Interest in the Russian language is waning at schools in Saxony. In the current school year, 14,035 pupils are learning Russian, compared to 19,354 five years ago, according to statistics from the Ministry of Culture in Dresden. The number of Russian teachers also fell during this period - from 2,215 in the 2020/2021 school year to 1,462 in the current school year.
Russian teachers are retiring
"The decline in Russian teachers initially has nothing to do with the attractiveness of Russian lessons. Rather, most Russian teachers received their training during the GDR era and will now be retiring in the next few years," explained the ministry. After reunification, very few young people wanted to study Russian as a teacher. Instead, interest has shifted towards languages such as Spanish, Italian and French. A trend that could also be observed among pupils.
English is already offered in elementary school in Saxony from Year 3 and is consequently the dominant foreign language. In the current school year, this applies to 423,587 girls and boys. They are followed by French (58,079), Spanish (31,193) and Latin (16,974). The Czech language was studied by 3,819 pupils, Italian by 2,119 and Polish by 1,783. 93 opted for Greek - fewer than five years ago (157).
