Capable of seeing a problem, proposing a solution and bringing it to fruition: what kind of professionals are needed in an innovative economy.
The domestic education system continues to develop, and an important landmark on this path was the meeting on the creation of an educational centre for training personnel in promising areas, held in January of this year. On it, President of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko indicated, “One of the most important tasks for the country today (perhaps this is the most important task) is the modernisation of the economy on an innovative basis.”
Be explorers
Indeed, the introduction of innovation is a key driver of economic modernisation. It is innovation that can give the economy a qualitative breakthrough: new technologies increase labor productivity, reduce production costs, open export niches and create entire industries that did not exist before. For example, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 spawned many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of industries, from mobile apps and online banking to Uber and food delivery.
However, innovations do not appear in a vacuum — they are created by people. Education itself is the link without which the entire chain of modernisation falls apart, because you can attract investments, build infrastructure, but if there is no one to generate ideas, develop products and implement solutions, the economic breakthrough will remain on paper. The example of South Korea is eloquent: by relying on education, the country in one generation has gone from exporting human hair wigs — one of the main sources of foreign exchange earnings in the 1960s — to becoming a world leader in the production of semiconductors and smartphones.
Innovation by its nature is not just an invention but the ability to see a problem, propose a non-standard solution and bring it into a real product. Accordingly, the education system is required not to transfer ready-made knowledge but to develop students’ research skills and critical thinking, creativity, the ability to formulate problems and work in a team.
How effectively does the education system today develop these qualities? Moreover, this system is faced with a serious challenge: modern technologies test the strength of its key components like the presentation of material in class, homework and exams as a form of control.
During the lesson, the teacher is forced to fight for the student’s attention. Outside of school, students are as immersed in the digital environment as possible, and their brains become accustomed to fast-paced, engaging content. What efforts must be made to interest the student in the current environment? Essentially, a teacher with chalk and a textbook must compete with algorithms that have cost billions of dollars to develop.
Homework, which should serve to consolidate knowledge, has turned into a ritual of rewriting. As the father of two schoolchildren, who sometimes checks homework, the author discovered the whole ‘industry of ready-made answers’: sites with solved homework in all subjects, channels on Telegram and TikTok with the same content, and, of course, artificial intelligence that will immediately provide a ready-made solution. A student simply copies it into a notebook, without even delving into the meaning. The problem is so acute that among our neighbours in Russia, in April 2026, at the level of the relevant department, it was publicly stated: homework in its current form has lost its educational meaning, because AI solves the problem faster than a student opens a notebook. And a British survey of teachers published last month also showed measurable consequences: two-thirds of teachers report a decline in students’ literacy and loss of key skills like thinking, writing and conversation.
Exams in universities, which are supposed to confirm knowledge, today only test the ability to bypass the control of the teacher. While preparing the article, the author talked with a few students. The sample, of course, is not representative but still. It turns out that many modern students take exams with micro-earphones — almost invisible, but allowing them to dictate ready-made answers.
How effective are theoretical exams in the age of information overload? When any fact, formula or definition can be found in seconds, testing memory becomes meaningless. The author attended an exam where students including managers of various levels clumsily copied from their phones. Where a member of the examination committee dying from second-hand embarrassment was tossed between the need to issue a reprimand and respect for the status and professional experience of the auditory.
The question is not whether to bring technology into schools — they are already there. The question is how to use them as effectively as possible to improve the school itself.
I admit honestly: when preparing this article, the author himself actively worked with AI — and, it seems, this is already the answer.
From reproduction to creation
What if new technologies are not a problem, but a window of opportunity for transition to the model that the innovation economy requires? During a lesson, AI works for each student separately: it re-explains the material to those who did not understand the first time, selects tasks according to the students’ strengths, and instantly checks the answers. The teacher does what a machine cannot do: they set a task, conduct a live analysis, and see the student as a person.
Homework ceases to be a rewrite of a ready-made solution. The student receives a task that does not have a ready answer online and uses AI as a tool — test a hypothesis, analyse an example, find a source. It is not the answer that is evaluated, but the course of thought.
The exam ceases to be an answer to a written question and becomes a defence of a student’s own work — a project, research, prototype. It is impossible to cheat: the commission asks about the sense, and the student must know their work from the inside. This is the transition from reproduction to creation. Countries that make this transition first will have a generation that works with AI as a tool, rather than cheating with it.
The President of Belarus defined our present as a time of concrete actions. This thesis is fully applicable to the education system. Along with fundamental knowledge, which has traditionally been the strength of the domestic school, the innovative economy increasingly needs people with actual work, who are capable of seeing a problem, proposing a solution and bringing it to fruition. It is important to supplement education so that it develops these qualities.
A strong foundation for this has already been created. The National Children’s Technology Park established by presidential decree in 2019 works with schoolchildren in 15 areas, from robotics to aerospace technologies. In October 2025, the President opened the Minsk City Centre for Technical Creativity – 18 laboratories on an area of more than 7 thousand square meters. Schools have engineering classes at major enterprises. The “100 Ideas for Belarus” project brings the best youth developments to the national level, and the youth analytical movement “The Future of Belarus” at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research teaches young people to examine real problems and propose solutions.
All these are working elements of the system. The task of the coming years is to make them the property not of individual talents, but of every schoolchild in every district. This requires trained teachers of a new type, a real connection between the school and enterprises, and a willingness to evaluate the student not by what they remember, but by what they are able to do. The engineering vertical in the country has been built — it is important to supplement it with the development of entrepreneurship in students, so that a school project can become not only a competitive work, but also the start of their own business. “He who builds with his own hands will never destroy,” the President said in December 2024 at a rally of student groups. The school that teaches to create — with your own hands, with your own head, with your own initiative — is the school that is needed in times of concrete actions.
Source: Беларусь сегодня
