Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan participated in the “Academic City Armenia: International Forum of Knowledge” conference and delivered a speech entitled “Predicting the Future”, his press office reports.
Speaking about the strategic significance of the Academic City, Prime Minister Pashinyan noted: “Education is a platform for predicting the individual’s future, and the “Academic City” project is actually to further strengthen the individual’s future prediction system and transform the individual’s future prediction system into the state’s future prediction system. And in my opinion, the “Academic City” is the project that will further strengthen the formula for predicting the individual’s future.”
Nikol Pashinyan emphasized that a very important component of the “Academic City” project is high schools. "We plan to have a high school of arts, a high school of technology, high schools in all directions, the idea of which is to give the most outstanding children of the Republic the opportunity to be closer to higher and postgraduate education at the intermediate stage," the Prime Minister said, adding that every child, without exception, is an exceptional talent, and the role and mission of the education system is to discover and develop the child's talent.
“Life itself is a learning process, and therefore our task is to make that learning process, the education process more institutional, more purposeful, more informed. And the same applies to the life of the country, and my prediction is that the Academic City will become a gravitational center for the life of the Republic of Armenia, which will predetermine the course of life in the Republic of Armenia at the individual level, group level, community level and state level.”
Next, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan answered the questions of those present. Answering the question of how he assesses the current state of the Armenian education system and its development prospects, the Prime Minister noted: “The state of the education system in the Republic of Armenia is bad, but the good news is that we have a clear plan and program on how to change this situation. Let’s go and see, for example, the issue related to the social status of teachers. Today, when visiting the regions of the Republic, I am pleased to learn that there are already teachers in the regions who receive a salary of 500,000 drams, 450,000, 400,000 drams, but this does not mean that we have achieved our dream, because we have agreed that voluntary certefication must be repeated in cycles."
Regarding the question of what role the Academic City will play in transforming the educational ecosystem of Armenia and fully realizing the potential of young specialists, Nikol Pashinyan answered: “The Academic City should be an acceleration center of development thought in Armenia, a gravitational center around which events should take place.” According to the Prime Minister, one of the important features of the Academic City is to bring the workplace closer to the potential student, which will give them the opportunity to do internships right on the spot; it will also be the number one center for intellectual entertainment. “This is very important. This will not be another fenced-off project, where only those who are either students or lecturers have access,” said Nikol Pashinyan. The Prime Minister emphasized that the Academic City is a project of a completely different logic, so that both students and lecturers have the opportunity to fully live and work there.
