Everyone’s problem, nobody’s fault: Armenia’s literacy crisis

Author’s note: About a month ago, I interviewed Mher Davtyan, an educational expert who is a doctoral researcher in education at the University of Cambridge. The interview would focus on Davtyan’s journey as a boy from Vanadzor who made it to Cambridge. Among the diverse topics we discussed, one was particularly important to him: Davtyan, together with his team, had conducted research on the literacy of Armenian children. A few days ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results appeared in the media, and we decided to revisit the interview and its original purpose.

Following the public discourse around the PISA results that showed Armenia’s 15-year-olds have serious difficulties in mathematics, science and reading, I remembered my meeting nearly three years ago in Vanadzor with Mher Davtyan, the co-founder of NorArar Education, an NGO focused on developing foundational literacy and numeracy in Armenia. During our discussion, Davtyan highlighted the importance of reading skills as both a gateway to equitable, public education and a gatekeeper to broader learning competencies, within the context of Armenian schoolchildren’s poor reading skills. I said, “No way, you mean there are children in Armenia who can’t read?”

The latest OECD study involved 760,000 15-year-old students from 91 countries. It turns out that, in this enlightened age, the situation is not particularly good elsewhere in the world either. The test is considered one of the world’s leading benchmarks of educational achievement, and its results are studied in detail by governments and education professionals. Armenia participated in the PISA study for the first time in 2025. 

PISA measures how well students apply what they’ve learned to new situations and real-life problems — not just how well they memorize information.

According to the findings, released on Sept. 8, only around 1% of Armenian students achieved the highest level of performance in mathematics, almost no students reached the highest level in science, and almost no students scored at Level 5 or higher in reading (the scale moves from levels 1 to 6, with Level 2 signaling the baseline proficiency threshold). By these indicators, Armenia ranks last in the region, behind Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

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Reading is not just about recognizing letters; it is about understanding what is written and going beyond the text, analyzing it, and much more. But it is also about having a good role model of a passionate reader. 

As a child, I remember my father always reading — whether it was a newspaper, a book, or later, a Kindle. When he insisted that I read, it never felt like parental pressure, but rather an invitation to engage in something enjoyable. Reading was a joy, and discussing what I read was even more engaging. Most importantly, my opinion about a book, even when it was not well-founded, was always accepted.

Davtyan, currently a doctoral researcher in education at the University of Cambridge, validated my experience with reading, and said adults can be a strong source of inspiration for young people. The public debate on PISA scores reminds him of the opening lines of Elif Shafak’s novel “There Are Rivers in the Sky”: “Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.”

Davtyan, who completed his master’s degree in educational leadership at University College London (UCL) in 2021, co-founded NorArar in the aftermath of the Artsakh war and the global pandemic.

Amid all the noise, with opposing groups blaming one another for the low performance of Armenian students, each person should simply think about their own raindrop, their own share of responsibility in the problem, said Davtyan. Primary school teachers often say: drop by drop, a river is formed. This applies to both positive efforts for the public good and the negative. 

“Work on foundational literacy requires broad cross-sectoral understanding and cooperation,” Davtyan tells the Armenian Weekly. “But I see the arrow of public condemnation being directed at the generalized figure of the teacher. A systemic, socioeconomic, structural problem that has been shaped over decades is once again seen as belonging to a highly generalized and abstracted figure: the Armenian teacher.”

According to Davtyan, the first drop of illiteracy in this public debate on literacy is when those fueling public blame believe what they know is absolute. They cannot accept that 15-year-olds erroneously mixed facts and opinions in the test, yet many treat their own opinions as facts and do not question their assumptions in public. 

“This is worrying because that is precisely where the impact of the literacy crisis becomes visible in social cohesion through public debate,” he said.

“Facts and opinions cease to be distinguished, or as we say in Armenian, ‘the wet and the dry’ become mixed together. It is dangerous because that is where authoritarianism, demagoguery and populism begin and where democracy dies, in those first drops of illiteracy,” said Davtyan. “Literacy is about building democracy and sustaining societal dialogue.”

Through its work, the small team at NorArar has connected with hundreds of teachers who, even under the most difficult circumstances, have been willing to devote their weekends to learning something new about how to teach reading. Davtyan and his colleagues have worked with middle school teachers of different subjects who chose not to blame their primary-school colleagues. Instead, they used their professional agency, which is their collective capacity for addressing complex problems of teaching and learning, to integrate reading skills into their curricula. This way, they helped students approaching the age of 15 close their reading gaps so they could access subject-specific texts.

“Developing foundational learning is the only way to broader and more complex knowledge and skills, and there is no shortcut, no technology or AI that can replace the cognitive, emotional, social and cultural development of a child that reading enables,” said Davtyan. “Focusing on foundational learning therefore requires systemic learning and collective accountability by all stakeholders involved.”

During research and fieldwork, Davtyan and his team noticed that some school principals created opportunities for their staff to continue learning about literacy issues at a time when mandatory professional training was already taking a significant amount of time. In those schools, literacy problems were not seen as deficiencies or inherent traits of students and their family backgrounds; instead, they triggered new ways of learning for all staff to address them through collaborative efforts within and beyond schools. 

In a word, the culture within such schools was different: accountability did not mean “controlling, tick-boxing of mandatory lesson observations or simply complying with external and internal inspections”; it meant holding oneself and others responsible for supporting children, navigating structural and resource limitations to support student learning, said Davtyan. 

Such schools were positive deviants from the norm in the sense that teachers and principals acted with more agency to work on literacy problems: they navigated issues of pedagogical autonomy, restrictions of the school timetable, curriculum demands and work-related challenges that hindered teacher participation in additional and collaborative professional development, respecting teacher autonomy and willingness to participate.

“Neither positive change nor fundamental crisis can be attributed to a single factor, whether the teacher, school leadership or the curriculum itself,” he said. “When problems are more complex, different factors may combine to produce the outcome. Therefore, there is no single fix, but a long commitment to developing teachers and trusting their autonomy and professional judgment.”

 While reforms matter, Davtyan highlighted the importance of enabling teacher agency without turning it into a simple tool for achieving one particular reform outcome. It should be seen as a collective capacity that emerges independently to support student learning, regardless of mandatory demands. Protecting teacher agency matters now because it shapes teachers’ professional judgments and actions, which may also determine how reforms are implemented and how everyday learning problems are solved in schools. In sum, nurturing teacher agency helps us see more in teachers than policy implementers.

When public and personal shaming is involved, it signals the absence of accountability. Students are most affected by this discourse, because by blaming each other, adults are essentially telling the children that they are incapable of being critical of their own work, sharing responsibility and having agency so that they strive to improve learning for the better.