According to this document, high school students will not only study the specifics of military translation, but also the structure of the U.S. and British armed forces, as well as learn to translate the interrogation of prisoners, the National Legal Internet Portal says.
The Ministry of Education states that this training program is designed for 69 hours. During this time schoolchildren will have to learn military terminology and abbreviations, grammatical phenomena typical for original military and military-technical texts, general information about the armed forces of Great Britain and the USA and their armament, as well as the classification of military topographical maps.
To learn these things, the class will do a variety of oral and written activities. Among them are translation of a foreign text, two-way translation of a conversation, interrogation or survey, deciphering acronyms, transferring the content of military schemes, as well as written translation of military and military-technical texts from English into Russian.
Military propaganda in Belarusian schools is not an innovation. Our editorial staff contacted a subscriber from Belarus who told us how, starting in 2014, the military and priests started coming to their school, and weekly lessons of "patriotic education" were added to the schedule.
"Once a week all Belarusian schoolchildren have a lesson of "patriotic education", says Alesya (name has been changed). According to the girl, usually organizational issues with the class teacher are solved there, sometimes they can talk about the harm of drugs and smoking, but since 2014 the situation has changed.
"In our school during the lessons of patriotic education began to show propaganda films about the great feat of the Soviet Union in the fight against the Nazis and about the clash of the two superpowers during the Cold War," says Alesya remembering her school years. "Our teacher would bring a pro-government newspaper and read aloud articles about economic problems in the West, about Ukrainian Nazis and our poor peers in Ukraine who were murdered by Bandera supporters."
The young woman said that the teacher told them that they were "adults and should understand everything" and suggested that they discuss world politics through the "prism of Russian propaganda."
"Sometimes a priest from the Russian Orthodox Church came to us, and here he was not shy at all in expressions, describing what 'hellish torments will await Ukrainian fascists' after they are killed by Russian liberators."
Alesya said that once the priest brought a huge, supposedly ancient book that he said described the "triune holy Russia" that once existed on the territory of modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. He claimed that school history textbooks had been rewritten and they were being deceived. "The class teacher had nothing against such encroachments on the education system and agreed with the priest."
By the way, for refusing to attend such classes, children could be shamed in front of the whole class, and in rare cases could even be registered in the "children's police room". For a child, this meant that he or she had to attend special lectures at the police station on the topics of proper behavior at school, as well as a note in the child's personal file.
