ARMENIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM INVENTS A ‘NEW BICYCLE’

ArmInfo
2007-10-16 22:05:00

During the switch to 12-year education they try to combine several
school subjects into one in Armenia.

As Head of the General Education Department of the Armenian Ministry
of Education and Science Narine Hovhanissian said in his talk with
ArmInfo correspondent, the idea is that secondary school pupils
studying should receive maximum knowledge on such subjects as physics,
chemistry, geography and astronomy. To note, the secondary school,
unlike the junior and the higher ones, is considered as the main,
according to 12-year educational system. Natural science became the
integrated or combined subject. In the text book of "Natural science"
5th class pupils faced the problem of misunderstanding the subject,
as the majority of the paragraphs contain tasks and problems, to solve
which the pupils were not prepared. At the same time, the Ministry of
Education and Science decided that teachers of geography must teach
this combined subject. Any objection or criticism is explained by
that the switch to 12-year school requires teaching of all the main
subjects in the secondary school, i.e. in classes 5- 9. Further, in
higher school, which became non-compulsory but just transitional, the
subjects must be distributed according to the preference for entering
a higher educational institution. Touching upon the problems emerged,
N. Hovhannisyan promised to pay attention to concrete criticisms on
the textbook’s quality and mistakes met in it.