As the Covid-19 pandemic in its several waves persisted for nearly two years, literature (both op-ed and academic) on the negative effects of school closures and online schooling continued to proliferate. There is no shortage of discussion on the implications of the pandemic and the resulting rearrangement of both general and higher education for the mental health of students and educators (e.g. Orgilés et al, 2020); on drawbacks and gaps in school program assimilation and knowledge transfer and their likely lasting impact on future employment/life opportunities, as well as on gross inequalities in access to online education across gender, rural/urban residence type, socio-economic status, etc (e.g. Maity et al 2022, Dorn et al 2021, Goldberg 2021). There is also a line of research and advocacy demonstrating how the pandemic has disrupted family life/relationships and working adults’ mental health as they struggle (and sometimes fail) to arrange their children’s online education. Far less attention has been paid to psychosocial issues in Covid-era education within the walls of reopened schools, organized in highly regulated and therefore changed learning environments. Critical voices, if any, typically were coming from a small segment of parents and focused on physical health-related concerns such as likely new outbreaks of the virus or undesirably long mask-wearing in schools. More generally, however, there was almost a consensus that the regained opportunity for physical school attendance undoes pandemic-related education problems requiring research.

Taking the case of state primary schools in the capital of Armenia, we will attempt to address some psychosocial problems of pandemic-era learning environments and demonstrate nuanced influences that are potentially harmful to children’s school socialization and personality development. In particular, we suggest that safety-driven restrictive regulations, the way they were run in the observed Yerevan state primary schools, affect the educational relationships and children’s internal image of the school. Tied to this, we want to put into perspective and speculate on some of the shaping factors as well as potential consequences of these regulations, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between school culture and dominant national culture. We will also suggest that the case analysis may be relevant to the better understanding of covid-era school experiences elsewhere, and can become a source for further, more standardized comparative studies on educational challenges in present times. 

The cohort of schoolchildren who first went to school during the pandemic (i.e. had never seen what a school without masks and entrance procedures is like), deserve, as we believe, particular research attention as a case of a vulnerable group in Armenia and elsewhere. They have an experience of an exclusively shrunk range of activities and freedom of movement compared to even those children who had attended “normal” school for one year before the pandemic (see further in the conclusions section). 

The schools developed safety control measures, not all of which followed a consistent logic of prevention. They were selective, acting more like an exercise of excess power or disciplining of children coupled with “institutional laziness”. That is, by and large kids were kept inside the classrooms at all times, and even the “physical training” class was run inside the poorly ventilated and overcrowded small classrooms on the unconvincing grounds (or under the pretext of?) infection prevention, while safely taking children of different classes at different hours out for outdoor activities would be both easy to organize and at least as safe as keeping them inside. Another argument in favor of selective "safety" and power exercise is the remarkable difference between the state and private schools, with the latter's students enjoying far fewer routine restrictions, including mask-wearing.

The study is explorative and is not grounded in a single theoretical framework, while it may instead help in developing a conceptual framework for understanding how schools and educational relationships reflect but also shape the state's prevailing responses to crises. Drawing on both desk-review and primary data of the contextual analysis component of our ongoing study (that looks at the pandemic’s short-term and long-term psychological effects), we employ speculative analysis and a critical approach to consider some cultural-psychological factors for the outlined picture. In particular, the preliminary analysis and conclusions in this presentation rely on on-site observations at two urban primary schools, short interviews with parents, conversational analysis in online parent and parent-teacher groups), and desk-review data, and uses the multi-source data to critically reflect on some educational challenges for primary school students in Armenia during the pandemic and, as we argue, beyond. The discussion and interpretation of the outlined issues can further generate more measurable hypotheses.

The picture described above could be avoided if school administrations and teachers put more effort into creatively combining preventive measures with the best interest of schoolchildren. For that to be the case, however, both the country’s predominant social-cultural context in general and the preexisting school culture, in particular, should be not discouraging for such creativity and ‘looseness’. Instead, the way schoolchildren were controlled, restricted, and overprotected (sometimes arbitrarily and with poor medical justification for it, such as not being allowed to leave classrooms during breaks under the pretext of reducing contacts) showcases the prevalence of hierarchy and rigidity, and seems to be a cultural or even structural "availability" shared by both school workers and most parents. Theoretically, it could be counterargued that schools’ genuine concern for their students’ health is the primary factor for such a picture. However, preventive health beliefs and behavior, as our in-progress research shows, are far from being a cultural norm or commonplace behavior and thus would hardly affect decisions. Add to this that private schools circumvent most of the described extra-measures, which speaks in favor of the "power exercise" component in state schools. Restrictive measures in schools are certainly a global problem with likely global consequences, yet the ways in which they are implemented in a given country spotlight the larger societal issues. Armenia is undergoing a major general education reform, declaring child-centeredness and equality at the core, which can only be welcomed. Yet if there is no sufficient attention to micro-level issues in the ways the school relates to children, these reforms may not land quite there where they are intended to. The children’s scarce peer interactions and physical bounds shape a limited and emotionally poor schooling experience and personalities that are deprived of sufficient formative relationships and activities for their optimal self-fulfillment.

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