Real School Goris Foundation

Our Mission

Real School in Goris is founded to create an informal education in Goris which will give the students the opportunity to get both theoretical and practical knowledge and skills, which will be enough to enter the job market easier. Our main goal is to create a techno-park based on that educational platform. To reach this goal, we took the Real School concept and programs and we are implementing the school in Goris as a separate institution. The main mission is like the Real School mission, which can be found below: The REAL SCHOOL is providing its graduates with knowledge (theoretical and practical) and skills (professional, personal and social) to succeed in high-tech innovative industry. REAL SCHOOL is a four year collage level program that combines liberal arts in-class education and vocational off-site trainings in R&D organizations, resulting in a level of knowledge comparable to today's Bachelor level graduates of Armenian universities combined with practical skills and CV of a 1-year junior developer in modern IT/High-tech company. The main difference from classical Bachelors program is targeting professional career in the industry, rather than academic career. However it doesn't mean that the applicants are low-level technicians. Modern high-tech industry requires everyday effort in self-education (lifelong learning) due to constantly changing technologies, innovation, new fields, spheres, opportunities. The modern life is not divided into "learn" and "work" segments anymore, but is combining the work & learning process till the last day of the professional career. As a consequence, the classical approach to education (learn only) and to professional career (work only) is failing in XXI century. Our vision of XXI century high-tech organization is a combination of Research, Production and Education formats. An organization that lacks any one of these 3 components, will loose in competition to those who are doing their own innovation, that is close to their own production, and are educating their own staff by maintaining the internship logistics. Our mission is to implement such program in partnership with IT organizations in neighborhood of each RealSchool site. It includes expansion to rural areas of developing countries, helping local industry to upgrade to meet the challenges of innovative high-tech economy. The liberal arts program is following classical approach to education of a "free citizen" of a republic, i.e. provide understanding of the structure of the world, universe, civilization, economy, which is sufficient for the person to discover their mission for their life or at least for the next 7-12 years, and to develop their skills and knowledge towards fulfillment of that mission. The liberal arts program itself is built in a project-based approach. The projects used in this section of the curriculum are also real-life projects, i.e. they are not invented by professors for educational purposes but are chosen from the infrastructure projects and issues faced by the region/country/world. Examples of such projects for I and II grade students include: 1) Forest recovery, in cooperation with the Armenian Forestry Committee. Green industry projects. Reuse of materials. Effective ovens development. Effective usage of forests/wood in the industry and household. Biodegradable materials development and use in the small scale high-end production. 2) Study of ancient Armenian literature, classical Armenian language, terminology, in cooperation with prominent researchers in the field. Creation of fonts, spell-checkers, translators for modern dialects (western/eastern) of Armenian and classical Armenian. Localization of the GNU SW (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Xfce4, Gimp, Inkscape, etc). 3) Study of ancient musical notation systems and body movement (dance) notation systems, development of SW for musical and ethnographic studies, in cooperation with researches from Armenian Conservatory, institute of Komitas and Armenian song and dance academy. 4) Study of environmental health control and monitoring, development of measurement kits for air, water, soil and ether (electromagnetic) pollution, performance of the measurements and publication/awareness promotion projects 5) Study of information management systems, information security challenges, development of national standards for information age, upgrade of national institutions, ministries to reduce paperwork and use modern IT solutions 6) Study of macroeconomic and microeconomic field, legislation. Development of promotion programs and lobbying for making legislation more friendly towards innovation, startup, family-business and small/medium enterprises. 7) Study of pedagogical and epistemological issues in high-tech post-modern reality, development of extracurricular and curricular studies for middle-school and high-school students. Support and further development of Armath curriculum, in cooperation with original authors of Armath curicula. Augmenting Armath with radio-frequency, electronics, mechatronics and biochemical kits. In the fields of pedagogy and epistemology - the mission is to reconsider foundations of personal training, establishment, attachment and feeling of heartbeat of the civilization, world, universe for a modern human being. From our perspective the history of the epistemology and thought is split into segments of before XIV century (primarily descriptive science), followed by the birth of analytical methods and decomposition, until hitting the ground (subatom, genome, lexical elements) in the mid XX century, and starting the third phase - the age of synthetic science (syntetic materials, synthetic life forms, synthetic languages). At the same time this switch from analytical to synthetical coincided with demographic supernova burst: for ages the population on earth was < 1B, and in XX it jumped to 7B and continues growing. As in the case of supernova - and in general - any bifurcation point - it is hard to predict what will be the next state: the dwarf, black hole, or new star. It is easier to choose desired outcome and invest resources in achieving that outcome, rather than investing in analytical efforts to predict the outcome. Fundamental reconsideration of human beings attitude towards self, towards their planet, their civilization and the universe is due to protect new generation from storm of information they are facing from their birth time, and give them instruments to categorize, prioritize and filter that information, in order to extract the core values, build goals and obtain attachment to life that was "given" in in the past to a person by the life style, and now has became a major problem for new generation, which has hard time finding challenges outside the virtual world of social networks and network games. Parents cannot solve this problem alone. The system needs to be built by the state to help them. Our goal is to provide B2G consulting and active participation in building the new formats and curricula for different age groups. Our consortium has created the Armath program under this mission, is building the Real School program, and has started building the Academic Research Hub for the academic (fundamental research) field as well. Among these, the RealSchool in mid-term has the highest impact on our future.