After being recessed for more than a month Armenian schools reopened Monday (January 11) after being shut down (December 8) during a flu epidemic, followed by the two-week New Year holiday.

The system of education suffered from world financial-economic crisis this year, which resulted in the reduction of funds preliminarily assigned for education, said Armen Ashotyan, Minister of Education and Science, at a press conference today summarizing the year.

Armenia’s schoolchildren, teachers and staff have been given another week to combat the spread of flu as Minister of Education Armen Ashotyan announced Saturday that schools will remain closed at least until after the New Year official holiday.

Two Armenian schoolchildren who won gold medals at a recent international school Olympiad in astrophysics in China say they did not have as much high-tech help as their counterparts from China, Russia and India. Still, their victory reveals potential in Armenia – the country that gave birth to world-famous astrophysicist Victor Hambartsumyan about a century ago.

Anahit Bakhshyan, an MP from the opposition Heritage Party’s faction, has criticized the amendments to the Law on Education of Armenia made early this month, as she insists they do not meet the interests of students and teachers.

Some university students in Armenia say it isn’t fair that primary school students get a flu break, when they don’t. (Classes for Grades 1-12 have been suspended till December 21, due to widespread influenza.)

Schools and kindergartens in Armenia are now closed, on the advice of health officials who proposed the closing to the Ministry of Education as a means of combating widespread seasonal flu that has cut class attendance by up to 30 percent.

Late Monday the Ministry of Education announced that all schools will be closed beginning today (December 8).

Many pedagogues, school teachers and parents are convinced that a majority of textbooks now used in schools are written in a language often incomprehensible for children of the target age group. Many believe this circumstance breaks students’ urge of knowledge as children tend to give up because of the complex material

A recent statement by a government minister about a possible abolishment of monthly stipends has caused a serious discontent among university students who call such plans “a gross violation of a student’s rights.”

At a roundtable organized on November 17, International Student Day, Education and Science Minister Armen Ashotyan was challenged with a question about the small size of student stipends and was asked when the government planned to raise these stipends. To this, Ashotyan answered that the government “is generally inclined to scrap student stipends altogether.”

This year even the world crisis did not hinder parents in their preparations for September 1 to spend hundreds of dollars on buying clothes and stationery for their schoolchildren and send then to school.

According to average calculation it takes some $100-150 to equip one child for school, including textbooks and clothes, while in case of students of senior schools such an amount is spent on only one dress of clothes.