Ahead of the start of the new school year, the Lukashenka regime’s Minister of Education, Andrei Ivanets, gave an interview to Onliner. Among other things, he shared his view of tutors: “I simply cannot stand them at all. Every person has their own potential, including intellectual potential. What does a tutor do? In a short period of time, they try to inflate a rubber balloon to the size of a car tire”.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s Advisor on Science and Education, Pavel Tereshkovich, comments on the statement:
“I’m not particularly surprised that the minister doesn’t like tutors. This is the view of an official from a state that automatically considers anything not directly subordinate to it hostile and suspicious. Ivanets believes the school curriculum is so simple that every parent should be able to solve a fourth-grade math problem and help their child without a tutor. Yet the minister himself admits that when he was applying to the BSU Lyceum, he nearly failed math because he ‘wasn’t particularly interested in the subject’.
It appears that this lack of interest has persisted even in his ministerial position. Here is the answer to a question about non-state education: ‘Private education exists. Today, there are six private schools and two private kindergartens’. That amounts to just 0.21% of all schools and 0.05% of all kindergartens. Over five years, the number of such schools has fallen 3.5-fold, and the number of kindergartens has fallen sevenfold. Well, let’s set aside this tiny figure — which is not even worth calling a statistical error — and which is presented as evidence that private education exists. Let’s look at the other figures from the same ministry. Over five years, the number of children enrolled in kindergartens has fallen by 84,500 (21%). During the same period, the education system lost 13,000 teachers. The share of higher-education instructors with candidate or doctoral degrees has fallen to 40%. And so it is hardly a coincidence that, over five years, Belarusian State University has plunged from 317th to 533rd place in the QS World University Rankings, while in the Times Higher Education rankings, it has fallen outside the top 1,500 universities. And in the Shanghai Ranking, there simply is no such country as Belarus.
Is this kind of math interesting to the education minister? Apparently not. But there is another kind. At the ministry’s most recent board meeting in July, it was announced that over four years, the number of international students in Belarus had increased by 10,000, reaching 37,000. They were not afraid to call this not only a ‘driver of development’, but also an ‘international brand of Belarus’. The only problem is that Belstat employees, who know more about math than Mr. Ivanets, report a completely different figure — 24,000 international students — and say that the number has remained almost unchanged in recent years. There is, of course, no great harm in this, but only until some grim-faced men from the State Control Committee come along and demand that the number of foreigners actually present be counted one by one. It’s not as though they are great fans of mathematics, but they will certainly understand that 24 is not 37.
The moral of the story is this: don’t offend your tutor. Some tutoring would be useful not only for schoolchildren but also for some ministers”.
