And so let's just start the discussion with, for our audience, let's paint a little picture, like what did the education system look like in late Soviet Georgia in the 1980s?

So the 1980s kind of is characterized as a very exciting period because so, you know, when you look at what was going on, so basically you had this modernization kind of happening in all the Soviet republics and also within the Soviet Russia.

So you had the 1984 education reform that tried to, in a way, give more kind of autonomy to schools and to kind of introduce some student-centred approaches.

So for example, and this kind of this process accelerated in 1984, Moscow kind of gave republics and local authorities like control over the curriculum and how they organized the schools itself and schools could offer like their own subjects and kind of subject profiles and the schools could kind of design their own timetables.

And there were in some instances, they were also kind of told to raise their own money in order to, I don't know, if they had extra needs for certain funds, this was in a way what was going on under Gorbachev.

And then they could also deliver their own kind of paid courses for adults and trainees.

And what also kind of was happening was that like student councils of teachers, like school councils of teachers, parents and pupils were also set up to run the schools, including like deciding staff rewards who got promoted, who got demoted.

unable to actually educate the population or use their intellectual capacities to help development because they're now working in the bazaar.