Will Belarusians No Longer Get Their School Certificates On Hand?
- 14.02.2024, 22:21
The political scientist said what the authorities can come up with to keep students in the country.
On Tuesday, February 13, Lukashenka met with the rectors of Belarusian universities, voicing a lot of controversial theses and a call to “shake up the universities” during it.
What “surprises” await Belarusian students? Charter97.org turned to political scientist Anatol Kotau for comment:
— Unfortunately, everything that has happened over the past, one might say, decades, will continue. Firstly, this is an increase in ideological pumping in all components — from students to teachers. The second is ideological purges among the teaching staff. Third, further changes in training programs, which lead only in one direction, are degrading the quality of higher education.
Everything complex and incomprehensible will be thrown out; there was even a call to reduce the duration of study in higher educational institutions to several years. In fact, this is the degradation of higher education to the level of specialized secondary education. There will be a complete enslavement of graduates through an increase in the cost of compensation for refusing compulsory distribution and an increase in the period of this service itself for an allegedly free education.
Accordingly, all these decisions will not bring anything good for the higher education system. We can say that this is the completion of the operation to destroy universities in Belarus.
— A very alarming signal was sounded: the order to “stop the outflow of students abroad before September 1.” What methods might be involved?
— The regime is unlikely to come up with anything new; it will use everything that has already been tested in practice to a certain degree. This is a complication of the procedure (and in the future, actually reducing it to the point of impossibility) of obtaining documents on secondary education on hand, so that they can be translated, apostilled and submitted for admission to foreign universities. You can expect the system to transition to a closed mode of operation where your school certificate will be sent to the university you are going to enroll in, rather than handed out to you.
It is also possible to further restrict the immediate freedom to cross the border under various pretexts — from national security situations to a return to old Soviet practices such as exit stamps and exit visas.
— It is noteworthy that Lukashenka also remembered the student protests in 2020. Is he still afraid of them?
— The year 2020 generally inflicted some kind of incurable psychological trauma on Lukashenka, because he constantly recalls it in place and out of place, in almost any of his public speeches. Students, in general, have always been such a threat to any regime. And 2020 showed that in Belarus, despite all the measures that were taken earlier to exclude disloyal students from social and political life, they also did not lead to any serious success.
In terms of the number of students participating in various forms of protest, 2020 can be compared with the mid-90s in Belarus. Then there was still some kind of spirit of freedom, the higher education system as a whole was distinguished by a greater degree of autonomy. There are many students, dozens of thousands of them in large cities, and they are a force to be reckoned with when it gets out of control.