Home Social Sciences Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction
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Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction

  • Michael Kelpanides , Despoina Poimenidou and Zoe Malivitsi
Published/Copyright: June 20, 2016
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Comparative Southeast European Studies
From the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies Volume 64 Issue 2

Abstract

Greece’s education system lags behind those of other European countries. Its two overarching problems, which encompass many others, are (a) the incompatibility of school knowledge and societal needs, and (b) the low performance of public schools. Because of these inadequacies, there exists a ‘shadow education system’ of private cramming courses preparing students for the required qualifications for university admission. Despite recurring criticisms from international organizations, the relative position of Greece to other countries has not improved. This paper addresses why there has been no improvement so far despite Greece’s use of available resources and expertise supplied by the EU. To explain why there has been no change, the authors trace the Greek system’s problems to historical antecedents and examine the political and social forces resisting educational change at present.

Introduction. Persistent Deficiencies of the Greek Education System

For many decades, reviews conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveying National Policies for Education, as well as related OECD documents, have repeated the conclusion that ‘Greece’s educational indicators lag behind those of other OECD countries’.[1] Despite several reforms initiated by Greek governments in response to the OECD’s criticisms, Greece’s low position relative to other member countries has not substantially improved. We refer in this brief introduction mainly to the OECD reports, because the OECD, being a global player, is a rather unbiased observer of the Greek scene.

Given its ongoing economic crisis,[2] Greece’s deficiencies in education take on an even more threatening character now that it has become clear that its outdated education system is inextricably linked to its economic failures:

‘The future of Greece’s well-being will depend on improving educational performance to boost productivity and improve social outcomes. In the current economic context, with the need to get best value for spending, Greece must and can address inefficiencies in its education system.’[3]

But if ‘the future of Greece’s well-being will depend on improving educational performance’, as the OECD authors write, then it follows logically that Greece failed disastrously in the past precisely because of the inadequate performance of its education system, which was and remains antiquated. This general diagnosis is our point of departure; focusing on the persistent defi ciencies in Greek education, we try to explain its remarkable resistance to change. In the introductory remarks we summarize, in seven points, the most severe deficiencies, which we will analyse more expansively in what follows.

(1) The incongruity between education and society. The persistent disparity between school knowledge and the needs of young persons living in a contemporary European society is the main problem. ‘The brief analysis […] points to the general conclusion of a serious mismatch between educational output and the changing needs of the economy and labour market.’[4] This persistent ‘mismatch’ is caused by the fact that the educational system has been producing a traditional education inadequate to the requirements of a modern economy and society. It neglects and renders marginal the much-needed technical and vocational education.

(2) The inadequacy of general education offered in public schools. The general curriculum for compulsory lower secondary education is overloaded with the reading of Ancient Greek texts and the study of its grammar, which is imposed compulsorily upon the whole student cohort: ‘Of course, the teaching of both modern and Ancient Greek (eight to nine hours a week) weighs heavily on the timetable.’[5] Here the criticism concerns the instruction in Ancient Greek, since the teaching of modern Greek, the vast majority of the students’ mother tongue, is anyway necessary to develop linguistic competence and sophistication among native speakers. Ancient Greek, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to a speaker of modern Greek, as distant to the contemporary language as Old English is to modern English. The curriculum of upper secondary education (not compulsory, but de facto attended by a large percentage of the age cohort) also includes Ancient Greek, which is required of all students, not only those who have chosen the humanistic course of study (who have, of course, more weekly hours of Ancient Greek than the others). Although Ancient Greek’s relevance not only to preparation for adult life but even as an ‘educational good in itself’ has been highly disputed since the beginning of the twentieth century and especially since the 1960s, only minor changes have been introduced into the curriculum.

(3) The inferiority of technical and vocational education. All past OECD reviews of Greek educational policies have criticized the inferior status of technical and vocational education:

‘We were told that technical occupations in Greece are on the whole not highly valued and that the prestige of general education and of the ensuing academic education is so high that technical and vocational education is by definition a second choice. […] The fact that in the second grade of the technical lycea enroll many pupils who are unable to continue in the general lyceum is often quoted as an indication of the poor quality of the pupil intake.’[6]

From the founding of the Greek education system in the 1830s, technical and vocational education was absolutely inferior to general education and remained so for the next hundred years; until 1929, the state almost completely neglected it. Despite the low cultural level of the rural population, which made the acquisition of literacy skills particularly difficult, as well as the provision of at least an elementary vocational-agricultural education urgently necessary, no proper education matching their educational needs was offered to them.

(4) The dominance of private cramming courses, the ‘shadow education system’. A rather unique, among European countries, feature of the Greek education system is the presence ‘of a parallel private system of additional classes (crammers, or frontistiria)’,[7] used extensively by the overwhelming majority of secondary school students to prepare for the competitive entrance examination to the selective university schools. The existence of these parallel cram courses and of numerous private schools offering a variety of subjects in high demand — modern languages, computer instruction, music, dance, sport, and art, courses provided by the public schools in other countries — confirms that the Greek public school curriculum is to a large extent out of touch with the realities of a modern society:

‘The dominant role of the frontisteria [sic] is nothing short of an open admission of the inadequacies of the public system. The demoralising effect on the public lyceum is immense.’[8]

(5) The low achievement of Greek secondary school students on PISA. The public system’s inadequacies have also been manifested in its students’ low achievement, which since the 1980s has been measured and thus for the first time made publicly visible, through the international evaluation programmes, mainly through the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA):

‘The challenges are significant. For example, Greece lags behind many OECD countries in performance on PISA, including countries with the same or lower levels of expenditure per student as well as countries with the same and lower levels of economic development.’[9]

(6) Thirty-five years without teacher evaluations. One of the Greek education system’s greatest current problems is its lack of any evaluation of its teachers going back thirty-five years. In almost all its reports on the Greek education system since 1982, the OECD has stressed that the absence of teacher evaluations is a major impediment in the attempts to improve quality in education:

‘Greece has currently no systematic evaluation of teachers. Legislation was introduced in 2002 — but never implemented — that would have required all teachers to be periodically evaluated by external evaluators and principals. Teacher evaluation could be used to identify priorities and to reward teaching excellence — though the design of the evaluation programs is of crucial importance in building a closer link between evaluation and rewards.’[10]

(7) The peripheral status of foreign languages in the secondary school curriculum. Because of a deeply ingrained belief that foreign languages cannot be learned in public schools, the teaching of these languages has always been peripheral in the Greek system. Foreign languages were taught only in secondary schools until 1987, when, under EU pressure, instruction was introduced in the upper three primary-school classes, followed much later by teaching in the first three primary-school classes. Generous EU funding (‘carrots and sticks’, so to speak) has spurred some progress in the early teaching of foreign languages in primary schools but the level of mastery among students, when compared to European countries like the high-achieving Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Germany, remains very low.[11]

The persistent deficiencies of the Greek education system cited above can be subsumed within two broader categories. The first, encompassing problems (1) to (4), concerns the inadequacy of educational content (curricula, subjects, syllabi); the second, under which we can classify problems (5) to (7), concerns the inefficiency of means, i.e. of the teaching and learning process.

