This week, Georgia’s State Audit Office opened an inquiry into the funding of the Tbilisi School of Political Studies, and government figures have publicly accused the School of promoting radicalism. Reading the coverage, I kept thinking about my own time there – because the place being described bears almost no resemblance to the place I actually experienced.
So let me tell you what I actually found.
The Tbilisi School of Political Studies has operated since 1999 as part of the Council of Europe’s wider network of Schools of Political Studies, which exist across many countries to bring together young professionals from different fields for civic and democratic education. The year unfolds as a series of seminars, and the final one is held in Strasbourg, in the Council of Europe building itself, where the national schools from different countries all come together at the World Forum of Democracy. I joined School in 2018.
One of those seminars took place in Bakhmaro – the high mountain resort in western Georgia whose funding is now, years later, the subject of the current inquiry. The photographs in this post are my own, taken there and in nearby Zortikheli. I offer them partly because they are beautiful, and partly because they are the truest answer I can give to the question of what this School is about.
What I Expected
To be honest, I couldn’t really picture what awaited me. I expected some kind of classic training – experts in political science telling us things about politics, using a few fancy words about democracy, liberalism, citizens’ rights, and a thousand other standard, popular topics. That was my mental image: lectures, terminology, the usual civics vocabulary delivered from a podium.
What I could not have imagined was that these things would be the least of what I found there.
What I Actually Found
Instead, the School gave me Georgian folk music and chants. It gave me feature films and documentaries I would never otherwise have watched – or that, if I had watched them, I would never have paid real attention to.
It gave me a room full of people from wildly different professions and political views: judges and prosecutors, politicians and journalists, schoolteachers, university students and lecturers. Different people, with different values – and a space where we actually listened to one another.
It gave me a space where we respected each other’s time. Respected it in a way I have rarely encountered, not only in Georgia but abroad as well.
The School turned out to be the least political and the most cultural place – cultural in every sense, and cultural in its connection to Georgian culture specifically. It turned out to be a place where, year after year, different people come to know that culture. And it turned out to be a place where a person’s own choice was respected.
A Different Idea of Learning
This is what struck me most, and it is worth spelling out. In the classic idea of a school, you get a grade only if you learn something, and you don’t if you don’t. The institution measures your compliance.
Here, at this School, whether you learned anything was your choice. Beyond the seminars, you decide whether you respect someone else’s time, whether you listen to another person, whether you lean on your horn in a traffic jam. The choice is yours. No one grades it. No one enforces it. You are treated as an adult capable of choosing. This is Culture of Choice
That is a strange foundation for an institution accused of indoctrination. Brainwashing does not, as a rule, hand you your own freedom and ask nothing in return.
On “Brainwashing”
And here I run into a professional difficulty. Standing in a space where you discover an 82-year-old Gurian singer who, in live performance, sends Georgian three-voice polyphony soaring in a single breath, I genuinely lose track of what we are supposed to be calling brainwashing.
Maybe my confusion is occupational. Before I can measure whether brains are being washed, I would need to operationalize “brainwashing” – to define it precisely enough that it could actually be assessed. Perhaps the pleasantly woven krimanchuli into Beethoven’s Ninth, a performance by Shavnabada heard inside the Council of Europe building, is brainwashing. If so, that too would have to be specified and measured. As it stands, the accusation floats free of any definition that a person could test.
That is not a rhetorical dodge. It is the heart of the matter. An accusation that cannot be defined cannot be verified, and an accusation that cannot be verified is not really a finding about the world – it is a label applied for other reasons.
Go and See for Yourself
I don’t expect anyone to take my word for what the School is. That would be its own kind of substitute for judgment. What I believe is simpler: more people should be given the chance to see this space, and then to make their own choice about it.
Because that, in the end, is the thing the School gave me that I value most – not a conclusion handed down, but the room to reach my own. An institution that trusts people to choose is not the enemy of a democratic culture. It is what a democratic culture is made of.
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Giorgi Tchumburidze
September, 2026
