Starting the school year with empty bookshelves

The Ministry of Education and Science proved to be unprepared for the start of the new academic year. Due to the transition back to the 11-year system, the ministry fell behind with the printing of new textbooks for schools. No wonder, it was in July that they announced the return to the 11-year school education, with only two months to go before the start of the new school year. At such short notice, they had to devise new curricula, develop the corresponding textbooks, and allocate funds from the state budget in due time.

However, Minister of Education and Science Dmytro Tabachnyk explained that the money was only transferred at the beginning of August (out of the necessary 200 million hryvnias only 120 million has been allocated), therefore they will have no time to print the books before September.

The absence of textbooks at the start of the school year has been a sad reality for Ukrainian schools for many years. During all the years of the 12-year school system, schools got used to constant problems with the supply of textbooks. But if they were normally provided during the first month, now the Ministry of Education and Science is going to provide them no earlier than November. This means that teachers and students will have to wait for nearly three months to get new textbooks.

All this could have been avoided if education was run in a normal way, following a single strategy which would not depend on political changes. But as long as education remains a torch which is passed from one political force to another, we are doomed to such chaos. The worst thing about it is that it is the children that suffer from all sorts of educational experiments, rather than experimenters themselves.

This year the students of the first, second, and tenth grades are going to be affected by the educational innovation. These are the classes left without books after the return to the 11-year system. The ministry promises to give out free books. However, experience shows that there are rarely enough textbooks for all students, and parents have to buy them at their own expense.

The ministry also assures that the first chapters will be published in specialized educational journals and on the ministry’s web site, in order to keep a coherent process of study and facilitate the teachers’ work. But do all schools have access to the Internet, especially those in rural areas?

According to experts, it would have been possible to avoid this deficit in textbooks at the start of the school year if the return to the 11-year school had been postponed at least for a year. It is unreal to develop new curricula and print textbooks based on them in the remaining 1.5 months. The new textbooks printed for the 12-year system are useless now, as they do not conform to the new curriculum and cannot be used — so they simply have to be destroyed. This is a waste of tens of millions of hryvnias.

So while the ministry is busy printing new textbooks, teachers will have to carry the burden of providing schoolchildren with source materials alone. The Day asked our experts to share their opinions and say how the above-mentioned problems will affect the process of study.

COMMENTARIES

Lilia HRYNEVYCH, coordinator of the Society of Knowledge direction in the “Government of Change”:

“For teachers and students it means waiting for textbooks for three months. This is a very serious hurdle for the academic process since not all schools have access to the Internet to rely on it as a source of information. The textbook is doubtlessly the main resource for schools, they are not provided with anything else.

“During the transition to the 12-year school, there have been constant delays in printing textbooks, which inevitably caused problems, as it was difficult for the children to study and for the teachers to work. Now the ministry went back to the 11-year school instead of improving the situation. Nothing has changed in their mode of working, the books are late again.

“It is yet another fact proving that education is not on the authorities’ priority list. However, the teachers will continue working, and the children will continue studying whoever is in power. Of course, they will be obstructed by the lack of textbooks, but they will look for a way out, say, use old textbooks from libraries. Those with an access to the Internet will search for information there. But it is obvious that all this affects the process of study and shows that again educators have to deal with the regime’s indifference and lack of professionalism.”

Kostiantyn KORSAK, Ph.D. in philosophy, director, Kyiv Institute of Educational Problems:

“If a child makes good progress, the main thing is to provide them with an intellectual challenge regardless of the fact if there is a teacher or not, and if the textbook is good or bad. The current stage of social development allows them to find this challenge. Children are curious by nature, and easily search and absorb information. A certain proportion of children are born with an inherent urge to find out ‘why,’ rather than ‘what’ and ‘when’ things happen. There are nearly 80 percent such kids.

“The problem is not the lack of textbooks. It is that children hate them. We have polled students to find out if they keep textbooks at home. No one does that because they contain no interesting data or information with real life examples. If you want a child to open a textbook in physics from time to time, there must be some interesting facts. Children have to realize why you should know physics, how it can help in everyday life; how you can use this knowledge when driving, riding a bicycle, or just walking down a slippery street. There is plenty of such information — but we have to depart from classical methodology in order to create such textbooks.”