Syria mandates Russian language study
It might be premature to dub the recent standoff between Russia and the West a renewed Cold War, but there are echoes of the era in Syrian classrooms.
After a brief visit to Damascus last week by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow announced that Syria will be making the study of the Russian language mandatory for all children — an odd choice, academically speaking, as the rest of the world scrambles to learn critical languages like English or Mandarin.
"We are being pressured in Ukraine, but look at what is happening in Syria," former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said in an address before the Russian parliament, parading the news. “Syria has always been our outpost in the Middle East,” he noted.
The decision to expand Russian-language offerings in Syrian schools was first announced in January, before the crisis in Crimea unfolded but just as murmurs of a renewed “Cold War” mentality in Moscow were beginning over Putin’s plans to fold Ukraine into its Eurasian Customs Union. Russian was to be introduced as an elective for fifth-graders due to “sympathies to Russia and interest in its great culture,” according to a statement [in Arabic] on the Syrian ministry of education’s website.
The casualty of this newfound Russophilia appears to be French, which has been the preferred language of study in Syrian schools since the days of the French mandate there. Given French (and Western) condemnation of the Assad regime's brutal crackdown on what began as a peaceful uprising in 2011, the subtext of this decision was too glaring for even the ministry to ignore:
Responding to a question about whether the introduction of the Russian language comes at the expense of French language study, and that it carries political implications in the wake of tense relations between Paris and Damascus [over the civil war] in favor of greater ties with Moscow, the Syrian Minister for Education said, “the decision was out of educational necessity, it did not come as a result of the perceived divergence in political relations.”
The minister proceeded to frame the decision as logistically sound. Nearly 50 percent of university professors already speak Russian, he claimed, citing the historic “relationship between the Soviet Union and Syria.”
That statistic seems generous, but the two have indeed been bound at the hip – and not only over Moscow’s adamant support for the Assad regime. In the northeastern port city of Tartous, Russia has its only Mediterranean naval base. Economic ties have been strong for decades, but doubly so as the Assad regime has come under crushing U.S. sanctions.
But the decision to adopt such a sweeping reform harkens back to the days of the Cold War, when Cuba and other Soviet client states made Russian language compulsory as English instruction exploded in much of the world.
Side note: Syrians don't take language politics lightly. The country has long prided itself on the linguistic hegemony of Arabic, which underpins the Ba’athist, or Arab nationalist, ideology that has prevailed over 40 years of Assad family rule. Unlike most Arab countries, Syria conducts University-level education predominately in Arabic, rebuffing concerns that English fluency is essential for integration into the global economy.
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