Inadequacy of General Education. The Preponderance of Ancient Greek in the Compulsory Educational Curriculum — Historical Antecedents

A crucial factor to explain the deviant pattern of Greek development is Greece’s cultural and political isolation from the West during its four centuries of the Ottoman rule: ‘Greece missed the defining experience of what has come to be known as Western civilization: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the development of secular states and civil societies.’[12]

The geographical region where the new Greek state was founded was underdeveloped and lacked urban centres. Its population consisted up to 80-90% of illiterate peasants who, under the millet system of the Ottomans, were dominated spiritually and culturally by the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, recognized in the Ottoman theocracy as the religious and political leader of all Orthodox populations within the Ottoman Empire, followed (with some unimportant exceptions) the policies of the Catholic Church in the crucial issues of (a) the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, in this case New Greek, which was forbidden; (b) its stance towards the European Enlightenment; and, relatedly, (c) its position towards the ascendant natural sciences. Thus, the secular cultural and social consequences of the Orthodox Church’s policies were the same as in the Catholic countries: continued illiteracy (see Table 1) and ignorance for the majority of the population.

Table 1

Percentages of illiterates in the populations of selected European countries, 1870-1965.

Country 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1965
Sweden 5-10 1-5 1-2 0.1 1-2 1-2
Denmark 5-12 1-8 1-5 1-2 1-2 1-2
Norway 5-15 5-10 1-5 1-5 1-2 1-2
Switzerland 7-12 1-5 1-2 1-2 1-2 1-2
Germany 8-13 1-8 1-5 1-2 1-2 1-2
Finland 25 10-15 1.1 1.0 1-2 1-2
England-Wales 25-30 10-15 5-10 1-5 1-2 1-2
France 31 18-22 11.9 5.3 3-4 1-2
Spain 65-70 61 52.2 30-35 17.3 8-13
Portugal – 75-80 68.9 41.7 41.7 35-40
GREECE 75-80 68-72 59.7 45.1 25.9 15-20
Russia/USSR – 80-85 50-60 35-45 5-10 1-5
Turkey 95+ 90+ 85+ 80-85 68.1 57-62

Source: Peter Flora, Modernisierungsforschung, Opladen 1974, 170.

With its prohibition of the translation of the Bible, the Orthodox Church, which had de jure full control over education, cultivated a cultural and linguistic climate in which the Bible’s archaic language dominated; Ancient Greek was supposed to be the ‘authentic’ Greek language and New Greek was denigrated as the vulgar language of the uncivilized people.[13] This devaluation has had highly negative effects on the development of the living Greek language. By contrast, the Lutheran Church and other Protestant denominations had the Bible translated into the vernacular and thus established in fact for the first time the linguistic standards, i.e. orthographic rules and conventions, that aided in the development of living languages; their efforts contributed to the spread of literacy across northern Europe.[14]

The Orthodox Church, however, could not influence to the same extent the Diaspora Greeks living outside the Ottoman Empire, in the important commercial centres of the West and in the Ionian Islands.[15] Sharing a European lifestyle and certain experiences in common, both groups maintained a cultural level far above that of the mainland Greeks.[16] In the confrontation with the Ionian intellectuals who resisted the conservative policies of the Orthodox Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople and, after the state-building of the 1830s, the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece used spiritual sanctions to punish ‘heretical’ critical intellectuals such as Andreas Laskaratos, and excommunicated them.[17] This was not dictated by the Turkish Sultan, as apologists for the Patriarchate claim.[18] On the contrary, it was a consequence of the Orthodox Church’s own reactionary policy against the ideas of the European Enlightenment.[19] Thus, the opinions of the learned men, scholars, and literati concerning education were mainly shaped by the archaist position of the Orthodox Church on the language question.

An additional factor working in favour of archaism emerged out of Philhellenism, a movement that swept Western countries and showed that European sympathies for the Greek cause arose out of the knowledge of and admiration for the culture of Ancient Greece possessed by educated European citizens.[20] Thus, the sense of an idealized Greek past functioned as the main instrument to attract European sympathies for New Greece.

Complementing the orientation of the Orthodox Church, a second dominant centre of archaism emerged when the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Athens was founded in 1837. Staffed with archaist literati of aristocratic Phanariot origin, it was socially respected as an academic institution of undisputable authority in all scientific, social, and national questions, and its professors, monopolizing the highest material and symbolic privileges, soon established themselves as the country’s cultural elite. From the outset, the Faculty of Philosophy served as a teacher training faculty that educated secondary school teachers. Thus its professors’ archaist positions exclusively determined, for almost a century, the professional training and outlook of secondary school philologists, who made up the most numerous group of secondary school teachers and who greatly influenced the stances of their students, parents, and others in their social environment — a decisive part of the country’s citizens and voters. The education of teachers at the Faculty of Philosophy became the institutional mechanism for the large-scale reproduction and diffusion of the academic archaists’ educational and political positions, via the schools, into society at large.

Before the rise of the spoken New Greek language movement, i.e. the demotic movement, at the turn of the twentieth century, these two centres of archaism retained the monopoly in the tight control over education through the Ministry of Education and Religion; nothing could be changed in teacher education without their consent. Moreover, the administration of the ministry was overwhelmingly staffed with philologists and theology teachers adhering to the policy of archaism.

In addition, because Ancient Greek could not be learned effectively at school, a completely artificial language called katharevusa (‘purified language’), with an archaic vocabulary and a grammar close to that of Ancient Greek, and a little more easily understood by educated readers than Ancient Greek, was constructed and had to be learned at school as a second practically foreign language besides Ancient Greek; this artificial language was introduced to the bureaucracy and was obligatorily used in all public settings. Thus the pupils then had to learn at school two unfamiliar languages: katharevusa and the distant Ancient Greek already taught in primary school — but received no instruction in their own mother tongue. The consequence was that children abandoned school in large numbers and remained at home to work in the fields with their families without ever having learned to read and write.

