HSE Experts Comment on Herman Gref’s Suggestion to Add Decision-Making to School Curriculum

CEO of Sberbank Herman Gref believes it is necessary to add a decision-making class to school curriculum starting from primary education. This subject is not only absent in school curriculum, it is not often taught even in universities. Higher School of Economics is a rare exception.

HSE first vice rector and HSE Graduate School of Business Dean Valery Katkalo assumes that decision-making is an area of knowledge and skills, in which there is rapid progress because of a leap in the development of neuroscience and methods of decision-making based on big data. At HSE Graduate School of Business, courses on decision-making are included in all programmes of GSB portfolio.

Fuad Aleskerov, director of HSE International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis, told VC how a class on decision-making could be useful for school students. Aleskerov believes that it is necessary to add such a class to the curriculum but only for students of the eighth grade or older and in a form of 6-8 lectures with practical tasks and problem solving. Decision-making is easy to adapt for any level of knowledge. However, as Herman Gref has noticed, Higher School of Economics provides its students with decision-making classes on the largest scale in Russia.

Decision-making subject is adaptive; its content differs depending on students’ specialization. Almost every faculty of Higher School of Economics has this subject in its curriculum. For example, HSE Graduate School of Business has courses about making business decisions, and on the Faculty of Social Sciences students with major in politics have a course ‘Game Theory and Political Management Decision-Making’. Economics or computer science students need decision-making theory because such specialists create new methods of decision-making during their career, while managers and sociologists need practical knowledge about how to use these methods.

Aleskerov states that a major part of decision-making science has been developed in Russia, and that is why an experiment of teaching decision-making in schools could be successful here.

You can read more about it in a VC article: ‘Adding Decision-Making to School Curriculum Means Teaching Children to Think Rationally’.