There is a fundamental different between the goals of education that I see here in Armenia and the ones I experienced as a student back home. At home, a common saying amongst my teachers was that the journey was more important than the destination. Here, priority is given to product over process. In other words, getting the correct answer is more important than the thinking which lead to that answer. This results in some very different teaching styles.
For example, test taking is very different here. When I was a student, almost every test I took required me to "show my work"- or explain my thought process- in addition to giving an answer to the test question. Even if my answer was correct, if I didn't show my work, I would not be given credit. The reasoning behind this was that the thinking that lead to the correct answer was at least as important (if not more so) than the answer itself. In Armenian classrooms, on the other hand, having the correct answer seems to be all that is important.
Back home, in order to study for an exam, students would be presented with practice problems that required similar thought processes as the questions which they would later encounter in the test itself. Studying for a test here in Armenia often involves going through the actual test booklet and reviewing the correct answers to the problems. This isn't viewed as "cheating" as it would be back home- but rather as the most effective way for students to learn the material they need in order to pass the exam. If a student is able to 'learn' (read: memorize) an answer to a particular question from his or her teacher and then later replicate that answer without assistance, then the student is genuinely considered to have mastered the material and the teacher to have done her job.
Obviously, I'm making generalizations on both sides here. I draw from my limited experience as a student in the US (restricted to small, wealthy private schools with strong liberal-arts tendencies), and my even more limited experience observing a small number of lessons in an even smaller number of schools over just a few months here in Armenia. It is only reasonable to assume that there are teachers here in Armenia who require more of their students than mere memorization, just as there are teachers in America who do not prioritize thought process as my teachers did. But I think that, as generalizations, my observations still hold.
I have been wondering what might have lead to this fundamental difference. I think that it is probably a combination of many things, which can be summarized by saying that as access to information becomes more widely available, accumulating knowledge of facts becomes less important than the skill to synthesize conclusions from a set of facts provided for you. In an environment where people have easy access to libraries or the internet, critical thinking skills (knowing how to ask good questions, how to efficiently search for answers, and being able to generate one's own answers from the information available) is far more important than simple knowing any given piece of information. However, in an environment where information resources like libraries or the internet are not available, critical thinking skills (while still important, of course) are not seen as the main thing to be learned in schools. In these sorts of environments, students attend schools in order to absorb facts and data from their teachers, who serve as walking libraries, since there is no other source from which students can obtain their information. Although libraries and internet access is becoming more and more readily available in Armenia, there is no denying that they are less easily accessible here than back home. Thus, Armenian teacher still fall farther towards the "information resource" end of the teaching spectrum than US teachers, who ought to be more like "critical thinking coaches" than walking reference materials.
There is also another thing, I think, more specific to Armenia, which has influenced this trend in educational priorities, specifically relating to test taking techniques. It is the extraordinary prevalence and use of low-quality standardized tests. At home, with the exception of a few standardized tests for admission into high school or college, the tests we were given when I was a student had been written by our teachers, and had been tailored to test those things they felt were most important for us to learn. Here, there are booklets with tests already written in them that each student must buy at the beginning of the school year. The tests in these booklets only very loosely corresponds to the material in the text books (which themselves are extraordinarily bad), but teachers feel they are required to teach from the text and test from the booklets. Additionally, these test booklets are filled with horrible questions: multiple choice questions with multiple correct answers (or no correct answers at all), fill-in-the-blank questions with ambiguous sentences, where multiple words could be grammatically correct with no contextual support. With questions like this- the content of which may or may not have been taught to the students previously- it's no wonder that the only way to help students pass the test in the time available during class is to give them the answers to the questions and hope they are able to remember as many as possible.
Honestly, it seems to me that Peace Corps Volunteers can advocate for more progressive teaching practices as much as they want, but that the only way real positive change can happen within the Armenian Educational System is if internet access is improved (along with computer literacy) or the teachers are unshackled from these horrible text books and allowed to create their own assessments.
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