In recent years, the illiteracy rate in Greece has gradually been declining: as has been widely recognized and pointed out in OECD reports, secondary school attendance has risen in concert with a parallel decrease in dropout rates. Nevertheless, even if Greece’s dropout rate is below the EU average, only three-fifths of dropouts finish their lower secondary education; 2% of the country’s children receive no formal education whatsoever and one-quarter only finish primary school. These rates are double the EU average.[21]

What prevented change for so long after the founding of the educational system? Politicization: the language problem was split along ideological lines until 1976, when demotic became the official language of the state, and the fronts in the language question overlapped with the political cleavage between conservatives and liberals, the former defending Ancient Greek and katharevusa and the latter supporting the demotic. The archaists defended their teaching of Ancient Greek as the proper way to ‘return to the roots’ of the nation, to its ethnic past, which was the typical pattern of all nationalisms.[22]

The misalliance of archaism with ultranationalist ideology led to the intense politicization of archaism: any opposition to archaism was condemned as ‘high treason’. This is what ultimately explains why genuine reforms in education were stymied for nearly two centuries, with the fatal consequence that Greek education lost contact with socioeconomic reality.

As a new civil society began slowly to take shape, members of liberal urban groups, having had better educations and having been influenced by the European Enlightenment and rationalism, rejected archaism and katharevusa, and tried to spread literacy and education by translating the Bible and the Ancient Greek tragedies into the demotic to educate the Greek people. Those at the centres of educational and political conservatism reacted to the publication in an Athens newspaper of a translation of the book of Matthew in 1901 and to the staging of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in New Greek in an Athens theatre in 1903 with mass mobilizations of their followers, which caused violence, deaths, and injuries on both occasions. Prime Minister Georgios Theotokis himself was injured in the November 1901 unrest and resigned a few days afterwards.

These historical clashes reveal the extent of the politicization and radicalization of the language problem.[23] The division concerning the ‘proper’ language of the Greeks became a main element of the persistent cleavage between liberals and conservatives in the fractured political culture. Robert Putnam’s statement about the Catholic Church in Italy comes very close to describing the role of the Orthodox Church in Greek society as well: ‘Organized religion, at least in Catholic Italy, is an alternative to the civic community, not a part of it.’[24]

Vigorous academic opposition to the imposed archaism found expression via the founding of the University of Thessaloniki in 1926. Its Faculty of Philosophy nurtured opponents of the Athenian archaists who fought against the latter for official recognition of the demotic and for its cultivation in schools and in public life. These positions were supported by the Liberals.

Educational Reforms and Counter-Reforms in the Post-Junta Period.Restoration with Little Real Progress

Moving forward several decades: in 1967 a group of colonels installed, by military force, a rightist military dictatorship in Greece that entirely lacked innovative capability and had no popular support. After it fell in 1974, there was a greater political consensus among Greece’s political factions than there had been, and this created a favourable climate for the implementation of educational reforms; the abolition of katharevusa was the most important step paving the way for improvement to the education system.[25] However, the attempted modernization ultimately failed, since powerful vested interests which had determined in the past the path of educational development and had impeded change, remained entrenched. Thus, most of the problems persisted.

First, although the study of original Ancient Greek texts was abolished from the compulsory education curriculum, i.e., the gymnasium (for students aged 12-15) in 1976, it was restored some years later, and in the lyceum (age groups 16-18) the requirement was not changed at all.[26] The main reason was to secure the employment of classical philologists, still the largest group among secondary school teachers (making up about 30-35% of the teachers). Hence, the strong teachers’ union (Federation of Secondary School Teachers of Greece, OLME), opposed any reduction in weekly hours devoted to Ancient Greek. Second, it was in the interest of the philologists occupying staff positions at the university and at the higher echelons of the education ministry to keep Ancient Greek as a core subject in the secondary school curriculum. Third, many nationalist voters supported the teaching of Ancient Greek in secondary schools.

However, drawing from many sources and from a representative sample of secondary school students (N = 8.335) taken in 2011, it was established that among the six main subjects, Ancient Greek was the least preferred. The distribution of the answers to the question ‘Which subjects, if any, do you like particularly?’ was as follows, by percentage: natural sciences, 43.6%; mathematics, 24.0%; social sciences, 20.7%; New Greek, 17.0%; informatics, 14.5%; Ancient Greek, 12.4%.

One of the main reasons for the inefficacy of Ancient Greek instruction is that the overwhelming majority of philologists teaching ancient texts, among them some of Plato’s dialogues, do not study philosophy at all; they are not required to attend one obligatory course in philosophy during their studies. Hence, the university has authorized them to teach a very complex subject without preparing them properly for this task. This kind of ‘system error’ was inherent in the education of the philologists from the beginning.

The introduction, in 1976-1977, of technical and vocational lyceums parallel to the general lyceum, which were targeted at developing vocational and technical education, failed completely.[27] A representative sample (N = 3.000) of 15-year-old students at the end of their gymnasium studies in 1980 showed that 75% chose the general lyceum and only 10% selected the technical and vocational lyceums, with the rest choosing other options.[28] The subsequent long series of reforms aiming to strengthen technical and vocational lyceums and cause most students to choose vocational education was unsuccessful.[29] Despite some fluctuations during the long period from the enactment of Law 576/1977 up to the present, data from the last decade show that access to technical and vocational lyceums has been falling, from 41.1% (N = 160.451) in 2002 to 30.9% (N = 108.010) in 2009.[30] The failure of technical and vocational education in Greece is a striking case of the path dependence of a development which started with the founding of an educational system focused completely on general education using archaist curricula and completely ignoring vocational education, as we have seen. The feedback loop works as follows: (1) The shortage of adequate vocational qualifi cations has ceteris paribus impeded economic development. (2) In the absence of economic development, there was little demand for technical and vocational education. (3) Vocational education, because of low demand, remained low quality and inferior to general education. (4) Low-quality vocational education failed to prepare highly qualified manpower to take on productive roles in the economy.

The Inferior Position of Foreign Languages in the Curriculum

Given the ethnocentric orientation of Greek education, the teaching of foreign languages was always of low priority and marginal in relation to the position of Ancient Greek. The first curricula in 1836 provided only two weekly hours of French in public schools; compared with the twelve hours provided for Ancient Greek and four for Latin, the time devoted to French was indeed marginal. At the beginning of the twentieth century, English was included only into the curriculum of the commercial schools which, being vocational schools, lacked the prestige of university schools.[31]

The decisive push towards the strengthening of the teaching of foreign languages and especially of English came from the EU.[32] In the 1980s and 1990s, foreign-language teaching was also introduced in the upper three classes of Greek primary schools. Alongside mainstream primary schools, a new type of primary schools with a modified programme was introduced in 2010-2011, in which English has been taught not just in the higher classes but also in the two junior classes. There are large differences among the primary schools concerning the teaching of English, the availability of teachers, and the facilities, with corresponding differences in the level of preparation of the pupils which are later transferred to the gymnasium. In an alleged attempt to tackle these differences, Education Minister Nikos Filis in the Syriza government recently abolished primary schools with a modified programme and announced that all primary schools will be of the same type as of September 2016; at the same time, the total of hours allocated to the teaching of English will be drastically reduced.[33]

A second foreign language (French or German) was introduced in the gymnasium in 1993, taught for two hours per week. English became the primary foreign language in 1997. At the same time, English was also taught in the lyceum with two hours weekly instruction in the first year, three hours in the second, and two hours in the third. Resistance from the classical philologists made it impossible, after some back-and-forth negotiation, to take an hour away from Ancient Greek and to add it to English; thus, the timetable remained as it had been, with five hours weekly devoted to Ancient Greek and only two to English.

