The current education system in Ukraine is hindering investment and business development and needs to be changed, according to Konstantin Efimenko, president of the pharmaceutical company Biofarma Plasma.
“In order for us to implement changes and invest $500 million over seven years, the education system needs to be fundamentally changed,” he said at the Kyiv International Economic Forum (KIEF) on Thursday.
Yefimenko noted the negative consequences for primary schools of online learning, which has been practiced in Ukraine for the past six years.
“That’s why we’ve completely lost the school system. Today, we’re getting kids with absolutely zero knowledge, and we need to understand that in order to understand where we are,” he said.
Yefimenko stressed the need to invest in education and review curricula.
“We need to change the education system, we need to remove all these lessons on happiness, some psychological lessons, and bring mathematics, chemistry, and biology back to school,” said the businessman and former Minister of Transport and Communications.
In addition, Yefimenko stressed the need to upgrade university teaching laboratories.
“I visited almost all the universities in Kyiv where chemistry and biology are taught. And I will say this: all their laboratories became obsolete 34 years ago. Everything there related to chemistry, biology, and physics should be collected and thrown away. The entire university base is worse than a single Biofarma laboratory, in which we invested $25 million. But let’s think about it: a peripheral company from Bila Tserkva has a better laboratory base than all universities, including national ones. How can this be acceptable?” he said.
Yefimenko noted the high demand for qualified personnel: “We need people, but we can’t train them at the trolleybus stop. We need to buy chromatographs, we need to buy cytometers, we need to find equipment and connect it. And we don’t have that.”
“We have created two schools because we understand that there is no school education. We have created our own department at Shevchenko University. There are now 15 children studying there. I find the teachers myself and pay them myself, which costs more than $1 million a year. We are now publishing textbooks. The only thing more important than this is what is happening on the front line,” he said.
