This general education manifesto is on the occasion of Charents’birthday. Yerevan, you are Charents’ city. Long live Yerevan, the Armenian capital city, with your position, genius as a leader.
We should live in such a way that our daily affairs make the change of the situation continuous, irreversible. It’s already said, “Preserve the union in important matters, freedom in the secondary and love in everything.”
By the right of elder, I say: we can come to an agreement with beneficiaries of general education not to postpone the already matured changes for any reason, and the barriers, which do not require additional financial supplements, shouldn’t be in the way of organization of general education for the student, teacher, school. By removing these barriers until the new academic year, we will increase our autonomy, independent acting, and capabilities of being responsible for our lifestyle, multiply our self-confidence and make our partnership firm. …
At this stage, we can record as an agreement that we spare the learner, family, teacher’s time and efforts maximally liberating them from fraud, artificiality, formalism, as well as waste of resources.
-Let’s get rid of compulsory 12-year secondary education, and let’s consider pre-qualitative (vocational) secondary special education to be compulsory after the basic general education. The students, after having left the 9-year basic school, will be free to choose a vocational training at college or at an educational center with or without any tuition fees, in diverse forms and periods of instructions beginning from a three-month period.
In this way, adolescents in Armenia will participate in the activation of economic and manufacturing life. So the system of general education will participate in the declared economic revolution.
Teachers will be in charge of the yearly and final assessments of the basic education which will be open and transparent. In June the active community groups and authorities of all ranks will be concentrated on the school leavers’ professional orientation and organization of working summer activities: working groups, farming and community initiatives.
We will ensure that each school has a basic curriculum in line with the current standards of general education. Teachers will be in charge of the development-choice-organization of school subject syllabuses (general, compulsory, student’s choice), and we will concentrate on the service and support of such autonomy.
With legislative and other actions, we will remove barriers to non-pedagogical education professionals who want and can work at school in the position of the headmaster, having the status of an organizer of mandatory and elective course, the educational project coordinator. Thus, the general education will contribute to the economy’s activation, to the reduction of unemployment.
Let’s make summer educational with summer schools, camps, projects, attractive suggestions of country study educational trips which will be accessible for the learner and teacher.
Let’s make the non-stop learning process and sharing the pedagogical achievements and new skills real for the teacher with a free choice of form. For this purpose, we provide free accommodation in our Yerevan dormitories and Arates Schooling Center, “Dpir” e-magazine … all our educational areas and property.
Let’s replace the anti-revolutionary, anti-inclusive examining June with revolutionary June as an all round first school review in Armenia. You may invite us in June, you may come to our Educomplex.
– Let’s help the school now to formulate and publish the development plan, the activities of becoming an open developing center in 2019, having the Government Program of RA as a guide for its own activities.
You may add your step, fill in your suggestion. And in the final structure of the government, the Ministry of the sphere, the minister should become the guarantor of these changes, the coordinator of our actions.
If yes, why do not we make this real with your confirmation as an actual arrangement between you and us?… During our teachers’ camp on March 25-30, we are finishing the entire formulation of the program development, organization, dissemination projects of material, media environment development of the author educational (state alternative) program of the wonders being created and built in the Educational Complex during the years of 2019, 2020-2022? We will present the results in the Open Laboratory of the Open Educational Network being organized with the proposal of the Ministry of ES of RA on April 26-27.
Yes, we should live so, we should act so: Preserving union in important matters, freedom in the secondary and love in everything.
Translator: Yura Ganjalyan