Besides the insufficiency of the weekly hours devoted to foreign languages, other indicators concerning the quality of teaching suggest their lack thereof. In a recent study, Maria Birbili carried out systematic observations of English lessons in twenty-eight schools in northern Greece lasting seventy-three hours in total, combined with twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with the teachers and 1,025 student responses to a written questionnaire given to members of the classes in the study.[34]

Birbili’s main conclusions are the following:

  1. In the overwhelming majority of the cases, the teaching is traditional and focuses on the translation of English texts into New Greek.

  2. The communicative approach is underdeveloped and there is litt le active cooperation among the students in the target language.

  3. The use of the target language is restricted: neither the teacher nor the students use the target language often. Communication — i.e. asking questions, and giving answers or explanations — happens in the mother tongue. In 67.2% of the sessions ‘no’ student used the target language, whereas in only 11.9% ‘quite a lot’ or ‘most’ students used the target language.

  4. Most of the time is devoted to reading comprehension, dominated by the translation of English texts and the posing of questions by the teacher. The development of speaking competence is weak.

  5. The teaching method is to a very large extent teacher-centred.

  6. Finally, 63.2% of the students consider the teaching of foreign languages in the private Foreign Language Centres to be more efficient, opposed to only 13.7% maintaining that the teaching at school is more efficient. According to the European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC) there are considerable differences among the countries concerning the use of the target language by teachers and students.[35] In conclusion, an important finding is that students show little interest in foreign languages because knowledge of foreign languages is not considered a requirement for university entrance.

The Inefficiency of the Greek Education System. Patronage of Entrenched Interests and ‘Bureaucratic Clientelism’

The causes of inefficiency of the Greek education system are based on the character of the political system as a system of patronage and clientelism.[36] Under Ottoman administration, unlike in the West during enlightened despotism, bribery was an accepted common practice, and this practice has continued in the era of the modern Greek state.[37] The political parties which emerged in the decades after state-building were patronage-oriented.[38] Each party that won in elections used the positions of the state bureau cracy as ‘spoils’ to reward its members for their services. Thus, after every election the victorious party dismissed all the public employees and replaced them with its own members. This practice continued for almost one hundred years until it was reduced via the reforms of Eleftherios Venizelos in the 1920s. Yet despite these eff orts, patronage and clientelism remained a main characteristic of the political system. Little did qualification or merit matter: only party membership and affiliation.

How did this happen? Under Ottoman rule, Greek communal leaders and notables — called koçabasi — constituted the lowest echelon of Ott oman provincial administration on the communal level.[39] These were large landowners and tax collectors engaged in the lucrative business of paying the imperial treasury a fixed sum in advance and then collecting from the peasants as much as they could.[40] As a consequence of the early introduction of universal male suffrage in Greece, this stratum of local landowners became politically infl uential in the new state because the illiterate peasants were not prepared for the political role of modern citizens in a parliamentary democracy. Thus, having no understanding of how the new state institutions functioned, they were dependent on the advice of the local notables, as in the past under Ottoman rule. The local notables, on their part — the same koçabasi who had served the Turks — took over the role of political patrons for the illiterate peasants; they became deputies of the Greek Parliament and functionaries of the Greek state, roles in which they reproduced their traditional self-enriching attitudes and behaviours, which they had developed as functionaries of the Ottoman tax administration.[41]

‘The traditional attitude toward a specific post, as a source of private profit to its holder rather than as an instrument of public benefit to all, became transferred to the entire state apparatus when the success of the Revolution made the state an object of contention among the Greeks.’[42]

The long-established practices of patronage and clientelism decisively influenced the further development of the Greek political system up to the present. The strong path dependence which evolved has prevented the rise of programmatic, mass-based political parties that could displace the patronage-oriented parties. Greece, where (a) universal male suffrage was introduced before there was a consolidated state bureaucracy with universalistic rules and protective laws, and where (b) patronage-oriented parties developed and survived without any competition from programmatic parties, is a case which fully confirms Martin Shefter’s thesis concerning the timing of democratization and bureaucratization:

‘[T]he role patronage plays in party politics is a function of the relative timing of democratization and bureaucratization. Where the creation of mass electorate preceded the establishment of civil service examinations or other formal procedures to govern recruitment into the bureaucracy, politicians were able to gain access to patronage for party building. The party organization they constructed acquired a widespread popular base and the political capacity to successfully raid the bureaucracy for patronage, even after formal procedures governing civil service recruitment and promotion were enacted.’[43]

Greek peasants, lacking education and a political ‘voice’, working with primitive technologies, and having low productivity, could not develop entrepreneurial skills. Hence, Greek agriculture remained on the level of a primitive subsistence economy, unable to produce the ‘surplus’ necessary for industrialization. Under these circumstances Greek peasants voted with their feet.[44] In contrast to German political elites after the Reichsgründung (1871) and Swedish social democrats in the first half of the twentieth century, who boosted industrial development, the Greek political elites failed completely. Their interventions into the economic process in favour of their protégés were not economically rational and were counterproductive. As George Coutsoumaris, working in the 1960s fortheCentre of Economic Research, based in Athens, correctly diagnosed:

‘[T]he many administrative controls which conditioned the establishment of new industries were not guided by clear criteria, aiming at specific goals, but instead gave wide discretionary power to the administering government offi cials and fostered political nepotism and abuses in directing industrial investment. Government administration often frustrates and distorts industrial growth instead of assisting it, particularly given its tendency to protect and preserve established interests and old ineffi cient establishments […].’[45]

Hence, the character of the patronage system and the concomitant incompetence of the state bureaucracy made it impossible for the state to play a positive role in economic development. As mentioned above, in Greece there has never been programmatic socialist or liberal parties with strong organizations and stable constituencies that could survive for a long period.[46] The most important reason for the failure of such parties to arise as a significant force is that Greece never became an industrial society. Lacking a mass movement of industrial workers, socialist and social-democratic working-class parties could not develop. The liberal parties’ weakness was a consequence of the fact that a strong middle class of entrepreneurs defending liberalism, self-responsibility and free market has never existed in Greece. The Greek middle classes do not embrace these principles, because many among them are self-employed owners of small or at best medium-sized enterprises which are mostly dependent on state subsidies and preferential regulations. On the other side, because the state is Greece’s largest employer — despite the EU’s privatization policies — many white-collar workers employed by the state do not support freedom from state regulation; they demand guaranteed employment from the state and, hence, an ever ‘bigger’ state.[47]

