RIGA, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- Over 500 people gathered in Riga Old City on Monday to demonstrate against the government's plan to switch the language of instruction in all public high schools -- including ethnic minority schools -- to Latvian, local media reported.
Most of the protesters at the rally were elderly people and children. Many of them held signs with slogans such as "Minority schools are Latvia's assets."
Some of the demonstrators who were interviewed by public radio said they joined the protest because they wanted their children and grandchildren to be taught their native tongue at school.
"Why should we lose our culture? Language is the source of everything," said a woman named Ludmila.
Gunta Araja, a deputy state secretary at the Latvian Education and Science Ministry, told reporters on Monday that the ministry's officials had asked the protesters to delegate their representatives for talks on the language issue, but the protesters were not ready to engage in talks.
Guntars Catlaks, head of the Latvian National Center for Education, said that the motives of the protest were not quite clear since its participants refused to communicate with the government.
The Education and Science Ministry has not received any written statements or questions from the organizers of the protest, Araja said.
Catlaks rejected claims that young ethnic Russians do not want to learn in Latvian, because minority school students can choose in which language to take their graduation exams, and 93 percent of them choose Latvian.
The Latvian government decided earlier this month that in three years, all core academic subjects in Latvia's public high schools will be taught only in the Latvian language. However, students at Latvia's ethnic minority schools will still be able to learn culture-related subjects, literature and history in their native language.
