Ideologies and National Identities in Armenia’s Education Discourse: Path-Dependent Relics of the Communist Past?
Ideologies and National Identities in Armenia’s Education Discourse: Path-Dependent Relics of the Communist Past?

Summary/Abstract: Following Armenia’s defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, a political process began to reform the country’s education system to convey a new form of national identity and a revised understanding of the role of education for the state. Drawing on Armenia’s amended educational legislation and six semi-structured interviews with schoolteachers, this paper examines how these reforms were perceived and how teachers reconstructed their professional roles and national identities in the classroom. Building on scholarship on communist legacies in the post-Soviet space, the study employs path dependence theory and the discourse-historical approach (DHA) within critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the data. The analysis shows that the reform discourse gestures towards liberal and egalitarian ideals. However, the pastoral, collectivist, and hierarchical educational ideals of communism persist among schoolteachers, as does universalism in legislative discourse. Teachers also engage in reflections on identity that lead to contestations over its meaning. Some stigmatise the current national identity and replace it with universalist ideals, and others destigmatise and reaffirm pre-war identities. Patterns also emerge in how teachers interpret educational ideologies. Those with stronger national orientations tend to emphasise civic responsibilities, whereas those with universalist ideals adopt more pastoral roles. The overall findings indicate a continued presence of communist educational ideals and national identities that are either ethno-cultural or universalist in nature, with a limited connection to statism.

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