Given the weakness of Greek civil society and the dependence of large groups of people on the state, no forces have emerged which have been able to reverse this dominant pattern. This is because, first, the patronage system is inclusive: i.e., there is no large social group completely excluded from and without any access to the networks of patronage relations. Second, since almost all groups enjoy some advantages from the functioning of the patronage system, no constituency supports the independence of bureaucracy; every group would have to lose, if bureaucracy became independent of the external pressures exerted by the political patrons, who distribute state resources to their clients.[48]

Because of the stability of patronage systems, very little has changed since the building of the Greek state. What did change in the period after the fall of the military dictatorship was the scale of patronage relations. The individual patron, on the one side, was replaced by a collective actor, a party or a bureaucracy; and the individual client, on the other side, was supplanted by a group or a category of individuals sharing a common interest. This new ‘bureaucratic clientelism’[49] was introduced and put into effect by the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) after its electoral victory in 1981. To an unprecedented extent, PASOK de facto annulled existing meritocratic access to positions and evaluation procedures in education and in public enterprises. During the electoral campaign, to win the majority of the votes, PASOK completely accepted and incorporated into its electoral platform the most far-reaching demands made by the teachers’ unions and the junior university staff. The teachers’ unions demanded the abolition of teacher evaluation; the insecure junior staff of the university fought for permanent appointment, the abolition of academic chairs, and the breaking of the professorate’s power. PASOK fulfilled these demands thoroughly by abolishing evaluation and academic chairs and by introducing a departmental structure in the universities. The acceptance of these positions under the given circumstances contributed to the establishment of a civil service mentality in the Greek university, as will be discussed below.

The Absence of Teacher Evaluation and the Power of the Teachers’ Unions

A devastating blow to meritocracy in secondary and primary education was the abolishment in 1982 of the inspectors-general whose task had been to evaluate the work of teachers.[50] Even if inspectors had acted in authoritarian ways under the prevailing political conditions in the past, this criticism cannot justify the abolition of the inspectorate under the democratic conditions of the present, for now the possibility of objections against inspectors’ arbitrary judgments has been institutionalized. Hence, abolishing the inspectorate as such because individual inspectors acted in authoritarian ways in the past meant throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The school counsellor, a new institutional ‘shadow-figure’ proposed by the teachers’ unions and introduced thereafter by PASOK as a replacement for the inspector, is not authorized to evaluate teachers and, in terms of the position’s legal power and authority, is in no sense an institutional counterpart to the inspector in its former role.[51]

As a consequence, there have been no teacher evaluations since 1982; promotions proceed on the basis of seniority regardless of performance or ability. In the past thirty-four years no government, either from PASOK or from the liberal Nea Dimokratia, has dared to introduce a procedure of teacher evaluation, fearing the reactions of the two powerful teachers’ unions, OLME and DOE (Federation of Primary School Teachers of Greece), who both have uncompromisingly resisted the introduction of any system of evaluation. Despite the passage of numerous laws and the declaration of presidential decrees and ministerial decisions in these years concerning teacher evaluation, none of these legal acts has been enforced. Both unions appealed repeatedly to the teachers to abstain from cooperating with the education ministry and to refuse to take part in any working groups preparing a draft law concerning evaluation. More specifically, with their letter from 21 October 2014 OLME, together with DOE, called on all teachers to resist all plans of the Ministry of Education with regard to evaluation. OLME and DOE also appealed to the principals to support their colleagues and to refuse to become their evaluators serving the ministry.[52]

The unions justify their radical position against evaluation by arguing that any educational outcome is the complex effect of many factors and, hence, the role and performance of teachers cannot be evaluated separately if all the other factors are not taken into consideration. The unions cite the following factors: (a) educational policy; (b) financing of education; (c) curricula; (d) educational infrastructure; (e) cooperation among government, administration, teachers, students, and parents; (f) the socioeconomic situation of the country; and (g) the teachers’ scientific and pedagogical competence.[53]

According to the logic of this argument, the teachers could in practice be evaluated only under ‘ideal’ conditions. But since existing conditions are never ‘ideal’ because something is always missing or imperfect, teacher evaluation can thus be postponed ad infinitum. The argument is rather used as legitimation to justify the unions’ counterproductive policy against any teacher evaluation under any real conditions, which for the last three and a half decades has prevented the development of a culture of evaluat ion and improvement in the quality of education:

‘Greece is one of only a few countries in Europe without external assessment of learning or external evaluation of schools and teaching or indeed any other comparative mechanism of quality assurance (except for its participation in PISA and university entrance examinations). […] The system cannot rely on consistent tools for measuring the quality and effectiveness of the education system and the actual achievement of learning outcomes, as there are neither external assessments of learning, based on standardised national assessments, nor external evaluations of schools and teaching. […] Furthermore, there is no evident link between student assessment, school and teacher evaluation and consequences for those who have been evaluated. Overall, there is no evaluation culture that takes results as the first criterion, or the basis for improvement strategies and distribution of responsibility.’[54]

It is true that there is no evaluation culture in Greece and that, in addition, the spirit of achievement and competition — if it were ever alive — has declined since the 1980s. The policies of PASOK but also of the subsequent Nea Dimokratia governments contributed heavily to the spread of a ‘culture of least eff ort’ by offering more state benefits to political clients and to broader groups of sought after voters,[55] financed by payments of EU funds and by an increasing public debt, as Theodoros Pangalos, minister in several PASOK-led governments since 1982 and vice-president between 2009 and 2012, showed in a controversial, yet revealing publication.[56] Since 1981, these policies have caused standards in secondary and tertiary education to decline because seniority has replaced merit as the basis for teacher promotions and, on the upper secondary level, the minimum requirements in student examinations have been lowered.[57] After the military junta was overthrown in 1974, the political consensus that emerged could have led to serious educational improvements. However, as we have described, these reforms were never realized to a desirable extent.

Greek Secondary Education — Inefficient and Out of Touch with Reality

The Shadow Education System of the Ubiquitous Private Cramming Courses

The overwhelming majority of secondary school students in Greece also take private cramming courses (frontistiria), a parallel system which ‘can be seen as compensating for the poor perfor mance of the public education system’.[58] The popularity of these schools proved the strongest evidence for the inefficiency of Greece’s public schools. Forms of private supplementary schooling also exist elsewhere in Europe, but the Greek phenomenon of frontistiria is unique because of its quantitative dimensions and its functional relevance for entrance into the selective university schools.[59] Secondary education, with its humanist-literary curriculum, failed to open the way to sought-after occupations and misled the large majority of secondary school graduates in their trying to enter the university, where the number of places was, as mentioned, restricted. This oversupply of candidates made more efficient preparation for the entrance examination necessary. In this highly competitive situation, the frontistiria emerged as a more efficient private institution to provide better preparation for the examination, which the school could not offer. Despite the increase in the number of places at new universities and technological institutes along the geographical periphery of the country, competition remains high because of huge differences in the attractiveness of the universities and their schools.

