If you read a lot of professor blogs--and check my blogroll in the next couple of days since I am working to add my favorite prof blogs to it--you will see a level of frustration at the student-as-consumer model which is being adopted by many universities. In this model, students (or their parents) pay money to a university which is a service-provider. Customer satisfaction is therefore the most important goal. Why do professors resist this? Or in some cases rage against it? Because customer satisfaction seems to imply in the case of a university that:

1) Students should be given good grades
2) Professors should only teach what students want to learn
3) The customer is always right, even if he or she cheats, plagiarizes, fails to come to class, listens to MP3s all through class, etc...

Is education really like a restaurant or a resort hotel? Or is education a different kind of product that involves earning a good grade through work, learning what the professors/experts say you should learn, and puts responsibility on the student to work hard, be respectful, and follow basic rules of academic culture? I think most reasonable people would say that education is not just another service, like a trip to the sauna. Unfortunately, it appears that some educators in Kazakhstan, in their admirable zeal to improve management and adopt efficient Western business models, are adopting the wrong kinds of models.

Businesswomen.kz, the magazine of the Association of Business Women of Kazakhstan, prints an article with Olga Kuznetsova, Chancellor of the International Academy of Business, in its Septembber 2007 issue. She does cite a few good recommendations: the dean should be available to students and giving adult learners a say in the syllabus of their training courses. However her firm support for the student-as-consumer model is stretched when she compares a teacher disciplining students to a restaurant manager yelling at customers.

Certainly Kazakhstan needs to move to a more student-centered style of education and lose the old-fashioned model of teacher as unassailable sage who lectures at passive students--this leads to passive graduates who cannot think for themselves, and also to bad teaching as professors can make mistakes (no really, we can). However, surely a professor has a right to maintain order in the classroom or assign work that students don't like?

While I admire Kazakhstan's attempts to modernize and reform (and a lot of great work has already been done in schools), I hope they will also evaluate foreign experience before they adopt it. Perhaps Ms. Kuznetsova should also talk to her professors/employees and make sure they are satisfied too!

By the way, if you are in Kazakhstan, pick up the Sept. issue of Businesswomen.kz. It has an interview with the Minister of Education, an interview with the President of the Bolashak scholarship, and some features of successful Bolashak alumni. It's a solid resource for Kazakhstan students who want to go abroad.