- •Учебно-методическое пособие
- •Содержание
- •Предисловие
- •Unit 1 education
- •Private Schools Growing But Lack Recognition
- •Мамармен: начало начал
- •Reading
- •Adults go to school
- •Manager on a Picket Line
- •Teacher on the lip
- •Able to be got 3
- •Ломоносову не было бы стыдно
- •Higher Education in the usa
- •Misconceptions of Studying in the United States
- •1. America is full of crime and is a dangerous place
- •2. It is too expensive
- •3. You may not be accepted or well-received by the locals
- •4. The usa is not known for certain academic disciplines
- •5. Recent international developments have made the usa dangerous
- •Организация учебного процесса
- •Final Task
- •Unit 2 application for a job
- •Preparing For a Job: cVs
- •Your cv should include:
- •The Skills of Giving a Presentation The Art of Public Speaking
- •Can you tell me something about yourself?
- •What has made you want to leave your current position?
- •Where do you see yourself five years from now?
- •4. What’s your biggest weakness?
- •5. What is your greatest strength?
- •6. Do you usually prefer working with others or on your own?
- •7. Can you describe the qualities you think a good boss possesses?
- •8. What do you like to do in your spare time?
- •9. What attracts you to the company?
- •10. Why are you the right person for this job?
- •Interview killers:
- •Найти работу за две недели
- •Ten Attributes of a Good Employee
- •Национальные различия корпоративной культуры
- •Берем курс на запад
- •Послать всех на тренинг
- •Text 3 What Makes a Good Manager? Here are 10 Tips
- •Менеджер по персоналу
- •Unit 3 ecology World scientists’ warning to humanity
- •Worries About World’s Ecology
- •Warning
- •What we must do
- •Не утонем – так сгорим
- •Reading
- •Climate
- •Changing Climate
- •Impacts
- •Неспокойная Земля (Интервью с академиком ю. А. Израэлем)
- •Toxic wasteland
- •Граждане, станьте мешочниками!
- •Helpful vocabulary
- •Final task
- •Unit 4 the purpose of science
- •Nanotechnology: Shaping the World Atom by Atom
- •History
- •New materials, devices, technologies
- •Дамскую сумку оснастили подсветкой
- •40 Тысяч американских курьеров получат новые карманные компьютеры с радиосвязью
- •Unit 5 terrorism
- •What is Cyberterrorism?
- •Лондон детонирует
- •Terrorism and the Media
- •Ес обсуждает меры по борьбе с терроризмом
- •Helpful vocabulary
- •Narcoterrorism
- •Радиационный терроризм: между физикой и политикой
- •Final Task
- •Unit 6 globalization: the argument of our time
- •Defining Globalization
- •Генуя — очередное поле сражения антиглобалистов
- •Reading
- •Additional reading
- •Unit 1 education Text 1 a mickey –mouse generation
- •Text 2 not smart enough for a passing grade ? fake your way into a university
- •Text 3 An American View of Russian Education
- •Is a foreign professor in Russia restricted in what and how he teaches?
- •If you pay, pay for the quality
- •Unit 2 application for a job Text 1
- •26 Советов для успешного прохождения собеседования при устройстве на работу
- •2. Особенно четко формулируйте то, что вы знаете и чего хотите добиться
- •3. Убедитесь, что ваши возможности совпадают с вашими целями
- •4. Четко опишите свои сильные стороны
- •5. Подайте вашу слабость как сильную сторону
- •7. Если вы были уволены, скажите об этом прямо.
- •8. У вас должны быть ваши личные стандарты
- •9.Задавайте вопросы интервьюеру
- •10. Не позволяйте вопросу о зарплате изводить себя
- •Text 2 My goal
- •Text 3 How to Keep a Good Project on Track? Here Are 1o Tips
- •Text 4 Leadership is a question of style
- •Unit 3 ecology Text 1 Greenpeace movement
- •Text 2 Killing the Volga
- •Text 3 Shrinking Sea
- •Unit 4 the purpose of science Text 1 a Future with Nowhere to Hide?
- •Is Your Cell Really Safe?
- •Terrorism
- •Definitions of Terrorism
- •Text 2 Terrorism: An Introduction
- •I Was There...
- •Text 4 Notes from a Russian volunteer
- •Text 5 Who's To Blame?
