By Davit Beglaryan
In 2025, Armenia launched a national educational campaign titled “Կրթվելը նորաձև է”—“Learning is Trendy”—spearheaded by Anna Hakobyan, the partner of Nikol Pashinyan. Ostensibly a cultural initiative to revitalize national education, the campaign masks a more troubling agenda: ideological conformity through emotional coercion. Despite its positive branding, the campaign bears the rhetorical and psychological hallmarks of totalitarian mobilization, using guilt, fear, and binary logic to restructure public consciousness.
At the heart of this campaign lies a dangerous substitution: education is no longer a right or opportunity but a patriotic obligation. The Armenian youth are told that studying is not just beneficial—it is required to ensure national survival. In posters and public speeches, slogans like “Our ancestors died so you could study” and “The future of the nation is in your backpack” shift the purpose of learning from personal growth to collective guilt and civic burden. This shift exemplifies what psychologist Erich Fromm identified as a loss of individual autonomy in Escape from Freedom—a key feature of totalitarian systems.
The campaign’s rhetoric divides society into binaries: those who participate are “heroes of the new Armenia”; those who resist are framed as threats to national identity. This structure eliminates moral neutrality, forcing individuals to declare loyalty or face social alienation. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argues that such dichotomies erase the space for dissent and critical thought, replacing them with fear-based allegiance. In this campaign, there is no room for skepticism or silence—only performance.
Perhaps most concerning is the glorification of routine academic behavior. Students are rewarded not for discovery or intellectual independence, but for compliance. This emotional glorification of the ordinary—a known tactic of Soviet and Maoist regimes—shifts the function of school from inquiry to obedience.
In this light, the Armenian campaign does not stand alone but echoes disturbing historical parallels. In Stalin’s USSR, literacy drives were tied to ideological purity. In Maoist China, students were weaponized against intellectual freedom. And in Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth redefined education as national sacrifice. In each case, education was not emancipatory but disciplinary—used to construct an ideal citizen, not a thinking one.
The long-term consequences of such a campaign are clear. First, intrinsic motivation—the kind that leads to real understanding and intellectual engagement—erodes when learning is compelled by guilt or fear. Second, critical thinking diminishes when questioning the dominant narrative becomes a political act. Lastly, democratic culture weakens as individuality is sacrificed to a monolithic vision of patriotism.
Armenia’s trauma following the 2020 Artsakh War may explain the emotional appeal of national unity and educational revival. True unity can’t be coerced—what pressure produces is not unity—it is uniformity. In using education as a tool of soft power, the state crosses a line: it begins to discipline not only behavior, but belief.
In the words of Paulo Freire, true education “liberates through consciousness.” When school becomes a stage for moral obedience rather than critical discovery, it ceases to fulfill the purpose of education.
