Will Foreign Languages Be Banned In Belarusian Schools?

Parents of schoolchildren are crying foul.

Reader Barys from Zaslaul wrote to Charter97.org:

“I’m a father of two kids and I closely follow the news from the Ministry of Education on the eve of the school year. I also have a bad feeling, because the Ministry of Education in recent years has been doing everything possible and impossible to only complicate the lives of parents and teachers. I remember how a year ago the Lukashist "educators" furiously destroyed private schools.

So, I learned that this year the officials from the above-mentioned Ministry were concerned about foreign language studies at schools. Someone might think that they paid attention to the low level of technical equipment in the classrooms, the crummy salaries of teachers or outdated textbooks. But no, the opposite is true!

The Deputy Minister, someone Aliaksandr Kadlubai, explained that now foreign languages will be studied in public schools differently - without deepening the history and culture of native speakers. Comrade Aliaksandr was indignant that, for example, one could see the British flag, a double-decker bus or a public call box in London, and so on in the English language classrooms.

I immediately thought that we once studied German in Soviet times. No listening, no talking, just endless grammar and translations. And half of those texts were about the Great October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War. Naturally, even excellent students could not speak German and couldn't put two words together.

It's scary to even imagine what kind of "improvement" the Lukashists will come up with... Well, instead of the British flag, they will hang a green-red one and instead of, for example, the works of Charles Dickens, they will be forced to read which Charhinets translated into English. Or maybe they will ban the study of the ‘enemy’ languages altogether because this is propaganda of the NATO ideology.

You don't need to be very smart to understand that in today's globalized world, you need to know several languages. And the more the better. The Lukashist regime is extremely archaic, just like its permanent leader. He, a poor fellow, could not even learn one language properly in his entire life.

We enrolled our daughter in English courses at the age of 5. She is now 8 years old and can read five languages. I think that this is the ordinary for a civilized society and Belarusians will build it at the end of the Lukashism era.”

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