Why is the term ‘Education Reform’ so easily and recurrently used in this country? The word is heard all over the place—in personal abodes and under open skies, in political campaigns and in media coverage, over internet platforms and in public discourse. What makes change in the field so indispensable and significant? The most simplified answer to this tricky question is that life itself goes through inevitable alterations, and so do the manmade systems accompanying it. Georgia has a long and complicated history of education that has gone through manifold metamorphoses, starting from ancient church schools and medieval academies like Gelati and Ikalto, and ending with the Russian Empire’s literacy endeavors, the founding of Tbilisi State University, the creation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and finally the post-Soviet reforms focusing on modernization, quality, and international standards.
And here we go once again: in the year 2025, Georgia has found itself in the middle of a new educational reform that is aiming at changing a plethora of things in the system, the enumeration of which wouldn’t make any sense here, because all is on public display. What we need to achieve in this particular piece is the overall justification of reforms in the realm of public enlightenment that occur once in a while in our lives. Education reform, in general, incorporates a diversity of exertions meant to ameliorate learning outcomes in schools of all levels, addressing the issues that have damaged the system during a certain period of time to the detriment of most students.
The discussion on the topic of content that makes learning high-quality will never end. The opinions to this end are as many as there might be volunteers to express themselves. And with such speedily altering technology—the AI and IoT in the first place—the scenery of education reform will have to move quickly with it. The focus in Georgia in this respect remains permanent: education reform means incessantly improving schools to create educated individuals and an educated society. Education reform directly impacts Georgian society’s future wits and goals; the plain reason for another reform in Sakartvelo is that our children need to be equipped with specific skills and knowledge that easily translate into wellbeing.
To cut it short, the act of reforming the educational system should be taken for granted by our society for two main reasons: first, it periodically needs change, and second, it will work to the benefit of our youth, because a reform, in general, serves progress. It must, at least! As I said, any educational system, including ours, is compelled to accept and implement change because there is an everlasting need to adapt to rapid societal, economic, and technological transformations. It is no big news that in Georgia we suffer from skill gaps, certain forms of inequality, and ubiquitous poor performance, and to handle these ever-present challenges, the consequently necessitated reform of the system has to take place, although no reform can work as a hundred-percent panacea, especially in our time of the fourth industrial revolution, which creates new pressures and challenges while trying to bring together physical, digital, and biological worlds with the help of over-sophisticated robotics and various complicated cyber-physical efforts.
The most significant among the crucial drivers of education reform in Georgia might be considered the following: economic demands requiring new skills like critical thinking, creativity, and digital literacy; societal shifts, including altering demographics and social needs, new academic priorities and approaches, climate change, and pandemics; technological advancement, modern personalized learning, performance differences, bias and discrimination in the means and ways of enlightenment, mismatch between traditional schooling and real-world demands; and global trends such as worldwide pressure for standardized testing, accountability, as well as core subject focus, and an accent on mastery and proficiency. In essence, education reforms are an incessant and unremitting round of attempts to repair systemic problems and prepare students for an ever-changing future, creating relentless pressure for updates. Thus, the timely implementation of education reform is definitely justified in Sakartvelo too.
Blog by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
