and is divided into four terms. Study program in schools is fixed but in the nearest future schoolchildren or their parents will have a choice of study subjects. Education in state-owned secondary schools is free. Russia is on the first stage of bringing new technologies in education.In almost every school there are new models of computers and almost every school has a direct connect to the Internet. Internet gives an opportunity for remote education with the help of e-mail, special forums and teleconferences.

The Ministry of Education launched the Unified state examination (USE) program. The set of standardized tests for high school graduates, issued uniformly throughout the country and it has replaced entrance exams to state universities. Thus, the reformers reasoned, the USE will empower talented graduates from remote locations to compete for admissions at the universities of their choice.

Higher education in Russia isundergoing great changes. Russia is in the process of migrating from its traditional tertiary education model to a modernized degree structure in line with Bologna Process model. (Russia co-signed the Bologna Declaration in 2003.) Russia enacted a law that replaces the traditional five-year model of education with a two-tiered approach: a four-year bachelor’s degree followed by a two-year master's degree.