Deputy head of the Armenian state automobile department Hayk Markaryan has warned parents of students in school to not give the car keys to schoolchildren. The school year has already started and despite the fact that students don’t have a license or experience, some parents are handing over the car keys to their cars.
“These kinds of things lead to serious consequences and the penalties will be severe,’ warned Markaryan and this is logical, because as you talk with students, you find out that most of them aren’t getting ready to go to school to learn, but rather to “show off”. Many parents get scared when September 1st comes around because that is when children wanting many things.
“Schools have turned into fashion homes because children are always in competition. They all want to go to school on the first day wearing expensive clothing, carry a new model cellular phone, girls want to go to school with leather purses. Pay attention to the school accessories sold in stores-it’s like a sex shop,” says Mrs. Ruzanna, who is doing school shopping for her two children. Ruzanna didn’t want to mention where she works, but she said that she and her husband had saved for 3-4 months just to buy the things their children needed, so that they wouldn’t be ashamed going to school. She reminisced about her school days and is amazed to see how the education system has devaluated.
“Instead of studying every day, all students think about are what clothes to wear. Armenians schools are very materialized. You should see students’ standards. I’m worried for my kids, but what can I do? I can’t punish them because it has gotten so vulgar that the children feel bad.” Ruzanna’s 6th grade girl tells her mother how other students tease others that wear old-fashioned clothes or don’t have cell phones. As I took a tour around the stores of the city, I realized that you need to have a lot of money for raising schoolchildren. The higher level of society are able to buy school accessories from brand name stores and the flow of people at the fairs goes to show you that a majority of people can afford those products. The fairs mainly sell Turkish, Chinese and Iranian products. For example, you can buy a skirt for a first-grade student for 6,000-8,000 AMD (20 dollars), which as I saw, was Korean and wasn’t in good condition. The male students’ costume, pants and the shirt all cost 20,000-25,000 AMD (40 dollars) at the “Hayastan” store. Shoes for first-grade students cost 7,000-15,000 AMD, but only the white shirt costs 4,000-8,000 AMD (20 dollars).
Parents usually set aside 100-200 dollars from the family budget for the school year and most of the people I surveyed stated the same amount. Mary Grigoryan, mother of a 2nd grade student, said that if it weren’t for her relatives living abroad, she wouldn’t be able to provide the necessary school accessories and clothes for her child.
“It’s hard for the Armenian earning an average salary to take care of the expenses for school shopping. Everything is expensive and low-quality.” She advised me to check out all the stores in Yerevan with the signs “Low prices” where they mainly sell Turkish and Iranian “trash”. She assures that students mainly look for notebooks with pictures of attractive, big-breasted girls wearing see-through clothing. These types of notebooks are always new in stock because there are always new models. Children sometimes lie to their parents, saying that they need notebooks so that they can buy the notebooks with the pictures of “sex symbols” on them. Producers sell their products, while the parents can’t go against their children and buy those products from cheap stores. In Russia, the notebooks include pictures of Russian buildings and monuments, while the last page has the lyrics to the national anthem.
All parents of schoolchildren say that the educational system is layered and that places many difficulties for the parents. They all criticize their children, but at the same time do whatever they please. As mother of the 2nd grade student Mary said, “The generation is bad, they even want sexy school accessories.”