[Paradigm shift in higher education]

The fast changes that took place in the last quarter of the 20th century made the professionals dealing with pedagogy realize that our school system followed the economical changes in terms of training supply and the matter of education very slowly, if at all; let alone the educational methods. We had to realize that the maintaining of this conservative system is not rational, education has become the most important part of the globalisational competition and the key to the 21st century is learning. Accordingly, the spatial and temporal expenditure of education has become a new trend, namely lifelong learning (LLL). The social needs on education have increased, the expectations of economy and employers have changed: knowledge has become the fund of competitiveness. In this process, universities have got an accentuated role: in addition to being the place of undergraduate training they have become the site of postgraduate courses for the increasing graduate adult masses. Therefore, reform processes have started in a number of European countries in the nineties. The Bologna Declaration signed on 19th June 1999 set a common direction for these reforms, with its signatories aiming to establish a standard European Higher Education Area with harmonized and comparable educational systems by 2010. However, the administrative change itself is not enough to reach the goals; a formal innovation has to be followed by a reform of the contents which means reformation of higher education. In recent years, Hungarian colleges and universities have worked out their educational programs that are suitable for the new structure; it is only the new educational programs that started from 1st September 2006. The author determines the most important parts of the reform of the training system of Semmelweis University Faculty of Health Sciences, which are the following: redrawing of the training philosophy and paradigm, the reform of the training structure of macro level (cognition, knowledge, skill), mezzo level (theory vs. practice and knowledge vs. adaptation) and micro level (basic knowledge vs. up-to-date knowledge), the technological-logistical reform of the training structure (passive vs. active knowledge) and the methodological, technical reform of the training. The author assigns the tasks of the reform in which the most important points are considered to be: the system approach overview of the learning output-expectation of Bologna system training requirements, the analysis of relation of necessity and supply, the reform of the college training system and the formation of focus points.