A controversial “law on language” drafted by the Ministry of Science and Education recently met with the Government’s approval and was submitted to the National Assembly. If approved, the law would make it possible for (state) schools to teach curricula in a language other than Armenian.

Opponents of the proposed law call it a “threat to the preservation of the Armenian identity.”

On Friday, May 7, the oppositional Armenian National Congress (ANC) released a statement, saying that the initiative is “a result of provincialism, threatening to put at stake and destroy one of the main achievements of independence – the system of united national school providing general educational.”

According to the opposition, with this initiative “the regime accepts the imperfectness of the Armenian education, and gives itself away that it perceives Armenians as a second-rank nation.”

The author of the initiative, Armen Ashotyan, Minister of Science and Education, insists that currently there is a demand for such schools.

“The step of closing such schools, taken during the Soviet period, was a necessity and it was very important to do that, but now the situation is different,” Ashotyan says adding that the students of foreign language schools must master the bulk of knowledge on the Armenian language, Armenian literature, and Armenian history as much as those students of regular schools (Armenian language schools).

“Those schools will be only two percent of all schools [in Armenia], and it is senseless to believe those schools may threaten out national identity,” Ashotyan says.

Meanwhile, PhD in Philology Minas Sargsyan, opposes, saying, “If a child gets an education in a different language [different from the mother tongue] since his/her childhood, he/she thinks in that language. For example, those who graduated from a Russian school think in Russian, and this threatens the preservation of their national identity.”

NA deputy Anahit Bakhshyan, who for 30 years was an educator, is not against the initiative.

“Currently it’s not the reopening of foreign language schools, but rather the poor level of the Armenian language at our schools that is a threat. We must think about that first of all now,” the Heritage Party MP told ArmeniaNow.