Currently there are about 150 students attending. Nearly all of them are from Armenia. There is only a handful from the Diaspora. There is one student from Syria, another from Iraq, and I’m told there is a student from Germany, though I haven’t met him yet. He’s doing a really good job of blending in. Students who come from Georgia or Karabakh are also called Diasporans, but kind of jokingly.
They are all required to live in the dormitory throughout their education, and share rooms with their classmates until their sixth year when they’re given individual rooms (space permitting). The student’s day is strictly organized. The following is their schedule:
6am - Wake up
7:30am - Morning Service
After Services - Breakfast
9am-2:30pm - Classes
3pm - Lunch
4pm-5pm - Study
5:30pm - Evening Service
After Services - Wash up
7pm - Dinner
8pm-11pm - Study
11:30pm - Lights out
They are not permitted to leave the monetary during the week, except on Sundays after church if they’ve got permission, but they usually have to be back in time for evening service.
This structure, although very strict, has a few really wonderful effects. The first is that the students are left, essentially, without distraction. They don’t have any relationships (active relationships anyway) with people outside of the seminary, and they have nothing else going on except attending classes and doing homework. This way they’re sure to have enough time to get their work done. Since, they share the same classes, and therefore the same workload, all of their class work is essentially group work. So they always study everything together. Due to this, the bond that is developed amongst the classmates is tremendous. They really are brothers by the time they graduate the seminary, and know each other as well as they know anyone in this world. It’s a very successful support system, and they build strong relationships that will benefit them personally and vocationally throughout their lives.
To Be Married
The downside to all this male bonding time was something I referred in the first installment… the girl thing. In order to be ordained as a married priest, you must be married first. The problem is that most of these young men have very little opportunity to meet girls. They have a couple months during their summer vacation when they can socialize, but they inevitably begin the next academic year, and spend the majority of the following 9 months out of contact. The result of this is that they have a very hard time developing interpersonal skills, especially the kind necessary for talking to women. In the short time that I’ve been here I’ve been asked on three separate occasions how to talk to girls, about what girls like, and more.
From one perspective it’s cute and it’s refreshing to see that their able to keep their innocence for so long in this regard. From the other perspective, it’s got to be awful for them to graduate in their mid-twenties and have to stress about learning how to meet and marry a girl as soon as possible so they can pursue their calling.
I don’t mean to over state this issue. It’s not something that’s considered an issue here, in fact it’s due rigeur or like a right of passage perhaps, but it struck me as being interesting
Growing Pains
The youngest students, as I said, are 17 years old. They aren’t mature 17 year olds either. They’re the same self-affected, insecure, and arrogant 17 year olds that I knew when I was in high school. It’s interesting that even though the culture and educational system is completely different in Armenia from the United States, a teenager is still a teenager. They struggle a great deal with the restrictions put on them, and the high expectations of this place. Many of them come from villages, and the quality of their primary education ranged from mediocre to awful. In order to be accepted to the school, they have to pass an entrance exam, but still they frequently have difficulty with the level of the instruction.
It’s hard to say what drives them at such a young age to pursue the priesthood. I’ve spoken to many of them about it, and each has his own answers. For some its a familial oblegation, others were inspired by a priest of deacon in their community, for others its done out of a sense of social righteousness. I heard one young man when being questioned as to whether or not he had what it took to be a priest say “I’m a good person. I stand up for other people.” I thought that was interesting. There are also young men who are here for reasons they won’t share, perhaps they’ve made personal oaths, or are even being sent here as a disciplinary measure.
While it’s not a direct comparison, it’s amazing to see the level of the oldest students compared to the youngest and see that they’ve transformed so much within the span of five years. The youngest students, though I’ve grown to be very fond of them, aren’t responsible enough to warrant being asked to care for a friend’s pet. The oldest students on the other hand, are knowledgeable and humble young men who you can easily see are the future leaders of the Church.
When put in that context it’s very clear that this seminary is doing its job well. That isn’t to say that certain things aren’t deserving of critique, but I think it’s far too early for me to start being critical.
This is the second part in a series of blogs which were written to give the reader an idea of what the Kevorkian Seminary is like… from my perspective at least.
The Academic life of the seminary, is very structured. Very very structured. Did I mention that its structured? This was surprisingly shocking to me at first, but in retrospect, its a seminary located on the grounds of an orthodox monastery, its not like it would take any cues from Montessori or anything.
Before going into the details, one of the best things about the academic experience of the Kevorkian Seminary, is that the people who are teaching you in any given subject (especially the high-level courses), are usually masters of the their subjects, in the truest sense of the word. If you are being instructed about the Church Doctrine, your professor is someone who has spent years and years delving into the details of that subject, and in their own ministry are engaged with its development. Likewise for topics like Liturgics, or Homiletics. Its one of the schools most wonderful qualities.
The aforementioned quality is something that most universities can boast of their professors, but in the context of the Armenian Church, the mastery of some of the Church’s admittedly arcane areas of study is a rare thing.
Classes
Every day, Monday through Saturday, there are three classes from 9am-3pm. Each class is approximately two hours long, with a 5-ish minute break in the middle. In the middle of the second class there is an extended break where they serve tea and some sort of baked snack, like a choreg. With very few exceptions, none of the classes are repeated throughout the week. Which means that the students are taking somewhere between 15 and 18 different courses at the same time.