- •Unit 6 globalization: the argument of our time Text 1
- •Communication activity unit 1 education
- •Opinions
- •Unit 3 ecology
- •Unit 4 the purpose of science
- •Terrorism
- •Unit 6 globalisation
- •Just for fun
Additional reading
Here you are suggested to read various texts on the topics studied in the Units to compose your own opinion on different problems and show it in the discussion.
Unit 1 education Text 1 a mickey –mouse generation
By Mikhail Delyagin
RESEARCH PROGRAMS DIRECTOR,
THE INSTITUTE
OF GLOBALIZATION STUDIES
We typically see them at electronics malls. We are met bycheerful "consultants”- young people who do not know anything, and do not want to know anything, about the electronic equipment that they try to persuade us to buy. Furthermore, most of the time they do not even have the slightest doubt that they could be wrong.
This is not a matter of chance or bad luck. The problem is the rapidly declining quality of higher education even at the best institutions of higher learning in Moscow — a quality that is an impediment not only to getting a good job but also to sheer survival.
We come across college and university graduates who are functionally illiterate (e.g., unable to understand a phone set instruction manual).
Another disturbing feature is intellectual infantilism — that is to say, the inability to evaluate a situation and find an independent solution. Here is just one typical example: A person has to email a letter to 30 addresses, but his computer freezes. There are many solutions here: e.g., send letters to 10 or five addresses or even one address at a time or use a different email service provider or another IPS or go to an Internet cafe. But you have to be a graduate of a modern Moscow college or university to keep on pushing the same button for five hours on end.
A simple search for information on Yandex(the Russian answer to Yahoo or Google. — Ed.) can be a problem. My experience is based on years-long observation of recent graduates who went to some of Moscow's institutes that are considered the world's best. These folks are already being facetiously referred to as Mickey Mouse clones, or more bluntly as "dead mice."
I believe that Russia's higher education system breeds professional unemployed, unburdened either by knowledge or skills or the knack of acquiring them. All it gives university degree holders is the confidence in their own exclusiveness: Socially maladjusted, they feel intellectually superior, the lords over other people. Cuba — a country with the best public health system in the Americas — stopped recognizing our medical degrees as early as the mid-1990s. Only several years ago, some countries were literally fighting for graduates from the best Russian institutes since their training quality standards were extremely high: Today, however, they are lower than India, for example.
At the same time this situation suits almost everyone: Parents pay for the dream of a bright future for their offspring; young men get draft deferrals, while girls prolong their youth. Transfer and acquisition of knowledge is very near the bottom of the list of priorities.
The problem is dramatically aggravated by the education reform, essentially designed to develop the commercial component of education and effectively denying low-income groups educational opportunities.
The underlying problem is disregard for education specifics. The quality of education standards should be ensured by the state, but it does not intend to take on this function: Liberal dogma minimizes its intervention. At the same time liberal fundamentalists regard education exclusively as part of the services industry, categorically denying its special character: Education (as well as healthcare) creates not simply added value but society's main productive force, which is more important than oil — human capital.
Far from rectifying the mistake, which is indeed worse than any crime, the reform in fact only exacerbates it. Corrupt financial flows are changing their routes, but not their scale. Aggressive stupidity is epitomized by the Unified State Test, which promotes fragmentary (clip-like) thinking instead of systemic thinking, forcing a student to learn disparate facts by rote and replacing creativity with dogmatism.
Today the "Gorbachev generation," born in the era of the "Prohibition," the rosy illusions of Perestroika, and a marked improvement in living standards in the 1986-1989 period, continues to enter the system. Beginning in 2008, however, Russia will start feeling the effects of the ongoing demographic catastrophe. It is only half the trouble that there will be no cannon fodder for the military machine, which refuses to modernize, or easy prey for the robber-like system of paid college attendance (I simply cannot bring myself to say "education").
The real trouble is that there will be no workforce.
The manpower shortage could be compensated by a viable education system — by providing better training and producing a better organized and more creative workforce. But the existing system of higher education only aggravates the demographic catastrophe with an intellectual catastrophe.
The only way of avoiding this is to stop destroying the higher education system under the guise of reforming it, to introduce strict quality control and stimulate creative, not narrow-minded, dogmatic thinking.