Most studies on the cramming courses in Greece lead to the conclusion that about 75-80% of lyceum students (upper secondary level) attend frontistiria, with an increasing percentage from the first to the third class of the lyceum.[60] Furthermore, those students whose families can afford it receive, in addition to the frontistiria, tutoring, i.e. private instruction by teachers going to their homes in the evening. According to a recent study by Katerina Polymili, who submitted a written questionnaire to students of the three lyceum classes in northern Greece using stratified cluster sampling (N = 1.276), 55% answered that for supplementary schooling they attend only frontistirio, 11% that they get only private instruction, with 21% affirming they were availing themselves of both options.[61]

A pedagogically embarrassing finding for the Greek system, already known from previous studies, is the amount of time spent by the students attending frontistiria after the end of their school day, given the fact that they necessarily spent all the morning hours in the regular school. Almost 80% of those attending frontistiria answered that they spend between eleven and twenty hours per week in a frontistirio.[62] To these attendance scores (from school and frontistiria) one has to add the time at home preparing for both schools. It is remarkable that the majority of the students say that they work more hours at home for the frontistiria than for their regular public school. Thus, 51.2% of the students answered that they work eleven to twenty hours at home for the frontistiria but only 6.6% answered that they devote as many hours to preparing for school.[63]

To these hours attending the frontistiria, the hours of private instruction must also be added for the subgroup of students who supplement school and their frontistirio with private tutoring. The cost of private instruction by teachers going to students’ homes is, as mentioned, higher than the cost of attending a frontistirio. Both these categories of expenses, which the students’ families bear, increase educational inequality. In theory at least, the free-of-charge public schools, together with the free books that are supplied, are intended to ensure equality of educational opportunity.

The PASOK government tried, in the 1980s and 1990s, to render frontistiria unnecessary by offering extra courses at schools free of charge, but this policy failed. The main reason was that students and their families placed greater trust in frontistiria than schools to prepare students for entrance to university. They preferred to pay the cost of frontistiria rather than rely on the preparation courses offered by the school, which perished after this failure. According to Polymili’s data, 70.5% of the students answered that their parents spend monthly between two hundred to more than four hundred euros per child for frontistiria and private instruction. Given the low salaries in Greece, this is a considerable burden for most Greek families.[64]

According to the findings of explorative research carried out by Kyritsis and Mavroskoufis in 2009, students assess the pedagogical, didactic and scientific competence shown by frontistiria teachers to be much higher than the corresponding competences of public school teachers.[65] They find teaching methods, lesson planning and the pedagogical climate much more positive in the frontistiria than at school. Also, they mark out that frontistiria teachers are more motivated, open, helpful, and supportive than their teachers at school.

But since frontistiria teachers and school teachers come from the same population of teachers, the only difference being that those working in frontistiria are waiting for their appointments to public schools, the significant differences in the judgements of the students cannot be explained by differences between the populations, but by the fact that teachers of the frontistiria are held accountable for their performance, because the way they teach has consequences for them, whereas the teachers appointed permanently in the state school system do not feel the pressures of accountability.[66]

Since for thirty-five years there has not been any evaluation of teachers or the establishment of norms on how things should be done in the classroom, there are no sanctions for unpreparedness, lack of motivation, or overall ineff ective teaching. A ‘good’ teacher coexists in the same school all the time with a ‘bad’ teacher but the institution treats them the same: difference in teaching performance does not matter. True, inner motivation is more important than acting under the pressure of external sanctions, for ‘the greater the need for sanctions, the weaker the ultimate force behind them’.[67] But no society has ever existed which could dispense completely with external sanctions because humans are, alas, imperfect beings. It is self-evident that a school system where only ‘good’ teachers are employed is an ideal that cannot be reached. However, enabling teachers to develop a culture of evaluation or self-evaluation can minimize the possibility of ineffective teaching and contribute to the improvement of learning outcomes.

The Failure of Greek Students on PISA Tests.School Inefficiency Becomes Visible

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was created in order to evaluate the extent to which 15-year-old students towards the end of their compulsory education were prepared to cope successfully with the requirements of the postindustrial knowledge society in real-life situations. Thus PISA has been focused not on the passive acquisition of knowledge but on the ability to activate acquired knowledge to solve real problems in as well as outside of school. This rationale entails the expectation that students in those education systems where achievement is based on measuring the passive memorizing of school knowledge, rather than the active transfer of theoretical principles from known to unknown cases, would score low on the PISA tests.[68]

Graph 1 shows the relation between students’ scores in mathematics on PISA 2009 and the ‘innovative potential’ of a society, measured by the indicator ‘number of high-tech patents per 1 million inhabitants’ for the EU countries. The relationship expressed by the determination coefficient R2 = 0.41 is statistically highly significant. Graph 1 demonstrates that students in technologically advanced countries score higher on PISA tests than students in technologically less developed countries.

Graph 1 PISA score in mathematics by high-tech patent applications (= ‘innovative potential’ of a society). Source: Kelpanides, Politische Union, 322.
Graph 1

PISA score in mathematics by high-tech patent applications (= ‘innovative potential’ of a society). Source: Kelpanides, Politische Union, 322.

Also as we see in Table 2, Greece occupies one of the lowest ranks — between 25 and 31 — among the thirty-four OECD countries. The differences between the Greek score and the OECD grand mean are statistically significant. To facilitate comparison, the highest score from one of the high-performing countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan, or Hong Kong-China) is also listed in Table 2.

Table 2

Rank of Greece among the OECD countries in all PISA evaluations.

Reading Mathematics Science
PISA 2000 Greece 474 447 461
Highest score 546 557 552
Rank 25 28 26
PISA 2003 Greece 472 445 481
Highest score 543 550 548
Rank 25 26 25
PISA 2006 Greece 460 459 473
Highest score 556 549 563
Rank 29 30 30
PISA 2009 Greece 483 466 470
Highest score 556 600 575
Rank 25 30 30
PISA 2012 Greece 477 453 467
Highest score 570 613 580
Rank 29 31 31

Source: OECD, PISA 2012 Results in Focus. What 15-Year-Olds Know and What They Can Do With What They Know, Paris 2014; Institute for Educational Policy, PISA 2009. Πλαίσιο αξιολόγησηςκαιαποτ∊λέσματα [PISA 2009. Assessment frame and results], Athens 2012, http://www.iep.edu. gr/pisa/images/reports/pisa_2009_plaisio_and_greek_results.pdf.

