What's best date to start school year in Azerbaijan?

One of the controversial issues in the Azerbaijani education is determining the date of the beginning of the school year. For several years, Day of Knowledge or the process of beginning a new school year is celebrated on September 15. Basically, resorting to such changes, the Ministry of Education was guided by the weather conditions. It should be noted, the beginning of the year was declined by 15 days, then, the vacations were also declined for the same period. And the finish of the school year has always remained the same and fell on May 25. But later the issue was settled and the last day of the academic year was postponed to May 31.

Back in the early school year of 2013 the Minister of Education, in response to questions from the public on the official Facebook page of his office, noted that he considers 3.5 months too long for the summer vacation for students. In his opinion, based on international experience, if the summer holidays last for too long, returning to school pupils demonstrate a low level of knowledge as they forget many things during this period.

"This creates another problem. The problem is that the volume of the curriculum is not reduced. The school program 20-25 years ago was at least not less than today. If you say otherwise, the volume of today's school curriculum program does not yield to the program 20-25 years ago. The more we give children the opportunity to relax in the summer, the more increases the burden on them during the school year. Because the number of school days is reduced. Before the school year began on September 1, and along with it, there was six-day training," the minister said.

MP Fazil Mustafa said he supports the idea of the beginning of the school year on September 1. According to ANN.Az, Mustafa did not consider it right to shift the control of the state education only to a single department, as the matter of education affects all citizens. "As pupils, students, teachers, educators and parents, we are all associated with this process, and so positive or negative changes should cause us to think. And we should not hesitate to voice any ideas to benefit the business. One of the main and perhaps even the primary tasks in this direction should be the adoption of our courageous decision to start the school year in all preschool institutions, secondary, vocational and higher education institutions on September 1," he said.

The MP believes that one of the major factors affecting the quality of education is the short time allotted to learn this program. "Once it was connected with the fact that the summer months were very hot, but if the cause is in the heat, then, respectively, all entrance exams should be prohibited in the summer and they should be scheduled for the spring or the fall. Loss of 15 days at the beginning of the year also causes some problems in the implementation of training programs," said the deputy.

In turn, the head of the Training Center XXI Esr, Etibar Aliyev, supports the ideas of the Education Minister and the MP and considers it appropriate to transfer the beginning of the school year to September 1. "In Western countries, and even in Japan the study begins on April 1. Typically, in any country, the school year starts not from some mid- month, but from the beginning. Our school year used to start from September 1, and it was a good choice. When the study starts immediately with the beginning of the month, then it is possible to implement better training plans and learn the school curriculum. But we have been sending our children to school on September 15 for already many years. But we only see negative results from that. I think that it was a little premature decision," he said.

Trying to cover it, and learn whether any changes will be made in terms of the start of school in 2014, we applied to the Ministry of Education of Azerbaijan . The department responded to us as follows: "All the information disseminated about the fact that the next school year in secondary schools will begin on September 1 and end on May 25 is unfounded.

In addition, in 2014-2015, extension of the school year by 3 weeks is planned. For this we plan to conduct a series of organizational measures."

Seymour

ANN.Az