Editorial: Demolition

We have often seen the education system in our country fall prey to political ulterior motives.

It is the first time, however, that we have seen tertiary education being used as a vehicle for achieving partisan ambitions.

From that perspective, the education minister is not merely copying the practices of the past. He is inaugurating a new type of old party politics that does not bode well for Greece’s problematic education system.

What is the substance of this brand of old party politics? The government and the education minister are tabling an omnibus bill that not only uses the education system as a field of shoddy and irresponsible experimentation, but also exploits it for vote-mongering.

Tertiary technical schools are being wiped off the academic map, even as the total number of candidates admitted to universities will rise so as to ensure broad access to university faculties for which there is low demand among university applicants overall.

In this manner the government is effectively establishing a two-tier university system. There will be a university of the academic elite on the one hand and on the other univesity faculties that are looked down upon, whose students will have no interest in the subject of their studies and who will quite possibly lack the necessary background to undertake them.

Is this class-based university the vision of the government? Is it an equal opportunity education system? Is it the product of a progressive outlook and policy?

The answer is obvious. The government opted for the easy course of demolition.