Rossen Genchev

Media8 October 20201:46:30BG · In Bulgarian

Education in Bulgaria: teachers, discipline, Finland and Korea

DevCast with Teodosiy Teodosiev, whose students won 10 of Bulgaria's 16 physics olympiad golds, and Telerik's Svetozar Georgiev: what school should change.

BGThe recording is in Bulgarian. This page summarises it in English; the times link to the original.

Summary

Episode 19 of DevCast is about education, and IT education in particular. The guests are Svetozar Georgiev, a co-founder of Telerik who now works on Telerik Academy, whose courses and resources more than 58,000 people have used in eleven years, and Teodosiy Teodosiev, the physics teacher whose students have won 10 of the 16 gold medals Bulgarians have taken at international physics olympiads. The hosts are Georgi Ivanov of Noble Hire, Boris Simandov and Rossen Genchev, founder of BioSeek and an admin of the Dev.bg group.

Genchev comes with nine points taken from arguments with friends over beer, and asks the guests to be candid rather than polite. The first is whether school was better before 1989: he was eleven or twelve when the system changed, remembers more discipline, and is himself a product of the clubs of the Palace of Pioneers. His last question, saved for everyone at the table, is which subject an eighteen-year-old should study to stay useful for fifty years; his own answer is biotechnology.

In between, Svetozar Georgiev says that the respect for school and for teachers, once a prestigious profession, has gone. Teodosiev argues that money should follow results rather than the student, that a society is rich when it has people for every level rather than the ambition that everyone becomes everything, and that distance learning cannot build creative people, which is why his students sit an olympiad every week. The table also takes on Finland's liberal schools against South Korea's competitive ones, whether to push the best or lift everyone, private against state schools, teamwork, and what each would do first as minister of education.

Key moments

  1. 01:16Now 10 of 16: Teodosiev corrects the count of his students' olympiad gold medals.
  2. 04:32Teodosiev: the money should follow the result, not the student.
  3. 10:14Genchev's first question: was school better before 1989? He remembers more discipline, and the Palace of Pioneers.
  4. 17:34Svetozar Georgiev: the respect for school and for teachers has gone.
  5. 21:57Finland's liberal schools against South Korea's competitive ones.
  6. 37:28Push the best to the top, or bring the whole class along?
  7. 46:03Private schools, state schools, or a mix?
  8. 1:06:01Teodosiev against distance learning: creative people are built in battle conditions.
  9. 1:17:02The first measures each would take as minister of education.
  10. 1:31:36Eighteen today, a subject for the next fifty years: Genchev would choose biotechnology.