The Educational Palette

Representatives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, who took part in a recent international conference on “Educational Policy and National Minorities,” reported on the results of a two-year project initiated by the Educational Directorate of the Council of Europe. Conference participants spoke about their accomplishments and discussed especially problematic issues. Among Ukraine’s greatest achievements, conference guests identified the publication of textbooks for national minorities in their native languages for all school subjects.

Ukraine has developed a complete set of educational literature in all languages of instruction used at schools throughout the nation and provides children with all books in their mother tongues free of charge. Eighty percent of books for middle and senior school students are free, while children attending elementary schools get all their books for free. Notably, schools with minority languages of instruction have a greater percentage of free books than Ukrainian-language schools. It costs under five hryvnias, or 80 cents US, to publish one textbook in Ukrainian, while the cost of publishing a textbook in Polish jumps to $92. Ukraine publishes 1,004 textbooks in all subjects for each grade at Ukraine’s four Polish-language schools. Pavlo Poliansky, director of the Preschool and General Secondary Education Department at Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Sciences, said in an interview with The Day: “When we speak about what every country has in terms of polycultural education and meeting the educational needs of national minorities or associations, it is worth remembering where each country started. After winning its independence in 1991, Ukraine for obvious reasons inherited a system of education that was clearly biased toward one of the languages, which was not Ukrainian. Both the 1996 Constitution and the Secondary Education Law contain provisions whereby every citizen of Ukraine has the right to a full secondary twelve-year education, which is mandatory in Ukraine, in his or her mother tongue. This provision also applies to preschool education, which is also mandatory in Ukraine. With 21,000 schools, Ukraine offers education in twelve languages. We also have schools with mixed-language instruction. For example, a school with Hungarian as the language of instruction may have Slovak and Ukrainian classes. The main achievement of the Ukrainian system of education in the past decade is its significant contribution to the harmonization of interethnic relations. We have had no interethnic conflicts, neither in education nor at the level of relations among different ethnic communities.”

The provision on educational centers for national minorities was passed earlier this year and registered on October 21 by Ukraine’s Justice Ministry. According to this provision, small communities of people who belong to a national majority will have Sunday schools or other centers where they can receive schooling in their native language.

In many areas densely populated by national minorities that have access to schooling in their native tongue, ethnic Ukrainians do not enjoy equal access to education in the state language, because there are no Ukrainian schools in such areas. There are cases where graduates taught in their ethnic languages have a very poor command of the state language. Some parents convince their children that there is no need to learn the state language because they will be pursuing careers in a different country. In such cases a special division of the Preschool and General Secondary Education Department, which oversees the language policy and education of national minorities, steps in to defend children’s language rights.

After joint educational training with national minority representatives from abroad, Ukrainian experts decided Ukrainian textbooks should reflect the contribution made by various ethnic groups to Ukrainian culture. They saw to it that history and literature textbooks provide a tolerant picture of complex periods in Ukraine’s relations with those peoples whose representatives currently reside on its territory. A Ukrainian-Polish commission responsible for a joint review of history and literature books has been working in this direction for the past ten years. Last year representatives of Ukraine discussed this experience with their Russian colleagues in Moscow- a first in the field of education. Ukrainians take pleasure in showing our foreign friends how their history is presented on the pages of our books. Still, we would also like to see a glimpse of Ukrainian history in foreign history books. Incidentally, Ukrainian history books present the history of our neighboring countries in separate sections.