EU country to phase out Russian language in schools

Schoolchildren in the Czech Republic will be stripped of the opportunity to choose Russian as a second language in the coming years as part of a recent education reform.

The country’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports approved a revised Framework Educational Programs for preschool and primary education in late December, with the document set to be presented to the public at a press conference on Tuesday.

The reform envisages English becoming mandatory as the first foreign language for all pupils from first grade, as opposed to third grade at present. Second language study becomes compulsory from seventh grade, with the choice “limited to three foreign languages (German, French or Spanish).”

The reform will take effect gradually, with the full implementation not expected before 2034.

The plans have come in for criticism from educational experts. In its article on Monday, Seznam Zpravy estimated that “today, one-fifth of children learn” Russian. The media outlet quoted Hana Andrasova, head of the Department of German Studies at the Faculty of Education of the University of South Bohemia, as saying: “I do not agree with the elimination of Russian. In my opinion, it has the right to life.”

Similar policies have recently been implemented in several EU member states with a historically significant proportion of Russian speakers. In 2022, the Estonian parliament passed a bill stipulating that Estonian would become the language of instruction in all schools and kindergartens by 2029, with funding for Russian-language education axed.

In 2023, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) suggested that the country’s new education law would introduce “potentially discriminatory measures affecting the rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities in education.”

Last April, the Latvian government similarly ruled that, from September 2025, schoolchildren in the country will not be able to study Russian as a second foreign language, with the gradual phasing-out expected to conclude by the end of the decade.

Despite a migration survey indicating in 2017 that 25% of the population in Latvia was ethnic Russian, only EU languages plus those of Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein will remain as options.

Moscow has repeatedly accused the Baltic states of discriminating against ethnic minorities and their languages.

Last May, Sergey Belyayev, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second European Department, told TASS that the “Russian language has been almost completely squeezed out of all spheres of public life, including the education system” in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in recent years.