Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s Advisor on Education and Science, Tatiana Shchyttsova, in an interview with Novy Chas spoke on how to resist totalitarian methods in education in Belarus and why Lukashenka’s ideologists will fail to make young people their servants.
Here are the highlights from the interview:
📌 “The Lukashenka regime has no ideology but does have a general ideological framework based on the division of the whole world into some “us” and some “enemies”, as well as on the alliance with Russia”.
📌 “What kind of person is the regime trying to raise? Some kind of moral monster, of course. When people get excited to visit prisons, it’s scary. If children are engaged in such activities from the 1st grade, then at the end of the school they will perceive them as something normal”.
📌 “As long as Belarus has an open Internet with all its diverse possibilities, including educational ones, we have a powerful tool of resistance”.
📌 “We should not just immediately judge the people who continue working as a teacher in the conditions of repression and neo-totalitarianism. There must be people in education who can properly communicate with the younger generation”.
📌 “Russification is a tool used to colonize our country culturally. It indeed is a threat, but there is also resistance to it. The priority for the future reform of education is to overcome the cultural dominance of the ‘Russian world’”.
