A dance association on Wednesday strongly criticised Disy’s proposal to ban many dance lessons for minors after 8pm, saying it was irrelevant and unfair.
Disy MP Kyriakos Hadjiyiannis told the House education committee on Wednesday that the proposed change to the existing law covering dance schools would create a proper schedule for children and improve family relationships.
“Children take a lot of evening classes and do not spend any time with their family,” Hadjiyiannis told the committee.
The new proposal to ban dance classes held after 8pm for minors concerns only private dance schools and refers to classical, contemporary ballet and jazz dance classes. It does not include traditional, disco, or any ballroom dance (latin, tango etc).
The Federation of Sport and Social Dance (CFSSD was quick to condemn move, calling on parliament to abide by the current legislation for private dance schools passed in 1997.
“When it comes to dancers and especially competitive dancers, the schedule they need to follow is demanding and difficult to combine with the rest of their afterschool lessons,” says the federation president Aliki Charalambidou told Offsite news website.
She said that dance schools always try to assign earlier hours to younger children and later hours to older teens.
She said the problem lies with the education system.
“The reason why children and dance tutors are forced to late dance classes is because students need to take extra lessons to cover the gap in the education system,” she said. “A healthy education system would not require children to take extra lessons for courses they already spend so many hours at school.”
She said it was unfortunate children tend to focus only on their performance at school and neglect other important things like their mental health, socialisation, stress management, the need to set and achieve goals, all skills that can be gained through sports.
“I hope the mindset of the people in this island will change and start thinking about the problems that currently prevail in the lives of young people rather than focusing on their training time,” Charalambidou said.
