EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES AND THE MAKING OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN POST-SOVIET

Cathy Wanner Columbia University

It's the direction given by education to unify a highly diverse and disaffected population. that is likely to determine A vast state-sponsored effort to Ukrainianize public all that follows. education reveals the state's version of what it means Plato, The Republic to be Ukrainian in post-Soviet society. Redefining an inclusivist Ukrainian nation, encompassing the Schools are vitally important in the transmission and sizable Russian and Russified Ukrainian populations, dissemination of historical memories, myths, and is crucial for the viability of a weak Ukrainian state. symbols, all of which foster a sense of nation-ness. The cultural knowledge schools transmit is a critical Concerned about the fragility of the new Ukrainian factor in formulating identity and crystallizing state, a small group of Ukrainian educators scattered membership in a particular generation. By targeting across the country have joined state-sponsored efforts education for reform, political leaders capitalize on at nation-building by creating elite schools. An the potential to incorporate into the very experience independent Ukrainian state is best secured, they and memory of the first post-Soviet generation reason, by a strong, culturally unified nation and a elements of Ukrainian culture, language, and nation cannot exist without a cultural elite. The historical memory to naturalize a Ukrainian identity founders and faculty of these schools see their among children of Russian-speaking families. mission as the reestablishment of a Ukrainian national elite and a reintroduction of the societal As Ernest Gellner (1983) and others have pointed divisions based on national, religious, class and out, the structural requirements of a modern gender distinctions that the Soviet system, in an effort industrial economy mandate that workers be mobile to forge a supraethnic Soviet identity, sought to erase. and capable of communicating in impersonal This essay focuses on the nationalizing factors that situations by trading on common cultural capital to distinguish elite schools from Soviet schools, whose be understood. Schools have become the arena where legacy they fight against, and the practices that set one learns the cultural currency in the form of skills elite schools apart from the majority of public and sensibilities that makes such communication schools in post-Soviet Ukraine. possible. The culture in which one has been taught to communicate indentures patterns of thinking and I must note at the onset that these elite schools are becomes the core of one's identity. Hence, Gellner fledgling enterprises with small student bodies. They argues that in the age of nation-state, one's prime are perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy as they loyalty is not to a religion, monarch, or land, but to search for sponsors to supplement the minimal state the medium of one's literacy, the identity-conferring funding they receive to expand the very offerings that part of education, and its political protector. "The make their schools elite. Their numbers alone do not monopoly of legitimate education is now more suggest radical change. Nevertheless, I argue that the important, more central than is the monopoly of emergence of this type of school is indicative of legitimate violence," he asserts (1983:34). moods in post-Soviet society, which aside from Increasingly, a cultural group is unlikely to reproduce education, find expression in other spheres of public and sustain itself if it does not have its own life. independent educational system institutionalizing aspects of its culture, delineating cultural boundaries, Institutionalizing Culture and providing an institutional site for acculturation to An influential post-independence blueprint for its values. The leaders of the beleaguered new education, written by a commission from the Ukrainian state are looking to the educational system Ministry of Education and released in December only a rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian - have 1992, outlines how the educational system will be retained their posts. Initially, there was little overt reformed in Ukraine to reflect changing political protest over the change to a Ukrainian-language realities. The report claims that the reforms aim to curriculum, although, depending on the region, it eliminate the "authoritarian pedagogy put in place by implied considerable hardship for some teachers who a totalitarian state which led to the suppression of had to learn the language before translating their natural talents and capabilities and interests of all lectures. Most teachers and administrators, in the participants in the educational process." The Soviet grand Soviet tradition of "two personalities," simply insistence on uniformity and collectivism are values accept the policy in word and passively resist it in rejected outright in harsh language by this deed. New and revised courses are hampered by commission. To reverse the lumpenization of society shortages or a virtual absence of textbooks. This produced by Soviet schools, they assert that the leaves the public schools trying to institutionalize a educational system must strive to develop new world view with old cadres using outdated "individuality, nationality, and morality" among textbooks written in Russian and cluttered with primary and secondary school students. To achieve references to the and Lenin. this, the proposed plan states that educational reform must be based on: Due to the economic crisis, meaningful numbers of new Ukrainian-language textbooks have yet to be a national form of education, which is founded on the written, let alone delivered to schools. History books indivisibility of