INTERNATIONAL INTEGRATION WITH SUCH AN APPROACH?

Azat Artsakh – Nagorno Karabakh Republic [NKR]
19 July 05

Fundamental reform in secondary education is a vital necessity, because
all the spheres of life, social, political and economic, require a
high level of education of the people. However, with mistakes and
hastiness in this system we will lose rather than gain. Later we
will have to pay a higher price. We are now raising a generation in
a period when the gene pool of the people has been damaged because
of the war and the natural disaster, which does not allow any delay
(I mean prolonging the secondary education to 12 years) for a socially
insecure people. This is the second year that children go to school
at the age of 6 and study by textbooks meant for seven-year-old
children. Such load may harm the normal physical and mental development
of children. It should be noted that children who start school at
an earlier stage differ from other children in the negative sense of
the word. Experienced teachers will confirm this. It is not easy to
understand why there was such haste when event there were no textbooks
for the new schedule. Is it possible to achieve qualitative changes
corresponding to the international standards through groundless
and pointless quantitative changes? In all the times the system of
education has been a superstructure which has always been “sensitive”
to its economic basis. Do we possess the necessary economic basis and,
more importantly, the psychological background? Isn’t it a vital need
to set an aim of international integration in these important and
necessary spheres as well? In think, in our reality it would have been
more practical to join the Soviet school, i.e. fundamental knowledge,
with the national school, i.e. upbringing. With a model of national
education and Armenian teacher it is possible to have school graduates
corresponding to international standards. It is necessary to revise
the textbooks and change the form of examination tickets. For example,
the pointless requirement of memorizing all the dates, nicknames and
names of relatives of historical figures, because even the teacher
may not always recall all these details. This helps to develop memory
while ignoring the analytical approach to the cause and effect of
this or that historical event. By the way, the textbooks of Russian
and the programme of exams in Russian in the 8th and 10th grades are
quite good in terms of what was said above.

NAZIK NALBANDIAN. 19-07-2005