It's the Middle Ages in Education with all sorts of Holy Inquisitors

“Is it impossible to suppress the private school tutorial education, the biggest economic scandal, of our times, which fleeces families and exhausts our children.”

Ioanna Karystiani, writer

For at least three decades, millions of Greeks are asking the same question. Personally, I would like to believe that the Pan-Hellenic college entrance examinations are coming to an end. Perhaps because I'm overly optimistic or perhaps because I have been left with a student's enthusiasm from the 70s who believed in the rumours – that my generation would have been the first to get in universities without these entrance exams – but alas we were wrong!

Now, after a course of 40 years of both sitting in and standing in front of desks (as student and professor), no political program can convince me – no matter how well meaning -  that it will smooth out problems in education, if first it doesn't change objectives in education and it doesn't abolish college entrance exams.

The fact also that Greece has the largest number of "unemployed holding a college degree" adds to the absurdity. In other words we have the "most expensively paid unemployment" globally, if we think of the immense amount of monies invested by Greek families so that their children can obtain that desirable college degree, but without any guarantees for any permanency in the job market.

 And that's why (always according to government statistics) one third of all Greek college students suffer from clinical depression. And to that nightmare we can add the ASEP fright (government agency responsible for public service exams and employment screening). Because degrees and parchments or graduating from public technical schools are not enough to find employment in the public sector. It's a new system of testing which also requires tutorials in private schools.

Besides, when we speak about a serious education system we mean, Free of Charge, without: Out of date programs; obscure and badly written books that don't connect with students' intellect; lack of infrastructures; lack of educators with some sort of periodic retraining, and there is so much more.

Finally, let's think about a social reality because there have been talks lately about raising the retirement age. Unless the right formula is found and we can retire at a reasonable age with dignity, we all run the danger of becoming the doddering old ladies of education.