Teacher’s Day is a traditional professional holiday in Ukraine, when words of gratitude are addressed to schoolteachers, bouquets presented, and amateur school concerts held. On this day even school routine feels festive, despite the tensions stemming from the coming reform. Will school reform solve all the pressing problems? Teachers, pupils, and parents all want to know. This subject was broached at a press conference Vasyl KREMEN, Minister of Education and Science. The conference was dedicated to Teacher’s Day and Mr. Kremen commented on the 12-point grading system and psychological climate at school. “As long as we remain afraid of changing anything, of discarding past stereotypes, we will only change the notices by the entrances to our schools: lyceum or gymnasium,” writes The Day’s reader M. FERYMA from Dnipropetrovsk. “We cannot remain indifferent to what our children grow up to be or what they learn at school, what potential they receive.”
Ukraine’s current system of education is strongly affected by the communist ideological heritage when every effort was made to root out critical thinking, thus depriving the individual of the will and ability to choose his or her own goals and solve his or her own problems independently. We all know that our children do not know how to apply their knowledge in daily life. And the teachers have another problem; they cannot simultaneously teach children to think independently and pack their heads with a multitude of unrelated facts. Training the teaching staff may have a strong impact on education and society in the twenty-first century; it can give both either a strong impetus or significantly retard their development.
Let us take a closer look at the realities around us. Over the years of independence we have not come any closer to the living standard in the developed Western countries and are not likely to do so in the near future. In other words, the hardships in our educational system will continue to be markedly different from the problems experienced by schoolteachers in the West. Even similar problems will have different dimensions, meaning that their solutions will also be different.
The West will not be able to help us train our teachers, because its specialists do not know how to solve our problems in principle. The law on education in Ukraine proclaims the educational system a priority in national development, yet we all know how “effectively” it is being implemented. If the situation does not change, the teacher’s pay will remain low and his/her job without prestige.
Teaching is one of the most widespread professions, but who will want to enter it given today’s conditions? Talented people will enroll in prestigious university departments (e.g., law, economics, management), leaving pedagogy to the inept and unfortunate. Of course, there will be exceptions, but these will only prove the rule.
There will be few really wanting to work as schoolteachers out of their belief that this profession is necessary to society. Whether we like it or not, the teacher’s occupation in Ukraine remains one for intellectual proletarians (a noted Hungarian professor pointed out that the simplest way out the working class and up another rung in the social ladder is by getting a teacher’s job). Hence most teachers show no initiative and their thinking remains on a trivial level. They used to yawn away their lectures as students and never strove to receive knowledge, let alone expand it, waiting only to be handed their diplomas so they could hope for better jobs in the future. They put up with their current occupation as stable, albeit low-paid, job but never miss a chance to get a better-paid position somewhere else. When made to attend refresher courses, they ask to please adjust the curriculum to their students’ level of understanding. They cannot figure out why they should develop their own understanding.
Much has been said and written recently about training future teachers, about inadequate school instruction, addressing criticism to the teaching staff. Simultaneously few believe in large-scale investment in the school system. Installing computers in classrooms or repairing the roof seems much closer to reality. Training teachers is regarded as a self-contained process. Is this why school reform is on the skids in Ukraine? Because the teachers are not ready for it? Somehow this possibility was overlooked when working out and enacting the 12- point academic assessment system. Now the Ukrainian teachers will spend half a year learning to count to twelve. The burden will be primarily on all those “advanced teacher-training institutes,” meaning they will not be able to cover all teachers even in a year.
An interesting poll was carried out by the Practical Psychology and Social Studies section at the Borys Hrinchenko Inter-Regional Advanced Teacher Training Institute. The respondents — 316 schoolteachers and 68 school principals representing various types of schools — were asked about priorities in the program for modernization of the educational system. Most pointed to proper equipment and financing of the educational process, guarantees of the priorities of education and teachers’ social protection. The smallest percentage mentioned modernization of the educational network and academic assessment system, plus prolongation of the term of study. When asked to identify the problems that should be solved first, one the respondents (all remained anonymous, of course) wrote: “Discard points as an academic assessment system, relieve the school of responsibility for students from problem families, introduce multistage trials of innovations, cancel optional textbooks, lower the administrative apparatus to a reasonable level, and ban unjustified experimentation in the education system.”
Talking of experimentation, teachers, when asked what kept them (especially younger ones) in school, gave similar answers: an opportunity to work creatively. Is this why the teaching staff at the Sukhomlynsky College averages 33 years of age, despite the overall statistical aging of this profession? An opportunity to experiment and look for solutions to problems without waiting for permission from above brought four graduates of the Pedagogical University — Natalia Naumchyk, Iryna Krasnoselska, Serhiy Trykurov, and Yuliya Mykolayenko — back to college this year to work as teachers. Even as university students, they practiced teaching in various Kyiv schools, but decided to work in the college’s creative atmosphere. Viktor Chupryna from Chernihiv oblast said after several days of work at the college: “For the first time I felt I was respected by both students and parents.” Olena Tverdokhlib was not so lucky. She had to quit after working at one Kyiv school for two years; she could not stand all the “friendly” pressure from senior colleagues with their teaching stereotypes. She is studying for a master’s degree, but still hopes to continue as a teacher. What happened to Natalia Ripko looks like a miracle. An engineer with the Arsenal Plant (Kyiv), she found herself teaching a computer course at School No. 9 in Fastiv and understood it was her calling. “I enjoy working in school, because now I can use all my practical experience, and I am in a truly creative atmosphere,” she says.
Of course, the results of the educational process do not become visible at once, but they will never happen unless the teachers themselves are really interested. Also, preparedness for change must be the most important trait of the twenty-first century schoolteacher in Ukraine.