The educational elites in those countries whose students had performed less successfully on PISA — and which are thus responsible for their students’ low achievement — reacted negatively to the PISA results, perceiving these outcomes as a threat to their positions of power and authority. Thus, the consistently low scores of Greek students in all PISA evaluations (see Table 2) has forced Greece’s educational elites to take a defensive stance and to try to call into question the validity of the PISA results. George Babiniotis, a member of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Athens, the most powerful actor at present defending the interests of the archaists in the Greek public, asserts that the PISA results are completely arbitrary:

‘Those who reach the highest scores in this system of preparation and examinations would get the last places by another examination system which would assess the knowledge, the general education, the cultivation and the abilities of the student to develop creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.’[69]

Given the low ranking of Greek students in all PISA evaluations, the Greek teachers’ union OLME, for its part, took an aggressive stance towards the PISA evaluation; referring to the position of the international teachers’ union Education International towards PISA, OLME rejects the validity and reliability of PISA as well as the claim that PISA results could be taken as a guide for any improvement of the national education systems:

‘Hence, PISA results can neither constitute a measure of comparison of the educational systems nor can the ranking of the states in this evaluation be taken as a basis on which guidelines could be formulated on how or what should be changed in the educational systems of the participating countries.’[70]

In other words, OLME regards PISA as completely useless. It takes the same defensive stance against the evaluation of students’ scholastic achieve ments as it has taken, as we have seen, against teacher evaluation. There is clearly a logical connection between both OLME positions because the low achievement of Greek students on PISA is a result of the Greek educational system: its curricula, methods, and, to an even greater extent, the low level of engagement of its teachers.

Hence, necessarily, only if these influencing factors are changed can students’ current low achievement level be improved. But such changes are exactly what OLME tries to prevent, apologetically defending the Greek education system’s status quo.

Greek Universities Since 1982. Routine PromotionsInstead of Competitive Election in an Open Academic Market

The initial period after the fall of the military dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974 was characterized by mass mobilizations in higher education, occupations of university buildings, and strikes by assistants and junior university staff. The longest strike in the history of the Greek universities lasted one hundred days in 1978. At the same time, there were equally intense mass student mobilizations, prompted mainly by, on the one hand, the inflation of the numbers of the junior university staff — assistants, instructors, PhD students — working on temporary appointments while bearing the bulk of teaching without the university’s formal recognition and, on the other hand, the arbitrariness of the professors holding tenure positions and their conspicuous misuse of their extensive academic privileges, which att racted recurring public criticism.

The junior staff’s main demand — putting it in the language of hard-nosed collective interest — was for their permanent appointments as soon as possible and their unrestrained promotion after some years to full professorship. These collective interests were publicly presented with the usual ideological phrases concerning the democratization of the university and ‘education for the people’, very popular among students and the Greek public more broadly, especially during the post-dictatorship period.

After its great victory with 51% of the vote in October 1981, the PASOK government prepared in the span of a few months legislation that passed in July 1982 as Law 1268/1982, ‘Concerning the structure and function of the institutions of higher education’, which abolished academic chairs and introduced a departmental structure with the department as the basic unit of teaching and research covering the field of a discipline and the section corresponding to the discipline’s specialized subfields. Members of the teaching and research staff were assigned to one of four levels of positions introduced by Law 1268/1982 that were to some extent analogous, albeit formally but not in substance, to the structure of the American university: (a) instructor, (b) assistant professor, (c) associate professor, and (d) full professor.[71]

Formally, the process of election to the higher positions should go as follows: the individual — usually relatively young — holding the position of instructor received by law the right, after serving in this position for three to fi ve years, to apply for his/her election to the next-higher position of assistant professor. This procedure was formally open to external candidates, as the position was publicly announced. If an external candidate, and not the incumbent instructor, was selected, then the contract of the person serving as instructor was terminated and that individual would be forced to leave. The procedure dictating accession to the next position in the hierarchy, from assistant to associate professor, was the same and was hence open to external candidates. By contrast, the electoral procedure concerning associate professors becoming full professors was not open to external candidates. The associate professor was assessed by a department’s electoral body and, if assessed negatively over two rounds of evaluation (there was a second chance), remained until retirement an associate professor. Hence, permanent appointments began on the level of the associate professor, whereas the appointments on the two lower positions were temporary.

However, after the law was implemented it became clear quite soon that the public announcements of the positions of instructor and assistant professor were only pro forma open to external candidates. In the overwhelming majority of cases the already serving instructor was elected to the next position of the assistant professor and the assistant to the position of the associate, because the election had been ‘organized’ by the professors and other powerful members of the department to secure the selection of current staff members and to exclude external candidates. First the position’s definition is manipulated in favour of the qualifications of the already serving member, then ‘proper’ members of the electoral body are selected to ensure the desired outcome, which is also achieved via diverse co-optations and log-rolling efforts. In practice, the formally competitive election from among several candidates was transformed into the routine promotion of the candidate already serving in the department to the next position upwards in the hierarchy — not much different in substance from the promotions in the civil service made on the basis of seniority.[72]

In addition, the law was subsequently changed so that permanent appointments, which applied to the position of the associate professor, were extended ‘downwards’ to include the position of the assistant professor. Thus the candidate elected to the position of the assistant professor, without having to compete with external competitors, now had the right to be ‘elected’ in the same department after one or two years there, in a ‘closed procedure’, as assistant professor with a permanent appointment.[73]

A study of the elections of the totality of staff members of all teacher training departments for primary and secondary school teachers in Greece (N = 606) came to the following main findings: first, out of a total of 606 staffmembers, whose elections in their departments were recorded on the basis of the institutional data of the Government Gazette, only six staff members (instructors and assistant professors) were found whose contracts were terminated because an external candidate was elected to the next-higher positions that these individuals had applied for. This corresponds to a percentage of about 2% of the total and is a clear indicator that the former — theoretically — competitive election process had been replaced by a routine ‘civil service promotion’.[74]

Second, concerning the mobility between departments and/or universities, 80% of staff members had not changed department or university but had climbed the ladder of the positions step by step within the same department, whose graduates they, in most cases, had been. This means that the junior positions of instructor and assistant professor were occupied to a very large extent by the former doctoral students of the departments’ professors. The defi nitions of the announced positions were in the typical case very close to the subjects of their doctoral dissertations. For example, if the subject of the PhD of a former doctoral student, favoured by the influential professors of the department, was ‘Peace Education’, then the position was announced not about ‘Education’ in general but about ‘Education with a special emphasis on Peace Education’. Thus, in reality, instead of a competitive election among many candidates applying for the position in the subject ‘Education’, only one candidate, for whom the position was in fact announced, had any real chance to be elected.

