Probably, some of our readers have seen a video on the Internet, where the teachers of self-proclaimed republics of the Donbas are teaching children heroism and patriotism using the stories of terrorists Givi and Motorola as an example to follow. The Ministry of Education and the government cannot possibly influence the topics of the lessons in DNR-LNR, but there must be propaganda to counter these facts. What kind of propaganda should it be? How to educate children and youth in a patriotic way, how to save the young generation from brainwashing and focus their attention on the love to Ukraine? Rectors of 40 higher educational establishments from all corners of Ukraine have looked for answers to these questions within the walls of the Drahomanov National Pedagogical University during the session of the Association of Rectors of Pedagogical Universities. A ground for the meeting was the Presidential decree on developing of a state strategy of the national-patriotic education of children and youth for 2016-20.
Den/The Day for many years has been in a way cleaning the society from the information rubbish and dirt, offering for the audience the most valuable thoughts and views on history, its reinterpretation and its links with the present day. Ingenuous patriotism is developed in such an environment. So, it is not without a reason that Den was invited to the meeting of the rectors.
The teachers of the Drahomanov University were the first ones to leaf through Den’s books. Professor of the department of Ukrainian Literature Iryna Savchenko took several books from the series “Armor-Piercing Political Writing” and “Subversive Literature”: “I already have the book Ukraine Incognita, I use it as a source of information at my lectures. Sometimes this is an alternative opinion to the official academic stand. These books are extremely important in terms of political education. Because the materials are well-grounded and they are presented in an easily understood way.”
Not only humanitarians took interest in Den/The Day’s books. Professor Vasyl Shvets, the head of the department of mathematics took Return to Tsarhorod for examination. He says that for a long time he has taken interest in history reports on Ukraine, and found them either in Den, or in the newspaper’s Library. Our books became a kind of a revelation to Nizhyn Pedagogical University. Its teacher Antonina Kononchuk noted that provincial higher educational establishments seek intellectual communication with the publishers of Den/The Day’s level, therefore they will be happy to see the guests from the newspaper in their walls.
A revelation for us was the meeting with Volodymyr Saveliev, the head of the Institute of Master’s, Postgraduate, and Doctorate Studies of the Drahomanov University. He took interest in James Mace’s books. He had read his writings and even was personally acquainted with The Day’s contributor.
“I met James in early 1990s, when I was working at the Ivan Kuras Institute of Political Studies and National Relations, headed by Kuras. Once I came to Kuras’s office. Mace, who was working for us for a while, was sitting there. At that time I had access to the archives on food policy of the Soviet time, so I told a lot of things James was unaware of, because he had mostly studied the Diaspora documentation,” Volodymyr Saveliev recalled, “My son was a school student at that time, so I invited Mace to deliver a lecture for his teachers. He did that twice, and the audience didn’t want let him go. But the society today is not ready to perceive Mace’s books. On commemoration days I can see only two or three candles in the windows.” [James Mace launched the tradition to light a candle in the window on the Day of Commemorating the Victims of the Holodomor. – Author.]
“Patriotic education is not only about saying and wishing something. Children and teachers must be given something tangible,” rector of the Drahomanov University Viktor Andrushchenko continued the thought on how to make the youth less inert. “And the newspaper Den is doing a great cause, highlighting the topic of the Holodomor, scattering the myths, condemning repressions, telling about the outstanding personalities of Ukraine, which is why the exhibit and our conference are not accidental, this is a coordinated policy of the newspaper and the Association of Rectors jointly with the Presidium of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (NAPS), because we are doing a common cause.”
Nearly four hours of the dialog of the rectors turned into a joint resolution, which outlined what should be taken as the ground for the concept of national-patriotic education. So, Ivan Prokopenko of the Kharkiv-based Skovoroda National Pedagogical University shared his experience: the university founded a Cossack center, where over 5,000 students make a conditional army, they are vowed into as Cossacks, hold lessons on Cossack glory, international conferences, with themost recent one dedicated to the 420th anniversary of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s birth.
The main theses from the speeches of the rectors included the ideas that the society and the system of education must work jointly, involve children in sports, educational, and volunteer’s projects; there must be a network of coaches, which will be teaching patriotism both to children, and adults; the content of school curriculum must be reconsidered; the interaction of higher educational establishments and youth and children’s organization must be developed. Together with practical recommendations our greatest flaws that impede the shaping of patriotic feelings were reconsidered. According to Vasyl Kremin, president of the NAPS, we haven’t formed an adequate platform that would be based on our own interpretation of history. Den’s Library is probably one of the bricks in this fundament, when nobody waits for orders from the top.
As I was listening to the speakers, I recalled a teacher from Bucha Natalia Samiilenko who shows initiative, not waiting for commands from above: she takes children to the hospital where wounded servicemen undergo treatment, they sell sweets at school fairs, raise funds for the needs of the servicemen (past year she even was a guest of the newspaper together with her pupils). Shouldn’t the initiatives of this kind be used to raise patriots?
