Tanja Shmarlovskaya and Darya Tchoumakova from Minsk and Hanna Khomich from Zhodino in Belarus worked on this contribution. They present three examples of how Chernobyl is treated in Belarusian secondary school books.
Tanja Shmarlovskaya:
There is the required course in all Belarusian schools (regardless of the school profile), and, as I know, in the most of universities this course is take place also. This course is called “Basics of safe living” (BSL). The course is studying for few years and it is quite extensive. I fell into the hands a thick schoolbook (420 pages) for high school pupils. In the schoolbook there are many sections: traffic rules, fire safety rules, protecting the population from emergencies, the protection of life and health, basis of medical training (I still remember how in the classroom I studied injections for dolls and studied to do the artificial respiration) ;)).
One section is devoted to radiation safety. This is a big part. Here, in my opinion, a disaster is described fairly objectively. There are causes and consequences of the accident, but more attention is given to the consequences specifically for Belarus. There is a map of cesium contamination in Belarus. Quite a lot has been written about radionuclides, about how the radionuclides were released, how the pollution happened. In this section much attention is paid to the accumulation and distribution of radionuclides in the environment and in humans’ organism. Here described the basic methods of protecting our organism from intake of radionuclides, and even there is a table of plants, mushrooms and animals, which are more or less able to accumulate radiation. It’s great, I think.
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