A certain American named Rockefeller, legend has it, started his way up as a shoeshine boy.
Although legends like this are not yet heard in Ukraine, this country, too, has people far and wide who are working their way up, unencumbered by any education whatsoever (we do not mean here overtly criminal elements). The absolute majority of them will not have, as a famous rock singer put it, “to open Foreign Ministry doors,” but it is their entrepreneurial spirit that keeps up, to a large extent, the door-openers and the country as a whole. The street is their school of life. This is often bad and sometimes good but how it is with us. And nobody can in fact answer the question what is more useful for today’s, say, 13-year-old boy to succeed in life: obey his parents, learn foreign languages in an elite school, or to keep his nose to the grindstone from childhood, for example, by washing windshields, thus learning not only to earn a living but also to accumulate capital. Which of these life scenarios will be more successful?
You can often see in today’s Kyiv teenagers and even children earning a living on their own on the city streets. As a rule, they wash cars. They also have “colleagues” doing odd jobs as railroad station porters. And, as a rule, each slot of this kind, usually an outdoor parking lot, is controlled by a certain group of teens. In a warm weather, they work right in the driveways and at the crossroads where a large number of vehicles accumulate: in this case, it is only a question of wiping the windshields and rearview mirrors, which is done exclusively by novices. The Day’s correspondent managed to contact a veteran of street corner car washing, 20-year-old Danylo, who had been doing it for five years.
“I have no parents,” he says. “I’ve been down and out. I have to do something, I can’t just beg around. Been washing cars for so long. Now I rent an apartment, but earlier I lived here.”
“Here” means the service room of a cafe next to the place Danylo where works, near the car park on the Olympic Stadium plaza. His current “subordinates,” thirteen- year-old boys live there now. He, as straw boss, teaches them the specifics of work, for buggy scrubbing really has its own specifics and even some tricks of the trade.
“It’s hard to wash black cars, I do it myself. They get warmed up and dry quickly, so the results are uneven. My record is to wash a Zhiguli in twenty minutes with one bucket of water. Once we even washed a tractor for eighty hryvnias. But, as a rule, we are given ten to twenty. I usually earn up to a hundred hryvnias a day if I don’t just lay around. But this is not the way to do things. Our state is somewhat strange: it probably exists only in the shape of the police. It can’t take care of anybody.”
“And do the rackets bother you?”
“Yeah, that’s all I need.”
Vague.
Danylo is sure he will, sooner or later, “work his way up” and start a business, but never a car wash: he thinks the automatic brushes scratch cars, this is why car washing teenagers are in principle unrivaled in the city.
“But do you have at least some kind of education?”
“I’ve been homeless all my life. When I was a kid I was taught to read and write. But I never went to school.”
“But would you like to study?”
“Sure, but so far I have to earn a living. Well, I want to study to be an artist. As a matter of fact, I paint portraits”
That’s it. The young man did not go to beg, nor did he join the outright bandits whose ranks are being actively manned by waifs. He feels he is in his proper place and, moreover, is self-confident
If Danylo’s life depends on his personal efforts, he will make it the way he chooses, provided the state will at least not keep him from compensating his lack of education with good wages.
INCIDENTALLY
Since the beginning of this year, salary arrears for Ukrainian comprehensive school teachers have risen by almost UAH 30 million, and amounted to UAH 254 million as of February 24. Payment of teachers’ salaries has been mostly delayed Ternopil, Rivne, Chernivtsi, and Chernihiv oblasts: by 4.1, 3.1, 2.9, and 2.6 months, respectively, Interfax-Ukraine reports quoting a competent source in the Ministry of Education and Research.
But the traditional problems of our education, short funds and teachers’ salary arrears, have been augmented of late with one more: children refusing to study. For example, data revealed at a yearend in the education department of the Rivne oblast state administration show that over 500 children do not receive compulsory education in the oblast. There have been recorded cases when parents do not send their kids even to the first grade. The usual reason for refusing education is quite banal: parents have no money to buy their children clothes and footwear.
Still more complicated is the situation with secondary education. Last year alone, almost 1,900 ninth-grade graduates in Rivne oblast decided not to continue their schooling. According to experts, here too the main reason why the young citizens of Ukraine do not want a secondary education is lack of funds and the need to earn a living on their own. In addition, more and more young Rivne residents believe having secondary education will not help them find a job and their place in life, The Day’s Volodymyr KONIEV reports.
“We have no information about how many schoolchildren earn a living cutting classes. This is not even envisioned by the statistics which only record the number of children attending school,” Mykola MELNYK, deputy chief of the Main Directorate of General Secondary Education at the Ministry of Education and Research of Ukraine, told The Day’s Oleksandr FANDEYEV. “However, I am aware of the real circumstances of life, so we should not ignore situations when parents keep their child out of school and force him to earn money (or the child him/herself wants to do so). Under the law on compulsory secondary education, children should go to school. And the observance of this law should be monitored both by schools and by local executive bodies. For there are certain age qualifications for job applicants. In other words, minor schoolchildren have no legal right to be employed. The state is obliged to allow those pupils who do not want (or have no possibility) to get full secondary education to study at least at vocational institutions where they will get at state expense education and a trade. Meanwhile, also a problem is the employment of young people with full secondary education, although the state guarantees them in the respective documents a five percent quota on the labor market. It is common knowledge how to solve these problems: to implement all the components of what is known as decent living standards. So they have to be solved by society as a whole, not only by secondary educational institutions.”
