Crimea: Liberation from debilitation
I was prompted to write this article by the recent news that almost 200 tons of Ukrainian textbooks were sent to waste paper in Crimea. I just want to add: “and rightly so.” I am familiar with the topic of Ukrainian textbooks and, more broadly, school education. My eldest son went to school under Kuchma and graduated several years ago. The youngest son went to school under Yushchenko, then studied for another 3.5 years under Yanukovych and since September 1, 2014 he has been studying according to the school curriculum of the Russian Federation.
Since my children studied in Russian schools in Crimea, they were very lucky that their education passed without any noticeable deformation towards the glorification of the fictional history of Ukraine and the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism. The school teachers saw the problem very well and did not try to force the issue of Ukrainianity.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator-Crimea news on Facebook , Odnoklassniki , or VKontakte
Although throughout Yushchenko’s presidency they tried to impose a complete famine in schools on fragile heads. When I came to school for parent-teacher meetings or to talk with teachers, I could not pass by school stands with children’s drawings without an internal shudder. It was a natural necrophiliac Sabbath and dancing on bones. Instead of “the sun in every drawing,” the viewer was greeted with horrors splashed out on album sheets in the style of I. Bosch. Against the background of some firebrands, skulls lay in piles, soot was flying and crows were circling. The purveyors of political speculation did not care about the state of children's souls - they needed to sow the seeds and strengthen the sprouts of hatred in the younger generation.
Fortunately, with the advent of Yanukovych and Tabachnyk’s accession to the post of Minister of Education of Ukraine, famine necrophilia was removed from schools and students were simply encouraged to draw bright drawings, unencumbered by politicking, about love for their native land. But the school curriculum, even with these changes, did not arouse any enthusiasm.
Although Tabachnik’s order removed Kuchma’s and Yushchenko’s history textbooks from the school curriculum, the topic of the fictional history of Ukraine has not gone away. However, I was invariably pleased with the brand new textbooks on the history of Ukraine, even those confiscated by Tabachnyk, which eloquently spoke of their lack of demand.
By the way, in terms of the quality of execution, these were very good publications, but did not correspond to the quality of the content. I have repeatedly heard from my sons and their friends that teachers teach them history from their own notes. There were few entries in the notebooks - mostly dates, to which you can’t really stick.
A separate article was textbooks of the Russian language and literature. In them it was simply impossible to find Sashko Garmatny’s verse “Poltava” with an ode to Peter, the winner of the Swedes with Mazepa, but the program also included “Eugene Onegin” and “Borodino”. The Soviet period of literature was almost completely erased, and instead of Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Svetlov, Gorky and Simonov, Aunt Rowling’s texts from the life of a bespectacled sufferer with a magic wand and stories of American science fiction writers bulged out on the pages. I have nothing against the humanist Ray Bradbury, but it is quite possible to read him outside the school curriculum.
Textbooks of Ukrainian literature, although they looked well-read (and in Ukrainian textbooks the paper was very similar in density and texture to toilet paper), but in content it was a collection of little-known countryside authors. The socialist and Russophile Ivan Franko was reduced to a couple of not very outstanding poems, but some Stepan Zhupanov was dragged in with rural stories. I won’t say that Zhupanov’s stories are bad, but teaching children from fairly ordinary works on the level of “How I spent my holidays with my grandfather” is somehow completely unkind.
I would also like to say something about the chemistry textbook. At school, I somehow got used to the sensible and concise presentation of Prof. Khodakov with a quick excursion into atomism and electron orbitals, and the Ukrainian curriculum actually offered an introductory chemistry course even below the level of the 4th grade natural history of the Soviet school: “add a blue liquid to a red liquid and get a green one.” Teletubbies show.
Politicization in the style of “Ukraine is not Russia” did not escape this textbook either. All Russian terms for chemical elements, such as “hydrogen”, “oxygen”, “nitrogen” were replaced by the wisely Latinized “hydrogen”, “oxygen”, “nitrogen”. In short, the waste paper recycling plant was simply crying in longing for these textbooks.
Russian textbooks issued last year differed for the better not only in the quality of paper, but also in greater clarity and a much broader program. I was very pleased that the textbooks also included presentation material on disk so that it could be mastered on a computer. Perhaps the only criticism is that the covers are too thin with the corners always crooked, clearly not designed for everyday handling by active children. Russian literature and Russian history have been returned to Russian children in full, without cuts or interspersed with the nonsense of politicians.
Many thanks to the Russian curriculum for a much more intensive course in exact and natural sciences. Now mathematics lessons in schools are held every school day. For comparison: under Yushchenko, mathematics teaching for high school students in schools with a Ukrainian educational program was reduced to two to three hours a week. As one of the school mathematics teachers, who was a member of the educational city commission of Simferopol and the Simferopol region, admitted, in 2013, almost half of the graduates of some schools passed tests in mathematics on completely blank sheets of paper. There is no need to guess what kind of prospect would await an entire generation trained according to a greatly simplified program. A consumer of popcorn and TV shows who is uncritical of the flow of lies from TV.
Thus, it is absolutely no stretch to say that the Crimean school and its students received exemption from debilitation. And graduates are given the opportunity to choose, enroll and study at universities from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
Crimea : Liberation from Debilitation