Armenia’s educational system has encountered an unprecedented intellectual setback in the entire post-independence era. Armenian 15-year-olds scored below the international average in mathematics, science, and reading, ranking behind regional peers in the latest global assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The findings published in the OECD’s latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey highlight deep concerns about functional literacy, issues that have been voiced at the highest levels in this South Caucasus country. According to the results, only about 1 percent of Armenian students achieved top performance levels in mathematics, while almost none reached the highest levels in science and reading.
This is a profound disaster for literacy standards in Armenia, a country that was consistently top-ranked during the Soviet era. Now, it sits near the bottom out of 91 participating nations in the OECD assessment. In any normal democracy, it would take mere hours to fire the official responsible for steering the education sector into such a catastrophic state. But in Nikol’s Armenia, different standards apply, the most important of which is absolute loyalty to Pashinyan. Beyond maintaining a tight grip on law enforcement, through lavish bonuses and lucrative positions he wins over compliant, uncritical, zombified allies, one of whom is the Minister of Education, Science, Culture, and Sport (ESCS).
The OECD is indeed a global benchmark in education, primarily through PISA. Every few years, PISA measures the ability of 15-year-olds to apply their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge to real-world challenges, with results closely scrutinized by governments and education specialists worldwide. Armenia participated in the PISA 2025 cycle, whose results were published on September 8 and caused immense disappointment among the clear-eyed segment of the Armenian public. Naturally, we do not expect to compete with top performers like China (where lead regions reached 93–97%), but we expected not to fall behind neighboring Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. Yet what happened, happened.
Read more – ACNIS reView from Yerevan #34, 2026 of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS).
