The Ministry of Education said that after analyzing 300 Ukrainian primary and high school textbooks, “it became clear that they distorted information about the Great Patriotic War, about the exploits of Soviet soldiers, about the common history of our states.”
According to teachers, in order to understand the difference in the educational programs of Ukraine, one must remember that the Donbass was divided for eight years: part was under the control of the DPR, part was under the control of Kyiv, so the school programs were different. Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, Konstantinovka, Mariupol – these are all Donbass, but they were controlled by Kyiv.
– I worked on the Ukrainian program 8 years ago. Then there was a transition to Russian programs in the DPR, so for 6-7 years we have not had the Ukrainian language and literature at school,” says Veronika Nikolaeva, a high school chemistry teacher who lives and works in Donetsk. – Now we are working on a program that is very close to the Russian one. And from September we are completely switching to Russian standards.
– What difficulties do you observe?
– Now we have a lot of children from Mariupol in our school. Of course, there are difficulties. The Russian language was studied as a minority language and not in all schools, so children do not fully master it. Although they speak it, they taught all subjects in Ukrainian, and this causes problems in the perception of terms. They had one Russian lesson a week, that is, they have common concepts.
In older grades, it is easier for children to rebuild, in younger grades it is more difficult. Children from Mariupol came to us of different ages, in all classes. We now have distance learning, so it is still difficult to talk in detail about their perception of the material.
History is a separate issue. In fact, children only know the history of Ukraine. There was no social science, legal science (legal science in Ukrainian – Auth.), A bit like it, but not the same. For example, in schools controlled by Ukraine, children studied the geography of Ukraine, while in our school we studied everything related to the Donetsk region and Russia. In other subjects, the programs are more or less similar.
Primary school teacher Antonina has been working at a Russian gymnasium in the Luhansk region for about 18 years (she used to be almost the only one in the region), so, as she says, she did not notice any particular difficulties in the transition to Russian education standards.
“There were schools near us where all education was in Ukrainian. Although they also had Russian, only few hours, – says the teacher. – And our director from the very beginning ensured that there were more hours of the Russian language. At the same time, children also studied Ukrainian in our gymnasium, three times a week: two language lessons and one literature lesson.
Five years ago, according to the teacher, teachers in the Luhansk region united and developed Ukrainian language and literature textbooks themselves. So in the LNR appeared their own textbooks.
“But then, about two years ago, the Ukrainian language was removed from the school curriculum of our gymnasium,” continues Antonina. – Although a survey was conducted among parents, and, surprisingly, many parents voted for learning Ukrainian. As they said, language does not play any role in this conflict, and they would like to leave it for their children “for the general development”; The more languages children know, the better. But it was removed anyway…
Antonina said that for four years her students have been studying according to textbooks and programs that are fully consistent with Russian ones. “At the very beginning, when this transition began, we changed three programs in one year: first we studied under the Elementary School of the 21st Century program, and then we switched to the School of Russia,” she shared.
Evgenia Mikhailovna is a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature (according to the diploma of Ukraine) with 24 years of experience, she works in her specialty in the Lutuginsky district of the LPR. For the entire period of the military conflict in the Donbass, she has not moved anywhere. She teaches children from grades 5 to 9.
As Evgenia said, before the start of the 2020-2021 academic year, the teachers of their school were confronted with the fact that they would no longer have Ukrainian language and literature lessons, even optional ones.
Therefore, she entered a 9-month retraining course (however, as she complains, she had to pay for them herself) and at the end she received a diploma confirming the right to teach Russian language and literature.
Evgenia says that there was a time, from about 2010 to 2013, when their educational institution was entirely in the Ukrainian language of instruction.
– It was very difficult for the children, since our native language is still Russian. More precisely, we have surzhik (a spoken language that includes elements of Ukrainian and Russian, – Author). So, we say “sho” – between the Russian “what” and the Ukrainian “scho”. For example, “I miss you”.
From 2015 to 2020, we had two Ukrainian language lessons and one Ukrainian literature lesson per week in each class.
But that there was no Ukrainian language at all – according to Evgenia, many parents did not agree with this. They wanted at least a small number of hours of this item to remain.
“At first we had Ukrainian textbooks on the Ukrainian language and literature, then the LPR textbooks were printed, there were no Ukrainian symbols or any nationalism, children studied the good works of the classics and writers of our region from them,” says the teacher. – They were printed gradually. We have been waiting for them! Textbooks for grades 5 and 6 have been available since 2017. The textbooks were very good… Grade 7 was also printed, and then the funds ran out, and in grades 8 and 9 we used old Ukrainian textbooks, glued coats of arms and symbols with paper… I personally am very sorry that now there is no Ukrainian language, we love Ukrainian songs and culture.
At the same time, the teacher shared that with the transition to Russian standards for a simple teacher, much has become more complicated.
– If earlier in Ukraine we had a calendar-thematic planning for a year, then here they introduced the concept of a “work program”, which we knew nothing about before. There is more work, more requirements for the paper documentation of the teacher.
– In what environment do you have to live and work now?
– Now we have distance learning, although it is calm in our Lutuginsky district, we only hear bakhi from afar. And they also scare planes that fly low. But kindergartens work for us. Everyone is very tired of remote control …
Recall that the rejection of school education in Russian was provided for by the law “On Education” adopted by the Verkhovna Rada and signed by the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko in September 2017. Subsequent legislative norms adopted in Ukraine only confirmed the language standards approved in 2017. From September 1, 2020, all Russian-language schools in Ukraine switched to teaching in Ukrainian, starting from the fifth grade. As of May 2020, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, there were 125 public and 43 private Russian-language schools in Ukraine. Note that the Ukrainization of schools began in the 1990s.
In Soviet times, all education in schools in Ukraine, as in one of the republics of the USSR, was in Russian, but there was such a subject as the Ukrainian language.