New challenges that Azerbaijan is facing today give particular importance to the increase in the human resources of the republic, and an important step towards achieving this goal is to increase the quality of school education, the rector of Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University Jafar Jafarov said, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza.
First of all, Jafar Jafarov noted that "at first we planned that Azerbaijan Tourism and Management University will prepare personnel for the tourism industry, but later it became the Azerbaijan Tourism and Management University. It was the first Azerbaijani university with a double degree program organized jointly with the Austrian English-speaking university. The program has been successfully implemented, and subsequently, many universities used it, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of its establishment in 2016," he said.
The leading pedagogical university of the country, which rector Jafar Jafarov was appointed by order of President Ilham Aliyev on June 23, 2016, demanded to enter a new level of work. "Azerbaijani State Pedagogical University is ten times larger, it provides education to about 20,000 students, about 3,000 people are employed there. It also has five regional branches," the rector pointed out.
The rector explained that the main difficulty in the merger was the high responsibility, imposed by the importance of higher education for Azerbaijan. "As the country develops, the human potential is becoming more and more important. The tasks that the country is facing give particular importance to the increase in human resources - and it is the number one goal for the entire educational process," the head of Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University stressed.
This is the difference between Jafar Jafarov's former and current places of work. "At Azerbaijan Tourism and Management University, the process of preparing for a specific field already has a certain basis. In the case of a pedagogical university, first of all, teachers are important. Everything is concentrated on strengthening the teaching staff in schools. There are 4,500 schools in Azerbaijan, most of them were either newly built, or completely renovated, but one infrastructure for education is not enough," he said.
In order to change the situation, the Ministry of Education seeks to increase the prestige of the teacher's profession. "Not all strong students and entrants choose this profession today. To encourage them, additional funds have been allocated to those who will score 500 points and higher and will first indicate the pedagogical direction in their applications. This transformation increases the prestige of teaching in the country. It is very actual, and in this connection, we also do a lot in the university to bring it into a state of mobile mechanism that can fulfill the tasks that we are facing," the rector of Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University concluded.
