Education

The European Humanities University, also known as Belarus's university in exile, is struggling to find its identity. It is torn apart between being the Belarusian university in exile and a "normal" European university based in Lithuania. Some say, it has lost its Belarusian character and gave up on its original mission. Others say that moving away from the Belarusian...

On 10 April, in an interview for Radio Svaboda Belarusian historian and a former lecturer at the European Humanities University Aleś Smalianchuk stated that Belarus did not have its own historical policy.

His interview followed several politically-motivated dismissals at Hrodna State University. The dismissals prove that the authorities are...

The official interpretation of history in Belarus has experienced a dramatic evolution since the USSR's collapse.  At the first stage a Belarusian nationalist-oriented approach dominated in historiography. After Lukashenka came to power in 1994, a reversal to a Soviet driven narrative took place, which, however, included a number of additional elements.

On the one hand,...

Festival of non-formal education, National Gender Platform approval, discussion of Minsk brand and human rights defenders of the year were among the most notable civil society events in Belarus last week. 

The Kalinowski scholarship for young Belarusians wishing to study in Poland is six years old but not not without controversy.  While those who run it underline its success, the post-graduation reality sometimes raises serious questions. 

In 2006  the Polish government launched the Kalinowski Fund to help the repressed youth who challenged the presidential elections...

On 26 October, Belarus state television showed another criminal movie about independent Belarusian community. This time to prevent crimes Department of Financial Investigation staff members confiscated scholarly books written in Belarusian.

The authorities confiscated over 5,000 books from a former chief editor of Arche Valery Bulhakau. According to state TV-channel, these books are...

In Belarus, being an academic means that you work in an institution controlled by the state. Sometimes you cannot be a true scholar because you have to produce the "official truth". Otherwise you risk being repressed for disloyalty.

A good illustration of that is last month’s case of Hrodna University in western Belarus, where a number of prominent university teachers...

On 24 August at a congress of Polish Diaspora in Warsaw Poles from Belarus adopted an open letter. The authors of the letter raised the topic of the serious difficulties that the minority faces in the last dictatorship of Europe.  

One of the most sensitive issues includes the use of the Card of the Pole, which five years after its introduction still remains controversial.  ...

The 2012 university admissions campaign in Belarus has just finished and reflects a very interesting trend. However good Belarusian higher education is for engineers, physicists, and mathematicians, that does not seem to matter to young people anymore. They want to become programmers. That means representatives of almost the only profession that guarantees them independence and a decent living...

Last month the Belarusian youth web site generation.by published a diagram showing that 2/3 of European Humanities University (EHU) graduates do not return to Belarus after completing their studies. According to generation.by, the data came from a poll of 2011 graduates of bachelors' programs published on the EHU website. The university described this information as false and...

Belarus is the only European country which has not signed the Bologna Declaration on the European Space for Higher Education. It still relies on a largely unreformed Soviet model of higher education. The main goal of that model was not to encourage...