Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Pashinian blamed successive former governments for what he described as the misuse of the education system for political purposes, while defending his government’s certification program for teachers as necessary to ensure their professional competence.
His remarks came after the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed 15-year-old students in Armenia performing below the international average in mathematics, science and reading, ranking behind regional peers in all three subjects.
Pashinian stopped short of blaming teachers for the poor results, instead criticizing the former governments.
“For three decades no one has told our teachers that they need to work on their skills. They toasted the teachers, but for what? Because those teachers were needed not to organize education, but to organize election fraud,” Pashinian said, referring to allegations under former governments that teachers were used to collect voter data and distribute election bribes during national and local elections.
Pashinian, whose ruling Civil Contract party has also been accused by the opposition of using administrative resources during elections, including in the state-funded education sector, also criticized what he described as the teaching of “ignorance” in schools and called for “ignorant school principals” to be removed from their jobs.
“We have an overall literacy problem,” Pashinian said, adding that Armenians need to understand “what the state is, what international relations are, what the economy is, culture, and everything.”
Armenia participated in PISA for the first time in the 2025 assessment, which covered about 760,000 15-year-old students in 91 countries and economies.
Only about 1 percent of Armenian students reached the highest performance levels in mathematics, while almost no students did so in science and reading. The OECD found that 28 percent of Armenian students reached at least the baseline level of proficiency in mathematics and science, compared with OECD averages of 65 percent and 74 percent, respectively. In reading, the figure for Armenia was 19 percent, compared with an OECD average of 67 percent.
Education Minister Zhanna Andreasian described the results as worrying in an interview with Shant TV this week but said they were to some extent expected. She said a vast majority of the students who took part in the assessment were in the 10th grade and had studied under new educational standards for only six months.
Andreasian said the new standards shift the emphasis from acquiring knowledge to developing competencies, including the ability to apply knowledge in different situations.
“The main thrust of our new educational standard was to shift the emphasis from knowledge to competencies – not only to provide knowledge, but also to teach students the skills to apply that knowledge in different situations,” she said.
Andreasian said the PISA results showed that students educated under the old standards had not learned sufficiently how to apply knowledge in real-life situations, which was one of the reasons the government had begun changing the standards.
The Education Ministry says 86 percent of Armenian schools now have science laboratories, with a goal of reaching 100 percent. Andreasian also highlighted project-based learning, in which students independently or collectively study a problem, apply their knowledge and reach conclusions.
She expressed hope that the impact of the new standards and other education reforms would become visible in Armenia’s results in the next PISA cycle in 2029.
Education expert Serob Khachatrian, however, questioned whether the transition from the old to the new educational standards could by itself explain Armenia’s poor PISA results, saying the difference between the two systems was not sufficiently fundamental to account for them alone.
He said educational outcomes were influenced by numerous factors, including school management, the state administration of education, teacher training and retraining, teaching methods, and schools’ material and technical conditions.
Khachatrian said the particularly low reading results were worrying because difficulties in understanding a text can affect performance across all subjects. He also suggested that students in Armenia may struggle because educational texts in Armenian can be difficult for them to understand.
“Our best students are more proficient in Russian and English than in Armenian. Perhaps the problem is also that our Armenian-language texts are not good enough. If parents read something and do not understand it, how can they explain it to their children? And how can the children learn?” Khachatrian said.
The PISA findings have added to concerns raised by officials in recent years about functional literacy in Armenian society. Pashinian said in 2022 that the issue constituted a matter of national security.
Since 2024, Pashinian and his wife, Anna Hakobian, have led a public campaign called “Getting Educated Is Fashionable,” promoting the importance of education at meetings across Armenian cities and towns.