Ministerial: Mestia, Svaneti

BLOG

I have now met two Ministers of Science and Education: a “then” and future Georgian president. One of each was the same person, in the former role, later ascending to the latter. Recently, it was the current Minister of Education, Aleksandre Jejelava, visiting Mestia to talk to local teachers. About 200 of us assembled in the large hall of School No. 2 for the occasion, and chatted with each other while we waited his pleasure.

It was a good time for me to realize how far-flung my contacts with teachers are in Svaneti. I have taught English in the main or only schools of Ushguli, Mestia, Etseri, Becho and Kartvani, in that order; my wife adds Lenjeri to this list. My glowing recommendation letter from Ushguli school as I applied for a post with Teach and Learn with Georgia in 2010 remains one of the proud highlights of correspondence in my life.

Mr Jejelava talked to us for about an hour about school and teachers, and left a much more favorable impression in person on all I talked to (my Etseri former colleagues) than TV or journalism had. He had the facts and figures at his fingertips, which gave a smooth confidence to his speech.

There are currently about 66,000 primary and/or secondary teachers in Georgia. One assurance the Minister offered us was that failure to take or pass the exams for teachers, at the moment, is not the main or even any criterion for having to exit one’s career. Rather, tacit agreement with a set of conditions for the nature of one’s teaching is, he said, more the deciding factor.

In the same vein, he went on, age should not force one to retire if one can still do one’s job to standard; whatever one’s age, young or old, capability should and will determine suitability for the post or not.

As for a teacher’s relationship to what he calls “Google Teacher,” the instant, though not always a hundred percent accurate, answer-giver, he offered three choices: Flee, fight or fraternize. That is, give up when challenged by apparently superior information then and there in the classroom; accept the challenge, and almost always lose; or accommodate it, because it’s not going to go away. Of course, he recommends the last choice. Education is clearly changing.

Another statistic: annually Georgia graduates about 3000 university students in the field of International Relations, but there are only jobs for about a tenth of these per year. Career re-think, anyone? Moreover, hardly any of these graduates, a mere handful, can boast proficiency in a foreign language as part of completing their diploma in a subject which implicitly demands it!

Further: of 2,085 Georgian schools, about 1,800 have less than 200 pupils. (I have yet to teach in a school of over 120 in Svaneti; one was just under this, and three were in the 50-70 range.) And… about 4.5 billion GEL would be needed to set all Georgian schools on their feet as far as proper renovation goes. Such a sum is not available in full. This is a sore point up here, where winters are six months or so of the year, heating pitiful, outhouses monstrous, many schoolyards (except Becho’s wonderfully huge treed grassland) not worth spending any time in at all in any season or weather.

Then followed some questions and answers, by rather poorly amplifying microphone, allowing a few of us to express thanks and vent what was burning on our minds. Tsiuri Gabliani was nominated and seconded as the group’s Teacher of the Year, well deserved for her decades of excellent service, and we surged out of the room.

Here, I had a moment to address privately my own hot potato: official protection of the Svan language in the form of optional lessons on and in it, as offered by the former holder of Mr Jejelava’s post, Dimitri Shaskhin. It seems that further discussions on this delicate point are forthcoming.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1500 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

Tony Hanmer