I can tell to the minute when I always feel best here: eight a.m. on September 1. It is then that I can look out on the usually barren landscape from my Troyeshchyna balcony and watch the footpaths come alive with a sea of flowers. The bouquets are borne by a bevy of boys and girls for the most part decked out in their Sunday best, accompanied by parents and grandparents, delighted to be going to celebrate what Ukraine officially designates as The Day of Knowledge, otherwise known as the first day of school. The teachers who receive the flowers are kings and queens for a day. And I, too, know that I will soon be facing my own university students, and as a university instructor I feel it is also my holiday and share in the pride every Ukrainian teacher feels on that day.
Knowledge is worth celebrating. As an old emigre once told me, education is the only thing that nobody can ever take away from you. But those who provide it, paid little and late, have little to celebrate. Like so much else in this country, education has suffered humiliating degradation. Young people shun such a penurious profession, and the profession itself is aging. Bribery has become commonplace among those who have little other way to supplement their incomes. Unfortunately, the great discovery that the nation’s currency could be stabilized if the government stopped paying its bills turned out to be the worst possible way to economize, because it meant the state was postponing the decisions to close what sooner or later will have to be and starving things like education that should be protected at all costs.
Knowledge is perhaps the only means of defense given many of these youngsters, who will sooner or later be thrown into the sociological meat grinder Ukraine has become. And if ever this country is to be turned around and earn its rightful place in the world, it will be they who will have to do it. For those like me, who are pushing the half-century mark, I fear it is already too late. Too much of the past lingers on and too much of the new is still being stifled. If they do it, they will need the knowledge and the will to fight deeply entrenched interests and structures. Education is among other things a form of intellectual empowerment, and in this country there is no greater need if its people are to sooner or later become citizens and masters of their own collective destiny. All of us, from those who staff preschool nurseries to those who train graduate students, are part of this process. Education, the dispensing of knowledge, is indeed something to be proud of, attend to, and finally begin to put right.
