Educating Pontian Immigrants in Greece: Successes and Failures

This paper describes the education of repatriate children who are part of a complex process of repatriation and settlement to Greece. Special emphasis is given to the education of younger children in relation to career and survival issues facing families in transitional stages. It also discusses the impact of these special circumstances on parents' educational values. The repatriate group addressed here is the Pontian group, people of Greek origin who had settled and lived in the former USSR and who have been repatriating to Greece the last few years due to the recent political realignment in that area. The authors are members of a group of researchers, most of them faculty members of the Primary Education Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who have been engaged in programs and activities combating exclusion and poverty for over ten years. The data for this paper has been drawn from the work of this team. In our effort to explain and help readers understand the difficulties the Pontian children face in adjusting to the Greek educational system, it is necessary to describe the characteristics and modalities of the group which affect the educational attitudes they develop, as well as the socio/economic structure created by the host country to accommodate their needs.