Our old and new problems are hanging around the necks of children: Pashinyan

During a cabinet meeting today, August 29, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addressed the issue of schools, sharing his observations from recent unannounced visits to education facilities. He emphasized that there are significant and serious issues to tackle.

"We hang all our problems—old and new—around the necks of children, which is simply unacceptable. We must allow children to develop without imposing these burdens on them," stated the Prime Minister.

In response, the Minister of Education and Science, Zhanna Andreasyan, noted that the environment is a continuation of content. She remarked: "We are also addressing the issue of our standards. If our goal with the new educational criteria is to promote flexibility, creativity, and independent thinking, then the environment must reflect that. The heaviness of our current school chairs does not allow us to create such an environment. We need to move towards changing these standards, so that children can sit in circles and work in small groups. This also sets requirements for the kind of furniture we should have."

The Prime Minister added that school fences should not be rusty. "Today, we have hundreds of schools with rusty fences; that should not be the case. We must ensure that this is not the reality anymore," he asserted.