Education in Armenia is in a bad situation: the schools were politicalized, the principles and the teachers had been involved in election fraud for years, and teaching of all subjects lags behind all contemporary standards for the minimum of 40 years. Practical steps are needed which will pull both this and other fields of public life out from stagnation.
However, if in other fields – the fight against corruption, shadow, and impunity of officials and others it is possible to gain fast and tangible results, then in the field of education, I believe, a cautious and prudent approach is required.
And here I want to refer to the historical precedence again understanding, of course, that all comparisons are historical. Coming to power in 1917, Russian Bolsheviks established an “Emergency Committee”, which should have undertaken sharp steps to realize their policy which they called “proletariat’s dictatorship”. Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed as the head of the Emergency Committee – a fanatic, a ruthless revolutionist who was fighting against the anti-revolutionists here and there, the ones who sabotaged, the rich people, the remnants of the tsarist regime.
Bolsheviks, nevertheless, understood that a new country could not be built on solely “proletariat’s dictatorship” and Emergency Committee, and Anatoly Lunacharsky was appointed as the Minister of Illumination. He was a writer, translator, expert on art, who was closely connected with the previous – tsarist intelligentsia in his roots. He, of course, was also a Bolshevik and revolutionist, but he always “diverged” from Lenin and Trotsky’s team to some extent. Lunacharsky had two most important tasks – to involve the old – tsarist elite in building the new country as much as it was possible and to form a new elite and new culture in the broad meaning of the word. He was fulfilling the tasks successfully until 1930, until Stalin overthrew him.
This field, as you see, is more conservative – to reject what exists only for the reason it has been created during the “previous regime”, to humiliate the teachers and lecturers who worked during the “regime” is simply not reasonable. Dozens of years are needed for making “new types” of teachers and lecturers. Frankly speaking, I do not imagine who will agree to work as a teacher at a school for 80-120.000 AMD at the moment, if the current teachers leave.
Another note: if someone has not closed the streets and laid in front of the cars, it does not mean s/he is against the New Armenia
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