The study’s third and final finding was that the mean duration of each position was short: four years for the instructor and four years and eight months for the assistant and the associate professor.[75] To avoid the publicly much criticized practice of ‘academic incest’, the subsequent Law 4009/2011 provided that

‘the candidate who applies for any university staff position must in any case have completed at least one of the three circles of studies in another higher education institution than the institution in which s/he applies for a position […]. The election to a position of staff […] is not allowed in the department in which the candidate received the PhD before the passing of at least three years since receiving the PhD.’ (Article 18, § 5)[76]

However, the same law provided another amendment of Law 1268/1982 that shortened the path to full professorship for the younger candidates by abolishing the position of instructor, thus rendering the position of assistant professor the first junior position. Hence, by being elected to this position — in one theoretically competitive election — younger candidates can become, as mentioned above, in about one year, permanent members of a department’s staff. There is little doubt that the well-established, routine promotion of university staffstep by step from instructor, or later assistant professor, to full professor in the same department through the weakening of genuine com petition is a decisive reason why Greek universities rank low in international evaluations.[77]

It is rather futile to try to correct wrong-headed developments with laws and legal regulations, if the actors involved have not internalized the relevant attitudes and the corresponding spirit. In Greece there is — with some exceptions — no spirit of competition and achievement, because both are widely looked down upon as ‘capitalist’ and ‘destructive of social solidarity’. There are, of course, differences among the departments and the disciplines; the totality of the teaching staff in pedagogical departments, who were the subject of the study, is not representative in a strict sense of the staff in the ‘hard sciences’.[78] But if in a system the ‘path of the least resistance’ through protection and nepotism is opened up, then the inner motives of the minority of actors opposing this practice must indeed be particularly strong. In Greece there are no signs that such motives exist on the collective level to a significant extent — they are confi ned to single individuals. However, the basic mechanism for the growth of knowledge and scientific innovation is the competition of ideas through institutionalized competition among scholars. The knowledge revolutions that have changed the world happened in societies in which the competitive ethos of science was internalized by the members of the scientific community, who competed for positions, ideas, and to be more original than their peers.[79]

The gradual transformation of the formerly competitive election of candidates to university staff positions into a more or less routine procedure of civil service promotion reveals a decline of the spirit of competitiveness, universalism, and achievement in Greek society. People demand from the state the distribution of assets without asking how these assets could be produced from a weak economy, and voters elect those parties that promise the distribution of more goods and more services — financed by public debt. This path, among other factors, has led to a horrendous growth of public debt reaching almost 200% of GDP.[80]

Conclusion

The explanation of the remarkably static nature of Greek education during its two-century-long Sisyphean way of reforms and counter-reforms can be summarized in the following four steps. First, there is an interdependence in Greece between traditional education with a heavily archaist curriculum, on the one hand, and the lack of economic development on the other. The initially unfavourable conditions of education during Ottoman rule, i.e., the illiteracy of the overwhelming majority of the population, and, after the state-building efforts of the 1830s, the absurdity of teaching the children of illiterate peasants not their mother tongue but Ancient Greek, along with the text-centred scholasticism in general education, all prevented the development of an effective programme of modern general education, which, had it been developed, could have contributed positively to an economic take-off and to a concomitant process of social development. In the absence of socioeconomic dynamism, no innovative social forces emerged to modernize society and, within it, the education of its members; a modern elite class of industrialists, managers, economists, sociologists, and computer scientists did not rise in Greece. Thus the traditional educational elites held on to their power and control over education and their influence on public opinion. We consider this vicious circle between educational and socioeconomic backwardness to be a confirmation of the theoretical assumptions implicit in the concept of path dependence.

Second, the historical timing of Greek state-building, caused by external developments (the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rising of nation-state-building movements in the Balkans), made the introduction of parties (‘democrati zation’) occur before bureaucratization and not, as in northern Europe, after the rise of enlightened monarchies with strong bureaucracies to enforce the law, the upholding of civil rights, and univer salism. Third, the consequence of this timing, as has been analysed in Shefter’s approach, was the development of a political culture of patronage and clientelism, in which the immobile Greek state — without political dynamism, and dependent on the interplay of particular interests protected by the bureaucracy — proved unable to take on the role of an active state that could modernize society ‘from above’. Thus, the functionally weak Greek state could not support economic development and the growth of civil society by enforcing universalistic principles. Unable to intervene rationally in the economy and in society as a whole, the Greek state, up to today, submits to the self-interested demands of protected organizations such as OLME, directed against the general interest in upgrading the quality of education. And fourth, given this lack of developmental dynamism on the part of the Greek state, a similar lack of dynamism has also nested itself in society, because of the absence of industrialization and of strong programmatic parties able to articulate large collective interests in a rational mode of political representation.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Michael Kelpanides (1945-2016), whose profound scientific knowledge and empirical research expertise will greatly be missed.

Published Online: 2016-06-20
Published in Print: 2016-06-01

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. History’s debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
  4. Research Article
  5. ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ dissolved. Yugoslav radio broadcasting in (west) berlin and the changing politics of representation, 1988-95
  6. Research Article
  7. Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
  8. Research Article
  9. Educational policies in Romania from Ceauşescu’s heritage to European mimicry
  10. Research Article
  11. Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia
  12. Research Article
  13. Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction
  14. Obituary
  15. Michael Kelpanides (18 July 1945–29 February 2016)
  16. Book Review
  17. Verfassungskonflikte zwischen Politik und Recht in Südosteuropa
  18. Book Review
  19. Narrating Victim-hood
  20. Book Review
  21. Transcending Fratricide
  22. Book Review
  23. Imaginary Trials
  24. Book Review
  25. Srebrenica
  26. Book Review
  27. Radovan Karadžić
https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2016-0017

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. History’s debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
  4. Research Article
  5. ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ dissolved. Yugoslav radio broadcasting in (west) berlin and the changing politics of representation, 1988-95
  6. Research Article
  7. Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
  8. Research Article
  9. Educational policies in Romania from Ceauşescu’s heritage to European mimicry
  10. Research Article
  11. Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia
  12. Research Article
  13. Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction
  14. Obituary
  15. Michael Kelpanides (18 July 1945–29 February 2016)
  16. Book Review
  17. Verfassungskonflikte zwischen Politik und Recht in Südosteuropa
  18. Book Review
  19. Narrating Victim-hood
  20. Book Review
  21. Transcending Fratricide
  22. Book Review
  23. Imaginary Trials
  24. Book Review
  25. Srebrenica
  26. Book Review
  27. Radovan Karadžić
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