Conducted by Jesse
Tatum, Associate Editor of CRIA
CRIA: What do you think
are some of the biggest challenges left to be tackled in
higher education in Georgia? What
can the government do to improve quality?
Blauvelt: Our organization was
directly involved in the program of developing the unified
national university entrance exams, under contract to the
World Bank as the coordinator for technical assistance, and
we were working on that from 2002–2006. So I really got to
see that process from the inside, and it is a reform that
has been very successful. At the start, before the Rose
Revolution, corruption in university admissions was one of
the central problems. Education in general was one of the
institutions in society worst hit by corruption. Education
then was a sort of black hole of corruption, and one of the
key points of that was on the entrance end. People were
paying 10 to 20,000 dollar bribes to get in to certain
prestigious faculties. So the entrance exam reform was able
to eradicate that entirely. What is particularly important
in the approach to that reform was that the real goal was to
build capacity. We didn’t come in and say “We’re going to
make an exam for you.” The idea was to help create a
function Georgian center that would develop the
expertise to make exams itself, and that has really been so
successful that Georgian specialists from the National
Examination Center have become sort of regional experts.
We’ve been involved in other projects, in Ukraine for
example, where we have invited Georgians to come from the
Center to provide technical assistance themselves. So the
reform has been even more successful than people realize.
But by now this reform is sort of an old
achievement. The question remains about what should come
afterwards. From early on it had several effects: it has
more or less eliminated low and mid-level corruption from
the universities, which seems to have been a lasting
outcome. The other effect was on secondary education, which
is a rather controversial thing in the world of test
development. The important thing from our point of view is
that it made school matter to a degree that it didn’t
before. Before that there was simply no point to school, and
work with tutors simply involved lots of rote memorization. Now I understand that they are
trying to switch over to a system of mandatory school
leaving exams that everybody will have to take in order to
graduate. The entrance examination reform in Georgia was
extremely radical: so radical that all university acceptance
decisions were taken away from the universities themselves
and given to the National Examination Center, based solely
on the results of the examinations. Gradually the autonomy
is being given back to the universities and faculties, and
the test becomes just one component of the selection
process.
My point in discussing this is that the
reform of the entrance examinations was a crucial first
step, and that if this had not been accomplished then
nothing else could be successful. But again, what happens
after this is the big question at the university level, and
it has been the big question for the past five years. It’s
probably something that is going to take generations to
solve. I think it’s part of a more general problem in
Georgian society: people don’t like rules and requirements
when they affect them; they don’t like abstract standards.
Examples of this come up very often, and it frustrates our
local employees at American Councils here: people come in
and say to them “Why do we have to follow all these rules?
We’re Georgians. Aren’t you one of us? Why can’t we do this
the Georgian way?” And that’s been a problem in both
secondary and higher education. In secondary education, for
such a long time, at least since the end of the Soviet
system, the main goal of the teachers has been to maintain
control in the classroom. The things that the Ministry is
doing – the teacher certifications, the training
opportunities and the requirements placed on teachers –
these things will, I think, have an effect. But it’s going
to take a long time. And the same goes for the situation in
the universities. The reform of the university faculties was
a much harder thing than the exams. The reform of the tests
and the university accreditation reforms were basically
technical reforms, while the reform of the faculty has been
a very painful one, and one that became politicized. But it
seems that ultimately that has been successful. University
teachers and professors can make a decent wage now, whereas
before that they would get 25 USD a month.
But there is still the issue of quality and
standards. The idea that someone could fail out of
university is virtually unheard of, and even more so in the
private universities. People think that since “we’re paying
for a product, so we should get that product. We should get
the degree, even if we don’t actually feel like working for
it.” So the standards, even at the best universities, are
really quite low. There is tremendous plagiarism that goes
on among college students, lots of “cut and paste.”
Professors in many departments are amazed when they see even
small indications of originality and initiative, and often
give inflated grades.
CRIA: Are there
sufficient opportunities for Georgian university students in
terms of mobility toward Europe & the U.S.? And
for the kids going abroad,
speaking of the plagiarism issue, for instance, do they work
well when the get there?
Blauvelt: This is the rub: Georgian
students, in my experience, do very well when they go to
foreign universities. They adapt to that system and they
come out on top of it. So it’s not about being Georgian.
Georgians are more than capable students. There’s something
more in the general culture. Perhaps we have to be
optimistic: maybe it simply will take a generation until the
system in Georgia becomes able to adopt international
standards, or until international standards force their way
into Georgia. But individually Georgians have the capability
to do this. They do fantastic work when they get accepted to
study-abroad opportunities. In universities all over America
you will find at least one Georgian, and they prove that
they are able to handle the requirements.
CRIA: A 2007 NY Times article cited
the decline of the Russian language across its historical
sphere of influence. How do you see its status in Georgia
today? How will it be used (or fall into disuse), in your
view?
Blauvelt: This is an issue that is of
great interest to me. Obviously there is a decrease in
Russian language skills in Georgia, especially among young
people. I think it’s largely seen in the generation of
people who were schooled in the difficult period of the
1990s, when the education system as a whole suffered great
difficulties. I think there are gaps in people’s knowledge
more generally, not just in language, but in biology,
chemistry and other subjects. It was hard to learn in the
days when there was no electricity or heating in the
schools. Some young people of this generation were able to
learn Russian well, sometimes through watching TV or having
Russian-speaking relatives, friends or neighbors. But on the
whole their Russian skills are weaker than those of other
generations.
