Writing so profusely about education has a reason: education is a gigantic concern for mankind, the content and specificity of which heavily determine the wellbeing of the generations to come. Meanwhile, if there is anything uncertain, unstable and ridden with doubts around the globe, it is the field of education, never catching up with the concurrent exigencies of real life.
And it is not only in Georgia that educational reform is taking place every now and again, but in almost every country of the world, including the United States. Who would think that in the country of Harvard, Stanford and Yale, the enlightenment of the public might need a reform? Any kind of reform! But as it seems, the land of the best and most famous universities of the Planet also needs renewals and adjustments, periodically refining schools, thus having a significant impact on the lives of educated Americans and the entire American society.
The same is true here, in Sakartvelo, although the history of education of the two nations might suggestively differ. The phenomenon of public enlightenment in America is by far older than the famous Ivy League and the Declaration of Independence itself, whereas the roots of education in Georgia are entangled with its ancient cultural history and medieval monastic academies, focused on national identity and literacy.
The first public school in America was established in 1635, followed by the founding of Harvard College in 1636, the system of education evolving from early colonial days. Comparably, the Georgian educational centers were established out of the country to promote learning, including schools in Antioch in the 4th century, the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos in the 10th century, and monasteries in Constantinople, Jerusalem, and on Mount Sinai, but the first university was founded here as late as 1918.
In America, initially, education was informal and often conducted at home or through small community schools, based on religious instruction, unceasingly adapting to societal changes, technological advancements, and various educational philosophies. The famous Horace Mann, the father of American education, thanks to his belief in education as a tool for social equality, established a structured and accessible education system with an emphasis on reform and professional training for teachers.
Meanwhile, the history of school education in Georgia evolved through 19th-century educational movements, Soviet-era centralization, and significant post-2004 reforms, focusing on decentralization, reducing corruption, and increasing school autonomy to create a modern 12-year general education system.
The first significant reform of education in the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the Office of Education was created in 1867, which did not directly impact the curriculum in public schools, but became a center for statistical information on the growing number of American educational institutions.
To compare, the first significant education reform in Georgia occurred during the First Democratic Republic between 1918 and 1921, characterized by the nationalization of schools, the introduction of Georgian-language instruction, and the establishment of Tbilisi State University, followed by purely Soviet reforms, strictly standardizing the system, content and style of education in the entire huge country called the USSR.
Further major modernization reforms took place in 2005 under the Law on General Education to move away from the Soviet system, and finally, there came the current last one, which is reminding us of the American reformers, who championed the idea of experiential learning, emphasizing the importance of teaching students how to think critically and solve problems rather than simply memorizing facts.
In America, this period also saw the introduction of child labor laws and compulsory education, ensuring that children had the opportunity to attend school, but in Sakartvelo, these kinds of good things had long been taken care of in the Soviet era.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement went big in the States, and it played a crucial role in education reform as activists fought for desegregation and equal access to education for all races. This kind of reform was absolutely unnecessary in our Georgia as long as the notions of racial discrimination and segregation were utterly alien to our society of that time, although the Soviet regime per se was a hard and cruel thing to endure in terms of other sides of human life.
In the USA, in more recent years, efforts were made, focusing on teaching standards, standardized testing, aiding disadvantaged students and holding schools accountable for their success, which we are gradually adopting in this country and even going further in numerous other respects.
In parallel, the collapse of the Soviet system of education, although it was strong and useful enough in many different ways, was marked by the democratization and humanization of the education process by adopting modern ways of treating both the student audience and the faculty.
The new laws in America provide schools with access to more funding, give disadvantaged schools more resources to help their students and teachers and widen the scope of student success beyond fair test scores. Just as well, the transfer of Georgia to the Bologna Process approximated us to the same means and ways of enlightening our society.
Yes, we differ in myriad ways, but there are certain key components of education reform that unite all of us, be it immense America or tiny Georgia, and these are: curriculum standards, teacher development, school choice opportunity, assessment equity, school accountability, technology integration, preparing students for the future, fostering civic engagement and democracy.
Will education ever be genuinely and entirely reformed? Probably not, and that’s healthy!
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
