“People will realize too late that this silence was not in their children’s interest,” says art teacher Giorgi Liparishvili in an interview with Batumelebi. We spoke with him about the “education reform” announced by Georgian Dream, which specialists assess as catastrophic and a step backwards.
Mr. Giorgi, since the Georgian Dream government plans to abolish the 12th grade in schools, we want to hear teachers’ opinions on this issue. What do you think about this change? What do students, schools, and teachers lose as a result?
This is not just about abolishing the 12th grade, is it? A whole package of education reforms has been announced at the same time, right? Reducing the number of universities, cutting the number of professors all of this will also lead to unemployment.
Cities will be emptied of students as well, because many people simply won’t be able to move to another city to study. And the claim that anyone will be able to complete the 12th grade in Europe and continue their education there that’s also false, isn’t it?
In Europe, the problem isn’t completing the 12th grade schools struggle even with food provision, and this hasn’t been resolved yet. Sanitary problems remain unresolved, and even now lice outbreaks are spreading in many schools. Why is that happening? Maybe because there’s still no water in schools shouldn’t someone talk about that?
The main issue here is to reduce young people’s exit routes to Europe and weaken their connection to European values. That’s why this is being tied to a “reform” of universities as well so that fewer students can even become students.
When, in the future, so many students graduate at the same time the current 11th and 12th graders what will be done with them? Where are these people supposed to go? And if the 12th grade was a problem, why weren’t we talking about it before? Why has it suddenly become an issue now?
So is the real problem the 12th grade, or something else that the state doesn’t want to admit?
What is the real problem, in your view?
The problem is having educated people in the country. The fewer educated people there are, the easier they are to control, to employ for low wages, to move around as you wish, and to penetrate their minds more easily. This is about eliminating development.
Last year, remember how some literary works were removed from the university entrance exam materials? Now even what remains will disappear if the 12th grade is abolished. You can’t cram everything into the 11th grade.
If the student doesn’t understand this, the student’s parent surely does but remains silent or thinks, “Well, there used to be only 11 years of schooling before.”
But back then, there weren’t this many opportunities. University diplomas weren’t recognized. You couldn’t win European awards or even travel to Europe. Now all of this is interconnected.
In my opinion, this is not an education reform it’s a reform of ignorance, a retreat of education. It’s a step backward, toward the past.
Most likely, a few schools will be allowed to keep the 12th grade, but then favoritism will begin, or education there will become expensive, and not everyone’s child will be able to attend. They won’t cut off the branch their own children are sitting on.
Their children already study in European schools and probably won’t need this system anyway in schools that already have accreditation and allow graduates to continue their education at European universities.
People will realize too late that this silence was not in their children’s interest. It will turn out that the government isn’t cutting off its own branch it’s cutting off ours, so that we cannot develop, so that we cannot reach that summit, which is sweet.
And who is carrying out this reform also matters, doesn’t it? Is this person an education researcher, an expert? Do they understand educational processes, school methodologies? Do they have international experience, European values in education? In this case, none of that seems to apply.
I had the opportunity to work briefly in a European school, and incredible things happen there. Children ride bicycles, choose their education paths, receive vocational education as well. Schools have so many workshops for children. Here, education, sports, and crafts have been completely disconnected from one another. Sports are treated as something unnecessary, secondary and now they’re being separated from education altogether, so that people cannot defend themselves through education and critical thinking.
They want us to be followers to go wherever the river’s current takes us instead of sailing with a sailboat into learning, education, and development.
What do your colleagues think about all this? Is there internal resistance among teachers to reject these imposed changes?
There’s no visible outcry. It’s as if people are waiting to see what happens. This is something we often suffer from we fail to use wisdom as an example, as experience. We know the saying: “Only after the cart overturns does the road appear,” yet we still wait for the cart to overturn and then it may be too late. After that, change doesn’t come so easily.
Are we really such a chosen nation that we’ll survive no matter what? If we don’t have education, if we lose the ability to fight, to think, to have strength what will save us?
We were saved once before, weren’t we? When language and people stood face-to-face with Russian tanks. It was unity that saved everything then, when they wanted to impose the Russian language everywhere in schools, courts, kindergartens. We barely survived that. Those people are still alive today we should listen to them, understand, and realize what was happening, because we are facing the same threat again.
This is not just about whether there should be a 12th grade or whether a university should have a building. We are facing a much bigger challenge.
At a time when you should be building student cities and expanding university spaces, you are shrinking them, reducing students’ space. Why? Why are you emptying cities of students? Because you are afraid they will wake up and confront the regime.
You restrict students’ choices, restrict pupils’ choices what are you preparing them for then? How are they supposed to escape closed doors and leave a dark room?
You say we fail to use knowledge in real life. Teachers have knowledge — they pass it on. So why is it that teachers themselves often fail to use what they teach at critical moments? Why do they also wait for the cart to overturn?
Again, we are heading toward ignorance.
But these people aren’t uneducated, are they?
Knowledge alone is not enough. We also need proper thinking. If a person rejects everything that makes us human — empathy, recognition of others, equality — then that person ceases to be human.
That’s why we shouldn’t teach children only specific subjects. We should teach them how to think, to ask questions. Learning should be like lighting a fire so students know how to warm themselves with that knowledge, how to use it when needed. Not just to be educated, but to be thinking individuals with values, able to distinguish between black and white.
We must turn people into citizens so they don’t confuse light and darkness, and don’t remain silent when they see the country collapsing over their heads, along with education and everything else.
Recently, the Georgian Dream government has adopted many restrictive laws, including ones that limit teachers and make them fully dependent on school administrators. What will we end up with if these plans are implemented?
If this continues, we will get an eerie silence like the silence before a storm. We will get a major regression. These laws are about control, intimidation, silencing about “stay quiet.” “Don’t plan anything, don’t do anything without me, I must know your every step.”
And how many people in this country can survive without additional jobs? Even the so-called salary increases resemble the fake hourly raises they announced not long ago.
How can you increase salaries by hours when villages are emptying of children, when schools are emptying? I saw one school with 16 students and 25 teachers. How is a teacher supposed to get a salary increase when they have only one 12th-grade student? This is absurd.
Are we heading toward total control?
Yes toward 1984 [George Orwell’s dystopian novel]. Everything must be seen, everything controlled.
The other day a friend reminded me that I once said: “We don’t read books anymore — we don’t even read each other anymore.” And that’s exactly what’s happened. We no longer ask about one another, and we no longer read books to distinguish black from white.
If we forget our history, then we will have to start over with our enemy and they will do to us exactly what they did before, using the same methods, just as after 21 years of occupation, to prevent the country and its people from developing.
Avto Varazi’s father, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize, was never even allowed to go. Otar Chiladze was nominated for the Nobel Prize by another country Georgia didn’t even dare to nominate him. And this hypocrisy pretending to honor Merab Kostava by opening his house-museum while simultaneously fighting European education is blatant. Connections matter here. If we forget all this, how can we build the future?
It’s like cutting off a house’s foundation and trying to build from the second floor. Will it stand? A tree cannot grow without roots. Our history is those roots.
And today, our history is being thrown into water, washed away from our minds, our memory, and soon, from books as well.