Epress.am News from Armenia
Working in schools must be teachers who, first and foremost, value children’s dignity and never try to belittle them, said Heritage Party member, former school principal and current MP Anahit Bakhshyan, speaking on the two videos surfacing in YouTube which depicted different teachers in Yerevan schools hitting pupils.
“Children are really different. And a teacher’s skill lies in the fact that she has different tools to be able to approach the soul of each child, to speak with him, to work, to educate and in the outcome, receive that which she has given.
“The pedagogical university, which prepares future teachers, should provide those skills,” she said, and in response to the question whether the post-secondary institution provides these skills, said that’s already a different issue.
Journalists tried again: can each individual who graduates from the Faculty of Law be considered a lawyer? To which Bakhshyan responded with her own question: “And what type of state is our state?”
“To keep it short, what type of system it is, that type of pedagogy it is — education, legal system and the rest,” said Bakhshyan.
She compared the pedagogy of the Soviet era with that today and noted that the lesson was at the center of the Soviet school.
“45 minutes, the teacher in front of the blackboard, the students in their seats, there was a class process,” she said.
However, the member of parliament added that if it was possible to put such videos online year ago, there would have been more (presumably, than today). According to the MP, pedagogy was authoritarian then, while today at least such issues are talked about.
The other participant in today’s press conference, a lecturer at the Armenian State Pedagogical University, psychologist Ruben Poghosyan said that decades of psychological research was conducted in schools.
“We came across numerous problems which couldn’t receive such a response from the media. Moreover, what we saw, it was nothing new, we’re all from there, right?” he asked rhetorically.
According to Poghosyan, it’s not that one should go looking for the accused in this issue, but to understand what has happened between the teacher and the pupils.
Bakhshyan, however, disagreed, saying, that doesn’t matter, no teacher should allow situations to escalate with children.
“They can be subjected to provocation, you know how smart they are in that sense, simply genius,” she said.