Pashinyan: Academic City to Predict Armenia's Future

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan participated in the "Academic City Armenia: International Forum of Knowledge" conference, delivering a speech titled "Predicting the Future."

Speaking about the strategic importance of the Academic City, Prime Minister Pashinyan noted: "Education is a platform for predicting an individual's future, and the 'Academic City' project is really about strengthening the system of predicting an individual's future and transforming it into a system for predicting the state's future. And in my opinion, the 'Academic City' is the project that will most strengthen the formula for predicting an individual's future."

Nikol Pashinyan emphasized that high schools are a very important component of the "Academic City" project: "We plan to have a high school for the arts, a high school for technology, a high school for all disciplines there, the idea of which is to give the most prominent children of the Republic the opportunity to be closer to higher and postgraduate education at an intermediate stage," said the Prime Minister, adding that every single child is an exceptional talent, and the role and significance of the educational system is to discover and develop the child's talent.

"Life itself is a learning process, and therefore, our task is to make that learning process, the process of education, more institutional, more purposeful, more informed. And the same applies to the life of the country, and my prediction is, our planning is, that the Academic City will become a gravitational center for the life of the Republic of Armenia, which will predetermine the course of life in the Republic of Armenia at the individual level, group level, community level, and state level."

Next, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan answered questions from the audience. Responding to a question on how he assesses the current state of Armenia's education system and its development prospects, the Prime Minister noted: "The state of the education system in the Republic of Armenia is bad, but the good news is that we have a clear plan and project on how to change this situation. Let's go and see, for example, the issue related to the social situation of teachers. Today, when visiting the regions of the Republic, I am pleased to learn that there are already teachers in the regions who receive a salary of 500,000 drams, 450,000, 400,000 drams, but this does not mean that we have reached our dream, because we have agreed that voluntary attestations should be repeated in cycles."

As for the question of what role the Academic City will play in transforming Armenia's educational ecosystem and fully realizing the potential of young specialists, Nikol Pashinyan answered: "The Academic City in Armenia should be an acceleration center, a gravitational center for the thought of development, around which events should take place."

According to the Prime Minister, one of the important features of the Academic City is bringing the workplace closer to the potential student, which will give them the opportunity to do internships on the spot; it will also be the number one center for intellectual leisure. "This is very important. This is not going to be another walled project where entry and exit are for those who are either students or lecturers there," said Nikol Pashinyan. The Prime Minister emphasized that the Academic City is a project of a completely different logic, so that both students and lecturers have the opportunity to live and work there fully.