education from the national soil, the for 11-year-olds (5th class) and for 18-year-olds organic unity of national history and traditions, the (11th class) have been printed and released. More can preservation and enrichment of the culture of the be found for sale by black marketeers on the street Ukrainian people, the transformation of education than in school libraries. Both the Soviet and post- into a significant instrument of national development Soviet public schools take a strictly chronological and harmonious relations among nationalities." approach to the teaching of history. Starting in the 5th class, they begin with Ancient Greece and Rome Overall, the new Ukrainian government advocates a and move along a teleological, Eurocentric track until greater "humanitarian orientation" in curriculum they finish the 11th class in contemporary times. design, including greater emphasis on aesthetics, law, ecology, and health, all subjects they feel were sorely Ironically, the same authors wrote the Soviet and ignored by Soviet authorities. The commission also Ukrainian versions of the "" announced the government's plans to break with the textbook for the 11th class. This "restructuring" of "totalizing" effects of standardized mass education, historical interpretation, exchanging a communist as they claim was the Soviet practice, and encourage ideology for a nationalist one, did little to reduce the experimental and private schools, each free to oppressive politicization of history. Once again, develop their own specializations, pedagogies, and historical interpretation is made a slave to the curricula within certain state guidelines. political machine. The only "revised" textbook available has already come under tremendous When this report was issued in December 1992, criticism for its inverted ideological slant. Ukrainian public schools had already begun the arduous task of converting to a post-Soviet The formal, structural aspects of Soviet education are Ukrainian-language curriculum by introducing easier to reform than the practices instilled by the Ukrainian as the official language of public values of the Soviet system. Aside from a rigorous education, by encouraging new interpretations of the adherence to a uniform curriculum, Soviet schools Ukrainian historical experience, and by creating a were characterized by strict discipline and relatively tracking system (a four-tiered division of students high standards of learning. The turbulence of post- according to ability), to name only the most Soviet society, coupled with extreme material significant changes. Soviet-trained public school hardship in school and at home, has prompted a sharp teachers and administrators - many of whom have decline in student performance, which all teachers boys with their sleeves carefully rolled up can be and administrators lament. seen dipping a tattered rag in a steel bucket to scrub down the stairwell. In public schools today students are still obliged to work up to the level of the class standard in all It is not any easier for parents. They work a second subjects, underlining the importance of the collective shift as repairmen, renovators, and contractors. They over individual achievement and abilities. Public often obtain the supplies needed to maintain the humiliation, rather than positive reinforcement, is building and grounds and furnish and decorate the considered the prime motivator and means of classrooms. Each summer before the new school year disciplining lazy or weak students who do not meet begins, teams of parents flood the schools to give a the class standard. The collective is once again new coat of paint, put up wallpaper, make repairs, reinforced by the practice of forming a class and hang posters and plants. (regardless of ability and harmony) which remains together not only day after day as the students move A teacher's job is never-ending as well. Teachers from course to course but year after year until often double as the director's secretary, messenger, or graduation eleven years later. errand runner. They spend hours not only writing but also typing worksheets, texts, etc. page by page using Under the Soviet system, all students wore uniforms, carbons. In each instance, those associated with the suit-like jackets and pants for boys and short brown educational system are frequently called upon to do dresses topped with a white or black apron for girls. unwanted, menial tasks well below what they are (or Make-up, jewelry, or fancy hairstyling were strictly are being) trained for simply to keep the schools forbidden. Now most students, freed of their functioning. uniforms, try to make a fashion statement by the way they dress. The cult of materialism flourishes as each Schools are operating today amidst vestiges of Soviet item of clothing or accessory indicates the type of structures, ideologies, and habits and the new values connections one's parents have, whether they have of "cowboy capitalism." With all schools running on access to hard currency, and the ability to travel dwindling state support, the responsibility for basic abroad. Even during this period of extreme economic maintenance falls increasingly to parents, teachers, hardship, paying for an item is often the easy part. and administrators. This burden, of course, fuels the Working one's "canals" to locate it and then create system of bribes at all levels of public and private the possibility to actually purchase it, can be education. When a student wants to enter a particular infinitely more difficult. Hence, the acquisition of school, one of the first questions asked of his or her consumer goods reveals one's station in society and parents is, "What can you help us get [dostat']?" The consumes the attention of status-conscious teenagers. vast shortage of goods has chased the very word "buy" from colloquial speech. It has been replaced