Ukraine traditionally celebrates Teacher’s Day on the first Sunday of October. About a third of this country’s population are directly related to this holiday, either as teachers or students. Ukrainian secondary schools employ 546 thousand teachers. By the beginning of this academic year teachers had had all the arrears in salaries and vacation pay cleared. They also began to receive seniority and healthcare pay as well as bonuses. Addressing a press conference, Minister of Education and Research Vasyl Kremin said it was planned to make all payments to teachers, as required by Article 57 of the Education Law of Ukraine, by September 1, 2004, as well as to considerably increase basic salaries by the beginning of the next academic year. The minister believes the current teachers’ salaries are far from equaling to the volume of their work and the significance of the function the teachers perform in our society. At the same time the profession of the teacher is no longer prestigious for young people. Pensioners and pre-retirement-age people account for 13% and 30%, respectively, of the present-day teaching community.
It is interesting that last Thursday Ukraine’s first monument to the Teacher was unveiled in Kharkiv on Bliukher Street. It is not a monument to a specific individual but a generalized image of a Teacher each of us has come across and who have become etched in our memory for the rest of our lifetime. This monument may help raise the prestige of the teaching profession, although it will never stand in for deficient school teachers. At the beginning of the academic year, there were more than 2,500 teaching vacancies in all Ukrainian schools, including more than 1,500 in village schools. Most wanted are the teachers of foreign languages, computer science, and mathematics.
