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Education in Uzbekistan
Population: 34,687,646

Head of State and Government: Shavkat Mirziyoyev

Form of Government: Republic with two legislative houses: Senate and Legislative Chamber

Official Language:
Uzbek language. The Uzbeks speak a language belonging to the southeastern, or Chagatai (Turki), a branch of the Turkic language group. Karakalpak, a distantly related Turkic language, enjoys official status alongside Uzbek in Karakalpakstan, where about half a million people speak it. About one-seventh of the population of Uzbekistan speaks Russian.

Uzbekistan's ethnic composition:
Uzbeks make up more than four-fifths of the population, followed by Tajiks, Kazakhs, Tatars, Russians, and Karakalpaks. Uzbeks are the least Russified of the Turkic peoples formerly under Soviet rule, and virtually all of them still claim Uzbek as their primary language.

Religion:
The Uzbeks are Sunni Muslims, considered among the most devout Muslims in all of Central Asia. Thus, about three-fourths of the population is Muslim. Slightly less than one-tenth of the population is Eastern Orthodox Christian, and the remainder considers themselves nonreligious or follows other religions.

Education History:
The madrasah functioned until the 20th century as a theological seminary and law school, with a curriculum centered on the Qurʾān and the Hadith. Arabic grammar and literature, mathematics, logic, and, in some cases, natural science were studied in madrasahs in addition to Islamic theology and law. Tuition was free, and food, lodging, and medical care were also provided. Instruction usually took place in a courtyard and consisted primarily of memorizing textbooks and the instructor’s lectures. The lecturer issued certificates (ijāzāt; singular, ijāzah) to his students that constituted permission to repeat his words.The famed medieval seminaries (madrasahs) of Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and the Fergana Valley. The famed medieval seminaries (madrasahs) of Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and the Fergana Valley, long in decline, underwent a revival in the late 18th and again in the late 19th century that prepared new generations for carrying on Muslim education throughout Central Asia. Thousands of seminarians had flocked to those great institutions inside and outside the region. Owing to both the renewed concern for education in the 1890s and the models offered by sudden activism among modernizers in Egypt, India, Turkey, and Tatarstan, Central Asia instituted its own educational reform movement known as the New Method (usul-i jadid) during the first two decades of the 20th century. The leaders of the Jadids, as they called themselves, included Munawwar Qari in Tashkent, Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy in Samarkand, Sadriddin Ayniy in Bukhara, and ʿAshur ʿAli Zahiriy in Kokand (Qŭqon). They exerted a strong influence on education during the initial decades of the Soviet period, and their methods and aims have reemerged since independence. After the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) in the mid-1980s, Uzbekistan’s school administrators and teachers openly acknowledged the inadequacies of public education and began intensive efforts to modernize primary and secondary education; among other measures, Uzbek replaced Russian as the primary language of instruction. These efforts rendered most schoolbooks, which were written in Russian, unusable. The new language emphasis and the change in ideology created a need for hundreds of thousands of copies of entirely new instructional materials in Uzbekistan’s elementary and secondary school system. In response to that need, several histories of Uzbekistan—somewhat liberated from communist ideological strictures but still showing Marxist influence—appeared soon after independence, written by scholars experienced in Soviet historiography. Higher education, too, began the massive switch from Russian-language instruction and teaching materials to a curriculum and classroom procedure based entirely on Uzbek.

After the destruction of the informal Jadid system by communist authorities in the early 1920s, higher research shifted to such newer educational institutions as Tashkent State University and, after 1942, to the Uzbek S.S.R. branch of Moscow’s Academy of Sciences. The latter academic complex supported some 200 scholarly institutes and centers at its zenith. After independence, and to some extent starting even earlier, the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan declined in prestige and suffered significant losses in subsidies. By 1992 many institutes had closed or combined with others, and competing institutions with funding from various state agencies arose to operate in the same field.

After the independency:
Policy change happened. Compulsory education changed from 11 to 9 years: higher education in tenth or eleventh grade or vocational training. The Uzbek language became the language of instruction at schools. In addition, budget constraints and other transition problems have made it difficult to maintain and update educational buildings, equipment, texts, supplies, teaching methods, and curricula. Foreign aid for education is desperately needed but has not been sufficient to compensate for the loss of central funding.

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Structure of educational system:
When viewed in general, the Uzbekistan educational system includes: Preschool training (preprimary-from three to six years old) General secondary education (from 6 to 15 years old) Secondary vocational education (from 15 to 18 years old) Higher education (undergraduate and graduate from 18 years old). Girls and boys are legally considered equal and study in the same classes and schools. Schools are open to all ethnic groups, and minorities in schools are rarely an issue. The academic year begins on 2 September. The grading system of Uzbekistan is numerical. Course exams occur only at the end of the term, and Education is freely provided to all children of Uzbekistan.

