If the goal is simply to get enough calories, then education is not necessary.
Why is the state of education so poor in Armenia today? Government propaganda talks about the guilt of the “former authorities,” teachers and intellectuals. There is some truth to that. We are told that “back in the days of the former authorities,” education did not provide a path to prosperity, a career or high social status. If we accept that this is precisely what education is for, then the argument is correct. But is that not also the case under the “current authorities”?
If we listen today to Civil Contract MPs and officials who receive salaries and bonuses worth millions, it would be difficult to argue that a good education is the key to their success. Even those who have attended various Western seminars or courses do not appear to have had their intellectual abilities particularly enhanced by those events — at best, perhaps, at the level of “vocabulary.” At their core are the same Nikol-Pashinyan-style clichés, combined with a complete absence of the ability to think. They are usually accompanied by thuggish expressions borrowed from the “boss,” or, when seminars are involved, embellished with empty “bird language” that is profoundly at odds with the realities of present-day Armenia. For example: in accordance with our shared European values.
It is difficult to see how memorizing such hypocritical formulas could be evidence of a high level of education.
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Education, in the deeper meaning of the word, did not contribute to personal “success” in life — in the everyday sense of that word — in the past, and it does not do so today either. Nor have the glamorous, high-society events supposedly intended to enhance the prestige of education changed anything. If anything, they may have put some people off the very idea of becoming “educated.”
But the problem, naturally, goes much deeper. And the key, in my view, lies in what we mean by the words “success” and “achievement,” and what education is supposed to contribute to. After all, what does it mean to be an “educated person”?
Education, in my view, is also a moral category. If a person says that our compatriots should be tortured and left to rot in a Baku prison, or that Kocharyan should not be put on trial but simply shot and the money he allegedly stole distributed among the people, then regardless of whether that person is a millionaire or a homeless man, an academic or a manual laborer, whether they parrot “core European values” or do not, THEY ARE NOT AN EDUCATED PERSON.
You do not need to read a single book to hold such views. You can see a couple of hate-filled posts on the internet, and a person’s convictions will already have been formed.
But there is a more important question here: why has the situation deteriorated even further in recent years, and why is there no chance of getting out of this hole under the current authorities? My deep conviction is that the problem is this: you cannot officially promote misanthropic ideas and at the same time urge people to become educated. The thesis that the purpose of life is to eat well, and that people should acquire knowledge for the sake of obtaining those calories, does not create sufficient motivation at a deeper level.
…As for the “former” and the “current” authorities. Which is worse: preaching national, spiritual and state values while living contrary to those values, as many of the “former” authorities did, or cynically insulting, denying and desecrating those values and living by openly trampling on and mocking them, as the “current” authorities do?
I leave the answer to the readers.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
