Fighting for children’s rights means fighting against equalization
Recently, the Human Rights Defense Office registered violation of rights against a child attending school No. 174. This child has limited physical capabilities. And, so, in 2013, the school, which was implementing an inclusive education, in other words, was creating opportunities for children with disabilities such to obtain education along with others, was renovated. However, is was refurbished without taking the children’s interests into account: not all conveniences were established for their mobility and using sanitary facilities. The Ministry of Urban Development and Yerevan Municipality are to be blamed.
You would say what a problem, one child is unable to attend school in the event when thousands of children in Armenia are hungry, do not have clothes and shoes to attend school, can not buy books and textbooks, and so on. Anyway, all these problems are raised because people do not feel them citizens and do not want to protect their own and others rights. Whereas, this sensation should be educated not even at school, but the kindergarten.
According to UNICEF data, one of five disabled children in Yerevan does not attend school, and this number is greater outside of Yerevan: one of four. The following numbers are more impressive: 36% parents of such children in Yerevan, and 51% – in marzes are confident that their children should not go to school at all. Consequently, all of us have the task to educate these people. For what purpose? Not only for them, but, first and foremost, for our children and us. So that the latter seeing a person who is different from them would not be frightened and think that they constituting the majority have some advantages, but to perceive their class as a unity of very different individuals.
This approach is quite contrary to the concept of teaching, which we were raised in the Soviet period. The ideology was communistic, in other words, it was based not on an individual’s creative development, but vice versa, on the concept of although beautiful but utopian wealth and happiness commonly and equally divided among everyone. In everyday practice, it was converted into equalization, to teach everyone in the same way and demanding the same from everyone, as Paruyr Sevak would say: lawn policy.
The type of “officially supported” was a drab one and not in the differences, but the revelation of diversity and development. (Of course, there were teachers and school principals who were willing and able to circumvent these tenets). In this context, not only the disabled could become a subject of ridicule, unacceptable, but also the child bearing optical glasses (“four-eyed”) or, for example, a child coming from a different location and speaking in his local dialect. Are we gone so far that the teachers obtaining education mainly in this century are teaching at schools?
The official organizations contributing to consolidation of children are also in shape of equalization ideology. Octobrists, pioneers and communists organizations, of course, were too far from protecting the children’s rights, according to the plan, they were supposed to prepare a “party soldier”, which, of course, since 60-70’s was turned into a mere formality.
Anyway, the lack of children and juvenile organizations was as harmful as their aimless activity, for the sake of some ideological purposes. If, for instances, we replace pioneer organization with “young Nzhdeh followers”, it will not add a new flavor to our lives. The organization cannot be one, as in the Republic, so as at one school. They must be different with their objectives and sizes. If there is a need to speak about a direction, it can be only one: diversity and, consequently, protection of children’s rights.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