The first educational reform:
In the mid-1990s, a significant curriculum reform was begun. Western experts advised: a more commercial approach to the mathematics curriculum with more emphasis on economics courses on the relationship of capital to labor, social science courses on individual responsibility for the environment, and the addition of entirely new subjects, such as business management. Because such changes involve new materials and a new pedagogical approach by staff, the reform period is estimated at 10 to 15 years. The current transformation of the educational system is performed along educational models in developed countries. According to Gulyamov, "During the process of developing the National Program, the experience of reforming education in more than 30 leading countries in the world has been studied" (Gulyamov 1999). In 1997, President Karimov founded "Umid," a program providing students with educational fellowships for obtaining education abroad. By the year 2000, over 700 students had been awarded the "Umid" Presidential Scholarship to pursue graduate and undergraduate degrees in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Certainly, returning graduates are expected to bring back "the influence," and those who have finished their studies are employed by the State. The Uzbekistan educators established contacts with the United Nations Organization and separate countries like France, Germany, the Republic of Korea, Turkey, and the United States. Many organizations like Peace Corp (USA), ACCELS (USA), British Council, Merci Project (Great Britain), Goethe Institute (Germany), NAFE (USA), and Save the Children Fund (Great Britain) participate in the educational efforts undertaken by Uzbekistan. For example, the Ministry of Education of Turkey assisted in forming 22 Lycea for over 4.8 thousand students. Another example is the American Council on Cooperation in Education (ANCALS) which within 4 years helped over 222 Uzbekistan students get an education in the United States. Finally, within only two years, 25 Uzbekistan schools got the certificates of the UNESCO Associated Schools Project (ASP).

Second Educational Reform:
The second president of Uzbekistan continued the educational reform. “Action Strategy for Five Priority Areas of Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan in 2017-2021,” adopted at the beginning of a new stage of reforms in Uzbekistan in February 2017, one of the priorities is “to continue the course of further improving the system of lifelong education, increasing the availability of quality educational services, training highly qualified personnel in accordance with the modern needs of the labor market ”. The development of improving the competitiveness of education in the country on the national and international labor markets was also included in the Concept of Integrated Socio-Economic Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan until 2030. Prior to the start of a new stage of reforms, preschool education in Uzbekistan did not receive much attention. This changed in 2017 when the Ministry of Preschool Education (MDE) was created. If earlier, the coverage of children with this form of education was only 27%, then by the end of 2019, it had already increased to 44.5%. During this period, the number of public preschool institutions (preschool institutions) increased 1.5 times (from 4940 to 7500), and private preschool institutions - increased three times (from 269 to 783). If, in 2017, 51 thousand teachers worked in the preschool education system, then by the end of 2019 - more than 80 thousand. Much attention was paid to the training of personnel for preschool education. To better train specialists, 97 pedagogical colleges have wholly come under the jurisdiction of the MDO. In all pedagogical universities, quotas for preschool education were increased. In 2019, the faculty of evening education at the Tashkent State Pedagogical University was opened for the first time. Specialists in preschool education began to be trained by the preschool education faculty at the Buchan University branch in Tashkent. The Institute for Retraining and Advanced Training of Heads and Specialists of Preschool Educational Institutions was opened at the MDO. On April 11, 2017, the World Bank and the Government of Uzbekistan signed a US$ 42.2 million Credit Agreement for the Modernizing Higher Education Project. USAIDUSAID’s assistance in the education sector restarted in 2019 to support public school students reading, math, information and communication technology (ICT), and English skills. Uzbekistan is involved in four EU education assistance programs: Tempus, which promotes university cooperation; Erasmus Mundus, which promotes student and academic staff mobility at all levels of tertiary education through joint higher education programs and individual scholarships; The EU-Central Asia Education Platform, which supports reform in the entirety of the Central Asian education system; and The Central Asia Research and Education Network (CAREN)

Challenges:
Simply transposing a European system to another region ignored the “loose coupling between global norms and local meanings”—the Soviet and the foreign (Western)—as well as the tensions between the continuities and discontinuities resulting from the fall of the Soviet regime. Bringing methodology and approaches abroad doesn't mean it will apply to the country. All the stakeholders should be considered in addition to cultural norms.

References:
1. Population: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uzbekistan-population/

2. Facts: https://www.britannica.com/place/Uzbekistan/Government-and-society

3. https://voicesoncentralasia.org/increasing-the-effectiveness-of-education-assistance-in-uzbekistan/

4. https://www.usaid.gov/uzbekistan/education