General Education as a Basis for Strategic Staffing an Innovative Economy: Overcoming Weaknesses

Abstract

The national education system is a key supplier of human resources for the innovative economy, which is extremely important given the need to build Russia’s technological sovereignty. The aim of the work is to identify the main patterns of influence of the effectiveness of general education on the innovative development of the economy.Methods. We examine the paradox of educational achievement among Russian schoolchildren, who demonstrate excellent results in primary school, but average or below average results in high school. This task is approached through assessing the ratio of GDP measured in purchasing power parity, the level of national publication activity, and the proportion in population of researchers conducting research and development, on the one hand, and the level of academic achievement according to the international cross-national PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study, on the other.Results. We demonstrate that Russian schoolchildren’s performance according to PISA is higher than would be expected based on Russia’s GDP, the level of publication activity of Russian scholars, and the level of engagement of Russian researchers in research and development. This means that the skills and talents of future researchers and young participants in the labour market are underutilised for the purposes of developing an innovative economy. The problems of educational inequality and the “academicism“ of Russian secondary school curricula are considered as two alternative explanations for the paradoxical decline in educational achievement among Russian schoolchildren in high school.Conclusions. The feasibility of strategizing the school education system as a component of the national innovation system is demonstrated based on the provisions of the methodology of Academician V. L. Kvint, taking into account global trends and patterns of mutual influence of the educational and scientific-innovative components of knowledge-based development.