Ban on smartphones and new clubs from the Ministry of Internal Affairs for schoolchildren and students. Belarusian education system in May 2025 

Ban on smartphones and new clubs from the Ministry of Internal Affairs for schoolchildren and students. Belarusian education system in May 2025
Photo: RIA Novosti, Alexey Danichev

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What changes await Belarusian schoolchildren starting next academic year: a ban on smartphones, mandatory work practice for grades 5–8, an increase in the duration of military training camps, and the unification of appearance. This, as well as how the last bells and graduation ceremonies went in Belarus, is covered in the ISANS report on Belarusian education for May.

Following our April monitoring research, we reported that every third news item on the official resources of the Ministry of Education had an ideological slant, which is evidence of the high degree of ideologization of Belarusian education as a whole. At the end of May, the situation on the ministry’s official resources was similar. On the official website of the Ministry of Education, 6 out of 22 news items (27%) had ideological slant, and in the official Telegram channel, there were 66 such news items out of 196 (34%).

The ideologization of the news feed was particularly noticeable at the beginning of the month, which was associated with the celebration of Victory Day and the Day of Official Symbols. In the second half of the month, the share of ideologically oriented news on the Ministry of Education’s resources decreased slightly, but the final figures for May were very similar to those for April. Every third news item in May (72 out of 218, or 33%) on the Ministry of Education’s resources had an ideological slant, which corresponds to both the April figures and the average ideologization of the ministry’s information agenda for 2024.

As for the overall state of Belarusian education, the following features and phenomena were characteristic of it in May:

1. New decisions by the authorities aimed at standardizing Belarusian school education.
2. Unquestioning implementation of Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s ideas in the field of education
3. Preservation of high rate of ideologization in Belarusian education
4. The imposition of the so-called “Victory Cult” in Belarusian education in connection with Victory Day celebrations.
5. Increased militarization of Belarusian education at the regulatory level.
6. Intensification of activities by the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to establish and operate military-patriotic clubs.
7. The continuation of April’s militarization pace in Belarusian education and new projects by the Belarusian authorities to strengthen it.
8. Intensification of educational cooperation with China.

You can read or download the whole monitoring of education in Belarus for May 2025 at this link.

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24.06.2025