The former Minister of Education commented on the difficulties of transitioning to teaching solely in the Latvian language.
As is known, veteran Latvian politician Karlis Šadurskis, more than 20 years ago, during his first term as Minister of Education, initiated the so-called language reform in minority schools — at that time, a language ratio of 60:40 was introduced, meaning a model of bilingual education was launched. Now the former minister and ex-MP Karlis Šadurskis, recalling that period (the year 2004) in an interview with TV-24, noted that at that time it was impossible to fully transition secondary education to the state language. 'Firstly, there simply were not enough teachers who were capable of teaching effectively in Latvian. Secondly, various Western advisors were putting pressure on us — at the behest of Russia, which was pursuing a very unpleasant policy towards Latvia and all the Baltic states, accusing us of being undemocratic, infringing on the rights of national minorities, and so on,' the former politician remarked.
As a result, the implementation of the reform was significantly delayed, and the fact that a third of students in former Russian schools are now struggling with the Latvian language does not surprise the ex-minister: 'The thing is, there was a lot of cheating in Russian schools. After all, when inspectors came, schools would immediately say: 'Oh dear, why didn’t you warn us about the inspection? Today, the lesson is being conducted in Russian.' With a bilingual system, it was easy to cheat like that. And now we see the consequences.
