BB.lv: “Shame” – National Minority School Graduates Have Critically Poor Knowledge of Latvian

The Ministry of Education admits that this is a disgrace for the education system. However, the situation should improve in the near future, since much has been done to completely abandon the Russian language in schools.

Vocational schools are also sounding the alarm that minority school graduates’ proficiency in the state language is often critically low.

The fact that there are ninth-grade graduates who do not actually know Latvian was revealed to TV3 on Monday, July 1, when it made a story regarding how junior school students passed centralized exams.

TV3 talked to students of Riga Technical College, where they came to apply for studies. However, the students did not understand most of the questions formulated in Latvian. One of the interviewees said that the exam results were bad. Meanwhile, another young man did not even hesitate to ask if I might ask him a question in Russian, the language most convenient for him.

“It would be better in Russian,” said the student who approached him. When asked how he plans to study, he frankly admits that he does not know. He has already looked at the exam results, for example, he scored 14% in Latvian, 43% in English, and 13% in mathematics. The student himself believes that he might have achieved more.

The college admits that this is not a rare exception. The proficiency in the state language of minority school graduates is usually critically low. There are even young people who studied for nine years, formally passed all the exams and want to study further, but know Latvian, at best, at the level of the fifth grade.

The Minister of Education Anda Čakša is also aware of the problem and believes that the fault here is that for a long time we have allowed Russian to be the second language of instruction in Latvia. This will change soon.

“It’s been a year since we switched to a unified school system, which, of course, will solve this issue, so it was important to pay attention to quality and we are currently monitoring this. And I really must say that it is a pity that following more than 30 years of living with our state language, there are local governments that do this, hide it and turn a blind eye to it,” says Chaksha.

The minister also says that in order to motivate people to learn Latvian better, there should be a plan to raise the bar for exams already in primary school. From the current meager 10% to 20%. Meanwhile, Riga Technical College emphasizes that schools that hid or ignored their students’ poor knowledge of the state language were actually harming the future opportunities of these young people.