I remember in college that there was a rule of thumb that for every hour of instruction there was supposedly X number of corresponding hours of homework required. I couldn’t say exactly what that X was, because I rarely ever did it, but lets say that it was 2 hours of homework for every hour in class. That means that these kids have 36 hours of instruction a week, and 72 hours of homework. That’s a lot! That homework rule might not stand up 100% here, but they are given pretty substantial homework in some of their classes. How do they do it? I’ll discuss that in the Student Life section, to come.
The classes are taught in a myriad of styles depending on the instructor. The old school soviet era teachers (mostly the lay people) teach in a soviet style. It doesn’t work for me, but most of the students are used to it already, so its not a big deal for them.
The “Soviet Style”, and I don’t know if that’s the right way to refer to it, involves a great deal of memorization. I was never much of a memorizer of things, as we really don’t emphasize that in the American educational system, but its a respectable skill none the less. I’m doing my best to try and pick it up.
The courses taught by the clergy, especially those clergy which have received higher education in Europe, Russia, or the United States, are much more open. They are usually taught in more of a conversational way, which almost all the students engage in readily.
The only class which is taken every year is Church Music. Music is huge part of what goes on in the Church, and it seems as though every student, by the time they’ve gotten through a year or two of training, sings with a powerful and confident voice. The students learn at least one church hymn a week, and are expected to be able to sing it solo, sometimes without being able to see the notes. You can imagine how many hymns they’ve learned after six years of music classes.
They are also expected take four different language classes during the course of their education. They study English and Russian in their first years, then they study Greek and Hebrew.
Etchmiadzin High
One of the things that surprised me the most about the school day here is the bell. At the beginning, the end, and the break of every class, the school bell rings. When I told this to my cousin David, he coined the term Etchmiadzin High, and it stuck with me. Much of the way the school is configured makes it very similar to an American High School, perhaps even an American Elementary School.
I say elementary school because of the way the classes are set up, not in a academic sense but logistically. The seminarians here are organized in classes. Such as the 1st year class, the 2nd year class, and so on (its more like Ա լսարան, Բ լսարան…). Each class has its own classroom, and each student has his own desk. He can keep things like notebooks in it, and pens. Students don’t choose there classes, or receive course schedules, because they simply stay in their classroom and the right teacher shows up at the right time. If a class is canceled because a teacher didn’t show up, or because that hour is free, they have to stay inside of the classroom unless permitted to do otherwise. Its also like elementary school in the sense that when they leave the seminary, either to go for the cafeteria for a meal, or to go to church, they do so in a line from youngest class to oldest.
I don’t mean for the analogy to be demeaning or anything, its just an observation. The truth is that, for reasons I’ll discuss more in later installments, this structure is crucial to the development and maturation of the students.
In the next installment: The Student Life
Its been slightly more then a month since I began at the Gevorkian Theological Seminary at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. Since then, the process of settling in to my academic life has been, like most things in Armenia, less then predictable.
In this post and over the next couple in this series, I’d like to share with you how the Seminary is structured, what the student life is like, and finally my personal experience. This is for the benefit of my friends and loved ones, as well as anyone else that is curious how an Armenian Seminary works.
Note: before considering some of the more entertaining things about the Seminary, I want to make a blanket statement. These things may only be funny from a western-centric point of view, and are perfectly normal and productive here. What’s more, despite and sometimes due to these things, I very much like being a seminarian here
How the Seminary Works
The Gevorkian Seminary, the preeminent institution for preparing young men for the priesthood in Armenia, is a six year program. A student who attends all six years will receive a bachelors degree in Theology, and specialized education in the Priesthood. In their fifth year, they’ll be ordained as a Deacon, the lowest rank of clergy (if they pass the relevant tests). After their sixth year, if they pass their exams, and if they accept the responsibility, they will at some point be ordained a celebrate or married priest (assuming that they’ve been deemed as ready). For some of them it will still be a number of years before they are ordained. Sometimes this has to do with the marriage thing, but we’ll get into that later. If the clergyman is ordained as a celibate priest it will be highly encouraged, if not mandatory, that they continue their education at the Masters level at some international university, in Europe, America, or Russia.
Students enter the Seminary after completing the Armenian equivalent of High School. High School (up until this year I think, as the laws were recently changed) goes until the age of 16. This means that most students are about 17 years old when they begin their seminary education. So, its possible for someone to graduate from the seminary, and be ordained by the young age of 23. It doesn’t happen very often, but it happens.
Most of the teachers of the religious courses are clergymen. Priests who work and sometimes live in the Monastery adjacent to the Seminary. As far as I’ve experienced, they are all very capable educators, and are highly versed in the subjects they are teaching. The school’s secular courses (Literature, History, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, etc…) are pretty much all taught by lay people. I’m not in most of those classes, so I can’t speak about them very much. I can confidently say that my Armenian History teacher is no Jaime Escalante though.
The Hierarchy of the school consists of a Dean, and two Vice-Deans, one in charge of the schools academic program, and the other responsible for administrative issues. Of course, being that its located at the Mother See, the school falls under the supervision of the Catholicos, His Holiness Karekin II, who takes great interest in the affairs of the seminary.
Well, that’s about it as far as the structure goes. Its not really entertaining at all actually, but I thought it would be interesting for everyone to have an idea of how the Seminary functions. In my next post I’ll present the Academic life of the school.
