www.aravot.am has already written about the educational and scientific component of parties’ pre-election programs. All forces promise to increase education financing, to provide student credits, to increase PhD bonuses, add them to the pensions etc., but the ways to reach those are not always mentioned.
We inquired from Armen Ashotyan, the Minister of Education and Science, how realistic those promises were. The minister communicated that he had prepared a comparative analysis of programs in the field of education and science put forward by political forces for himself and he had noted that everyone lacked content. “Let us put politics aside, let us forget that I am a member of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) and one of the people responsible for the educational program inside our party. The first thing that grabs attention is that everyone’s educational component is weak and the second is that emphasis is made on social problems and finance,” stated Armen Ashotyan.
According to him, the program of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation had an advantage over all other parties’ programs in terms of education and science, “There is almost no content in the educational and scientific sphere in other parties’ programs, there is only social and financial emphasis and one cannot carry out educational policy only by that. Certainly, education and science are the spheres, where there is always demand for expenditures. From the RPA perspective, they are not expenditures, they are investments. As for the increase in financing the sphere, it will be done as soon as it is possible. However, we don’t have a possibility to increase state financing dramatically for well-known reasons; that is why we try to carry out development programs with the support of international donors – World Bank, European Union etc.” In the minister’s words, “Certainly, money is very important, but it is impossible to think that one can make a dramatic change, if one doesn’t know what reconstruction he is going to carry out in his educational and scientific system.”
Mr. Ashotyan talked also about the respective part of the Armenian National Congress (ANC) program, “I looked through that long ago, I even had an opportunity to discuss it with the ones responsible for it. I said that almost half of the provisions included in their programs are steps taken by the state policy in the past few years, it had been in progress when their project was published and as for the other half, I don’t think it is realistic.”
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Gohar HAKOBYAN
