In rural Georgia, not Georgia as a state, but the nation, there is a road that hardly merits the name. It eventually arrives at a small settlement that most maps don’t bother to accurately mark after winding past steep mountain edges and through villages that are so silent they seem to have been forgotten in the middle of a sentence. It takes work to get there. It takes something completely different to stay there.
A few parents decided they were tired of waiting in a village like this, where everyone knows which child belongs to which grandmother. No kindergarten had been sent by the state. Not much had been sent by the state. As a result, the community built it themselves, which is what rural communities sometimes do when their patience runs out.
The resulting preschool wasn’t very impressive. One room in an administrative building, brightly decorated and furnished by a combination of outside assistance, parental work, and the kind of group stubbornness that doesn’t look good but gets things done. That first morning, six kids arrived. According to reports, a four-year-old insisted on wearing his tie so he could arrive looking like the prime minister. The picture of a young child in a mountain village treating preschool like a state event is the kind of detail that sticks with you because, to him and his mother, it really was. “We could not even imagine,” his mother remarked, “that the children of our village would ever have the opportunity to attend a kindergarten.” She wasn’t acting overly dramatic. Parents don’t plan for early education in communities this remote, divided by geography and years of government indifference. They mourn its absence in silence.
However, the story’s underlying structural reality—rather than just its warmth—is what makes it worthwhile to analyze. Georgia’s record is genuinely complicated, and the state has struggled for years with how to care for its most vulnerable children. In terms of institutions, the nation achieved a remarkable bureaucratic feat between 2003 and 2014 by dismantling nearly 86% of its residential care system from the Soviet era. Theoretically, tens of thousands of children were transferred from large institutions to family-based care. On paper, progress was genuine.
Pavement, however, is not the same as paper. When state inspectors eventually gained access to an orphanage in Ninotsminda in 2021, the same system that was able to cite those statistics also oversaw what they described as years of systematic abuse. Children were punished by having food poured on their heads. lack of sleep. A child who used derogatory language was admitted to a mental health facility. Operating under church authority, the institution was protected from scrutiny by an administration that physically barred investigators from entering. The discrepancy between a nation’s reform narrative and what was truly taking place behind closed doors is difficult to ignore.
The children’s transfer out of that facility was hurried, disorganized, and finished in two or three weeks without the kind of thorough evaluation that the circumstances required. Some kids wouldn’t go at all. No one has been held accountable as a result of the subsequent criminal investigations, at least not yet. Observing this process gives the impression that the reform apparatus works flawlessly in reports but less so in the lives of real children.
This contributes to the village preschool’s sense of importance despite its small size. It symbolizes real investment from those who truly bear the consequences, something that the state apparatus frequently cannot produce. The community that lobbied until someone paid attention, the parents who assisted in furnishing that one-room center, and the caregivers who attended every day were not adhering to a policy framework. They were bringing up kids.
It’s still unclear if Georgia’s larger system will catch up to what these small communities already know. There is pressure from around the world. At least a road map is provided by the models from nations like Latvia, which saw a two-thirds reduction in the number of institutional children over a ten-year period. However, once more, roadmaps and mountain roads are quite different. For now, a boy in a tie is learning his letters somewhere in rural Georgia. That is not insignificant. It could be everything.
