One of the most important leaders of the Romanian community in Ukraine, the former mayor of the Mahala commune, Elena Nandris, demands that the Romanian authorities get more involved in defending the interests of the ethnic Romanians in the Cernauti region.
Nandris expressed her concern about the application of the new Education Law, which provides for the restriction of the rights of minorities in schools. The normative act requires schools with teaching in the minority language, including Romanian, to gradually introduce classes in the Ukrainian language.
"I think that the Government of Romania should get more involved in the defense of our Romanian language, because we are losing it and we feel very sorry. We love our language, we fight for our language, we value it more than you there. We have always said: we want to speak, we want to sing and pray in our language. We have been speaking in the language of our ancestors for years. Today is 551 years since we have been Romanians. And now, in a few years, we are destroying everything. It hurts us a lot. Many in Romania don't understand this. It hurts when you lose your language. We don't have the power to do anything here. The law goes on. They haven't yielded a single letter of the law," said Nandris.
There are two high schools in the Mahala commune, one with 411 students and the other with 320 students, where courses are currently taught exclusively in the Romanian language. Starting with the next school year, teaching in Ukrainian becomes mandatory from the 5th grade. In the first year of secondary school, students must learn at least 20% of subjects in Ukrainian, the percentage increasing to 80% in the last two years of high school.
"According to the law, we were asked to introduce subjects in the Ukrainian language, within the percentage set by the law, and starting next year, in the 5th grade, we must have subjects in Ukrainian at least 20%", declared the director of the "Gheorghe Nandris" High School, Ina Nica.
The Ukrainian analyst of Romanian origin Serghei Hacman believes that every citizen of Ukraine has the obligation to know the official language of the state, but he believes that minorities should have the right to learn in their mother tongue.
"When we talk about education, we talk about the rights of a person on two levels: his/her right as a minority and his/her right as a citizen of a state. It is normal when there is a balance in these rights, without exaggeration on one side or the other. When we exaggerate on the one hand, we form a person who cannot develop in the state in which he lives, if he does not learn the language of the country of that state, and on the other hand, he loses his identity, if he does not have the right to learn in the language maternal", said the analyst.
The Education Law was amended in 2017, requiring, in the first stage, that Russian-language schools switch to studying all subjects in Ukrainian from September 1, 2020. Schools of national minorities in Ukraine, who speak a language of the European Union, should gradually introduce the Ukrainian language starting in September 2023.
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