They Won’t Change “Law on Language”, Foreign Language School Project Will be Implemented by Alternative Methods

Opponents of opening foreign language schools and making changes in the Laws on Language and General Education today had a chance to express their concerns and statements of the question at the parliamentary hearings held at the National Assembly.

Despite the fact that the Law on Language stays inviolable, which was one of the main concerns of the opponents, they announced that they would continue their struggle till the offer to make changes in the Law on General Education is also taken out of the package.

They also offered to take the complete bill back from the NA, hold large-scale discussions and develop a program targeted at raising the level of the general educational system which will also raise the issue of improving foreign language teaching.

When we reminded Ashotyan that a few months ago he considered the implementation of the government project without making changes in the Law on Language impossible (whereas many intellectuals opposing the project were offering many other ways) he said that alternative ways have been found by the lawyers of Ministry of Education and Science and NA.

“People who regularly voice their concerns in fact do no work, whereas we have worked both for them and for us,” Ashotyan said.

The information that Armenia lags behind Georgia and Azerbaijan by the level of foreign language knowledge among 16-35 year-old citizens did not convince the opponents of the project that the problem had to be solved by opening foreign schools. Just the other way around, that argument was another opportunity for the opponents to insist that the level of foreign language teaching had to be raised at all general education schools since 10-11 schools would not raise Armenia’s rating in that respect.

According to Levon Chukaszyan, PhD, Head of the Chair of History of Arts of Yerevan State University, this parliamentary discussion was an attempt to prove that the Government listens to other viewpoints but in reality it was a failure since nobody was listening.

“We made sure one more time that advocates of the project do not clearly imagine the threats and challenges that are connected with the issue raised by them and are generally not aware what is going on in the world in this field,” he said.

Chukaszyan also said that the practice of “telling the truth right to one’s face” is not yet accepted in Armenia and many confuse it with personal insult: Chukaszyan had made a proposal to the Government to transfer Ashotyan to a job that conformed to his abilities. The latter felt deeply insulted by it.

At the parliamentary discussions Artak Davtyan, the Head of the NA Standing Committee on Education, Science, Culture, Spots and Youth Issues came up with a surprising and incomprehensible viewpoint:

Responding to a remark by a member of the Initiative “We are against Foreign Language Schools” that when “Mercedes” was imported into Armenia, “Yeraz” did not become more competitive (the comparison concerned the issue of competitiveness of Armenian language in case of foreign language education) Davtyan said: “They shouldn’t even have tried to raise the quality of “Yeraz”, they should have rejected it.”

Ani Gasparyan