This also has to do with other factors, such
as a separation from Russian culture over the past two
decades. There is less and less Russian heard on TV or in
films, for example. And much of people’s language learning
efforts have been devoted to English and other Western
European languages. But I think there is a shift taking
place with children. Parents are now thinking about the
advantages of having their children learn Russian, and are
helping to renew the focus on that in the preschool and
primary school levels. There seems to be a tremendous demand
for Russian-speaking nannies, for example, and for
Russian-language kindergartens. People have started to
realize, I think, that fluency in Russian is going to be an
important thing in the future, and that they should not
allow the gift of possessing Russian fluency that remained
as holdover from the Soviet experience to slip away.
CRIA: So more practical thinking on the
Georgians’ part?
Blauvelt: Yes, it’s pragmatic, and
also Georgians will often emphasize that there is a
connection with Russian literature and culture, even if the
political and personal situation between Georgians and
Russians has been better.
CRIA: Does Russia have
any Goethe Institute or Alliance Française equivalents, for
example? If so, what are the current levels of
enrollment/interest they enjoy, as far as you know?
Blauvelt: There is an international
organization of teachers of Russian,
MAPRIAL,
that is quite active, and our organization cooperates with
it on the institutional level. They held a conference in
Georgia several years ago, and the President of our
organization, Dan Davidson, who is also a Vice-President of
MAPRIAL, came to Tbilisi for that. It has always been
surprising for me, though, that Russia puts comparatively
little effort into using soft power in this part of the
world, that they don’t do the sort of things that we, the
Americans, or other Western countries are doing in terms of
offering scholarships and educational opportunities, and
outreach for language teaching, like Peace Corps. Part of it
perhaps has to do with the Russian government’s Realist
worldview, and they assume that we do all of these things
actually for political advantage. But if they were to offer
large scale programs like the Muskie Fellowships – I think
there are or were such things on a smaller scale, like
several slots in MGU [M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State
University] per year for Georgian students – but if they had
bigger programs, scholarships, high school exchanges,
Georgians would respond very favorably.
CRIA: A paper in
our current issue – the questionnaire for which you helped
to develop – looked at foreigners venturing to learn Russian
and/or Georgian in Georgia. Generally speaking, perhaps from
your own experience, how do you think Georgians feel about
“outsiders” choosing to learn either one or the other while
in Georgia? Which language would the average Georgian
recommend an engaged expat learn, and why?
Blauvelt: That's a good question,
actually. No Georgian has ever said to me that learning
Georgian is a waste of time, although some might question
the utility. There are two mutually contradictory myths that
Georgians have in their heads, I think. The first is that
the Georgian language is of special interest to all foreign
academics and linguists. It's an important language in the
world and it should be an important thing to study, and so
foreigners are supposed to come here to study the language,
and they should learn the language. The second myth is that,
unlike Georgians, foreigners are really not very good at
learning foreign languages, and that the Georgian language
is really too difficult to actually be learned by outsiders.
They are even surprised when foreigners can speak Russian
well, which creates yet another contradiction: while they
expect all foreigners to speak Russian, and yet they're
surprised when foreigners can actually speak Russian
fluently. In fairness, that’s probably because many
foreigners with whom people most often interact, especially
tourists, tend to patch together minimal scraps from both
Georgian and Russian in order to communicate. Georgians also
are not sure about whether Russian is actually a “foreign”
language.
And it is true that Georgian is a very
difficult language to learn, which adds a barrier to the
level of investment in terms of time, effort and energy
required to achieve fluency (or even functional
proficiency), which then has to be calculated against the
expected returns. Basic necessity of needing to survive in a
language obviously affects that calculation, so as with
learning any language, immersion in a Georgian-only
environment adds to both the incentive and the results. I
think that explains why Peace Corps volunteers in the
villages tend to learn much more Georgian than most other
foreigners, especially in terms of spoken language. But it’s
difficult to find oneself in such an immersion environment
in Tbilisi, especially for those who speak Russian well. At
American Councils we’ve been experimenting with organizing
short-term immersion courses outside of Tbilisi. So far we
did a ten-day beginning level workshop in Borjomi this
summer. The results have been mixed so far, but I would like
to pursue this idea further next summer.
So even for most foreigners such as me who
live and work here for long periods, the meager expected
returns on investment in learning the language beyond
minimal levels mean that few are ultimately successful. For
example, you could probably count on the fingers of one hand
the number of foreigners in the world who know Georgian as
well or better than I know Russian. As the CRIA article
demonstrates, many foreigners who are successful in Georgian
also know Russian, so knowledge of Russian is not
necessarily a hindrance to learning Georgian. But for me
personally, in most unofficial situations I’d rather say
something well in Russian than say it poorly in Georgian, as
long as whomever I’m talking to understands more or less.
And again, those immersion situations where the other person
cannot understand Russian at all are very rare in Tbilisi
(although I actually usually enjoy it when I’m forced to
speak Georgian, like in certain cafés where the waitresses
can’t speak Russian at all). I’ve studied Georgian with
varying degrees of intensity over the past twelve years, and
aside from café vocabulary my success has been modest.
Despite everything I said above, I have always felt very
limited by that, and I think it really is ultimately a
disadvantage and a hindrance to make connections with
people, even though I can communicate with most people just
fine in Russian or in English.