New school year starts in Belarus

September 1, BPN. A new school year has started in Belarus. According to the education ministry, over one million school students have started classes in 2,901 schools, including 115,000 first-graders, one thousand more than in 2021.

Most of them will study in Russian, with only about 107,000 to be taught in Belarusian.

Back in 2016, the total number of school students was at 981,600, including 128,900 who received instruction in Belarusian.

The academic year has also started for more than 180,000 students of secondary educational institutions and over 254,000 university students.

On September 1, the first lesson in schools will be dedicated to historical memory, while Alaksandr Łukašenka intends to teach a history lesson to be broadcast across schools and universities.

For the 2022 school year, the authorities plan to include materials of a criminal investigation into the World War II “genocide” against Belarusians into the school curriculum. For instance, high school history lessons will include topics such as “crimes of the Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian nationalists against Belarus’ civilian population” and “the Belarusian collaborators’ participation in the German Nazis’ occupation policy.”

After the suppression of post-election protests in 2020, Belarusian authorities promoted a theory that Belarusians suffered genocide during WWII. In 2021, Prosecutor General Andrej Švied announced that his office had opened a genocide case. He also edited a book drawing parallels between the Nazis and participants in the 2020 protests.

The new Education Code, providing for compulsory secondary education (11 years) instead of the basic education (9 years), comes into force on September 1. New rules also say that all schools in Belarus should teach in the official languages (Russian and Belarusian) from September 2022 onwards.

In August, the authorities closed the Lithuanian school in the Hrodna region citing non-compliance with fire safety rules.