High Quality Education: Globalization and Problems of National Educational Systems

Requirements of the Information Society and Knowledge Society determine the need for significant improvements, structural changes, shifting priorities in the social system. Such a trajectory of development is already represented not only in the education systems in North America, Western Europe, countries of the Confucian and Buddhist cultures but also in the Eastern Europe and Russia.

While comparing educational systems of Russia and the United States primarily from the aspect of high quality education development there we can see deep differences between these systems that are connected with different historical traditions, mentality, economic and political structures of these countries, and finally with mobilization or innovative types of development. But today, under the influence of globalization, we can state a convergence of educational systems in Russia and in the United States within the paradigm of a pluralistic educational system. Russia moves away from etatism, political monism to political system’s pluralism which certainly conciliates it to the political system of the United States.

World experience of the recent decades shows that in this area a flexible system of control (often direct and indirect in the form of influence) should be conducted where there is no rigid centralization and where the balance of governmental, regional and local education programs is necessary. Particularly sensitive should be the attitude of the state towards high quality educational institutions: it is necessary to take into account their specificity, to seek additional resources including financial in the form of various additional scholarships for the talented students, and grants to effectively developing educational institutions etc. and at the same time maintaining their maximum autonomy.