Vahe H. Apelian
In an alphabetical listing, the Armenian Church, community center and school constitute the trinity that is the holy grail of the Armenian Diaspora. For all indications Diaspora as a whole does not appear to be in want of more churches and more community centers. The matter is altogether different with Armenian schools.
Founding and maintaining an Armenian school, time and again, has proven to be a very challenging task. The Armenian Diaspora has experienced seismic tremors in the last few decades, mostly due to the unfolding of violent political events in the Middle East--the cradle of Armenian Diaspora--and due to increasing cost of living everywhere on this globe. As an outcome of these events and states, Armenian schools have been closing both in our Middle Eastern communities as well as in West. We have no control over these events. The best we can do is to adjust.
Parent’s rightful perception about the education their children would receive and master their greater society’s language appear to be changing in favor of parents' not wanting to enroll their children in Armenian schools. Parents are not only concerned their children mastering the larger society's written language but also mastering its verbal conveyance, that is to say, mastering its accent. A few years ago the late George Apelian, educator, author, pointed out to me that more affluent Armenian parents were sending their children to non-Armenian schools in Lebanon for this very reason.
Solid education and accent are valid concerns. Let's put them in perspective for the benefit of Armenian parents who have the possibility of enrolling their children in their local Armenian school.
A few years ago I attended an annual conference concerning my specialization--pharmaceutics. People from all over the world attended the conference. To warm up his audience for a dry subject he was about to deliver, one of the lecturers asked: "What is the language of science?" He then answered it: "In the United States it's English spoken with an accent”. How true. In this interdependent world, it’s also Hindi, Mandarin or Arabic spoken with an accent as well. Those who have heard Vartan Gregorian have surely noted that he speaks with an accent. But that has not prevented him from reaching the uppermost echelon of society. No one really cares much about your accent as long as you offer what your interlocutor needs to forge a win-win relationship with you--be it personal or impersonal.
Understandably public schools in the West enjoy far more resources than an Armenian school. But capable and dedicated teachers have transmitted solid education since antiquity in structurally much more modest buildings and without the many gadgetry modern schools enjoy. Computers are the outcome of such basic education and will never replace it. Armenian schools historically have done well in imparting sold basic education to generations of students. I have yet to hear a friend or an acquaintance tell me, in hindsight, that he or she wished their parents had sent them to a non-Armenian school to better prepare them for life. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority, if not all, of former students in Armenian schools I met fondly remember their times there. There is a reason for it and it has to do with EQ-- Emotional Quotient of the former students.
EQ is a measurement of a person's ability to monitor his or her emotions, to cope with pressures and demands, and to control his or her thoughts and actions. Educators agree that EQ is as important as IQ (Intelligence Quotient) for succesful education.
There was a time when what students learned in a classroom stayed with them unchanged for a long time. Not anymore. Education, especially nowadays, is also learning to constantly learn new things. A student has to be emotionally well adjusted and socially well anchored to surmount this ceaseless onslaught of newer things. Along with imparting solid and basic education, Armenian schools have been very successful in preparing their students to score high in their EQ as measured by the successes of their graduates. Most of the students I knew up to my gradation from high school did well. In fact they did very well, whether they attended college or not after graduating from high schoot.
I do not want to paint a picture of an all-too-perfect Armenian school that surely does not exist, as perfection does not. I simply wanted to elaborate my take on the issues of accent and of basic education so that parents would have a broader perspective should they be considering enrolling their children in an Armenian school accessible to them.
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