Day after day I realized how important are youth movements, how important role can they play in establishing of the democratic society in my country. Today, along with other maybe more important rights, we miss youth rights in Georgia. Of course a lot of changed since 1991, but still old soviet mentality remains in our people: in parents, school administration, in government, in all society. I am not saying that we can easily jump from one old soviet mentality to new progressive, western mentality. No, it's almost impossible to do it, there are too many cultural, economical and traditional differences. The rights of speech, religion, individual ideas are more luckily improved during these years, but not as good as we wanted. Still students do not have much rights in school, there are not a lot of laws and bills to regulate some basic rights or responsibilities, problems with education, which seriously impacts on the young people and many other problems, which need immediate response and take care of.
There are bunch of youth organizations, which are trying to somehow solve some youth problems, some of them had already some results, others still can't do anything. Sometimes it's looks like we solved a problem, but it just "looks" like that, meanwhile the problem remains still problem. I was involved in school self-governmental body (Tvitmartveloba), which should be like school body and it should take care of all problems inside the school and protect students' rights. Well, it was great idea, but it was not enough energy and new mentality from school administration to do everything we had to. I was elected as a president of this ASB in 1997 and I think I did my best, but maybe not enough. According to the administration in 1997-1998 our ASB got more student clubs and activities than we had before, but still, almost all ASB members were under the influence of the school administration. I am not saying that we had not cooperate with school administration and the principal, but I think we got under their strong "protection". All our decisions were nothing if we did not have any type of approval. At last it got to the point when administration did not want any type of elections but just appointing the candidates for the offices from the principal's office. Almost every candidate was "protected and influenced" by the administration. And when all of the members of ASB are not thinking for themselves but for somebody else (administration for this particular case) it's absurd to talk about some kind of progress in establishing the democracy in schools.
I am hoping that in the future, more strong youth movements will established in Georgia and they will break all those barricades which remains on our way towards democracy and free will!