Double Burden with "get" or "obtain," suggesting the "canals" and contacts one must tap into and the Herculean effort Most striking to Western eyes is the double duty that one must make to procure goods. Parents must state all students, parents, teachers and administrators are their occupation or position. Most administrators are called upon to perform. This "double burden" has savvy enough to evaluate the likelihood of a parent's plagued all schools, Soviet and post-Soviet, public access to hard currency, deficit goods, or officials in and private, elite and ordinary, and is the ultimate positions of power based on their profession. Parents mixing of manual and intellectual labor. The children have the right to choose a school for their children. are more than just students. They are the school's Technically, a school is obliged to accept all students janitors and gardeners. They wash walls, scrub floors, in its district. But legal obligation and ability are de and prune bushes. Everyday two students from each facto no longer sufficient criteria for admission to class are "on duty." This means that they are any school. In some instances the greed of directors responsible for cleaning the classroom, washing the or teachers drives the process of negotiating blackboard, and running errands. On any given day, admission. Often enough directors are simply trying little girls with pompom pigtails in white aprons and to get basic supplies to keep the school functioning. historical events in terms of how they affected The rule forbidding bribes is turning to utter fiction Ukraine and how Ukrainians affected them. In each as fear of reprisal evaporates. Bribes and influence instance, teachers seek to underline Ukraine's status peddling increase in proportion to decreasing state as a European country by highlighting its tradition of support. Likewise, inspectors charged with statehood (in spite of the fact that there has never investigating and punishing greedy administrators been an internationally-recognized Ukrainian state in who blatantly demand outlandish bribes have equally the modern era), Ukraine's peaceful coexistence with succumbed to corruption. neighboring countries, and its history of democratic institutions. A de-Russifying orientation to Ukrainian The Protective Power of the State history often adds up to a large dose of Said's Orientalism for the Big Brother, as is recast as Although government leaders have announced vast an Asiatic Empire built on oppression and and grandiose plans to reform the educational system subjugation. (1979) The image of Ukraine as to reflect changing political and economic realities, victimized by statelessness and colonialism is used to those involved in education are acutely aware of the explain the chaotic and "uncivilized" state in which multitude of obstacles working against the Ukrainian society is presently swirling. Ironically, the Ukrainianization of public education. The educators effects of statelessness are studied in conjunction who recently founded elite, experimental schools are with Ukraine's "tradition of statehood." often motivated by a conviction that only a state apparatus can protect and culture One of the most contested periods of history is against Russificatory trends and the encroachment of Kievan Rus', which is marked by the acceptance of an omnipresent, commercialized, Hollywood mass Christianity in 988 A.D. At that time, Kiev was a culture. Indeed, many argue that without a state, major trading center and has since become the Ukrainian culture would have simply drifted off to Ukrainian capital. Yet it is referred to as "the mother the "dustheap of history" as the population silently, of Russian cities" and the forerunner to the Russian steadily Russified. Yet, their belief in the protective state, in numerous pre-Revolutionary and Soviet power of the state is tempered by an entrenched texts. Many history teachers are reclaiming Kievan skepticism in the ability of the government to act in Rus' as a Ukrainian state, built by Ukrainians. It is the best interests of the Ukrainian people and to held up as the genesis of the "1000-year tradition of actually advance the Ukrainian cultural revival state-building in Ukraine," a direct quote from the currently underway. To expedite the nation-building Ukrainian declaration of independence. Kievan Rus' process, the founders of elite schools have flourished at a time when there were neither Russians circumvented the official educational bureaucracy by nor Ukrainians, simply an eastern Slavic people. creating their own storefront schools with state funding. Although there is considerable variation As Anthony Smith (1987) has pointed out, without among these schools in curricula, they have several myths there would be no nations, only populations elements in common: a radically new approach to the bound in political space. With so little cultural and study of Ukrainian history, the inclusion of religion, linguistic distance between the "populations in an emphasis on creativity in the form of numerous political space" known today as Russia and Ukraine, art, music and theater classes, and a reduction in the myths of national genesis and national grandeur have traditional physical sciences to make way for earth become a critical ideological battleground for the sciences and ecology. Each of these shifts will be definition of Ukrainian national identity. Such myths, discussed before proceeding to profile three such often advanced by the cultural elite, tease apart the schools in more depth. cultural and historic differences between Russians and Ukrainians to advance a national essence which Most notably, elite schools have moved beyond the justifies political independence and a separate state state program to de-Sovietize the curriculum by de- apparatus. Russifying their curricula as well. They teach history from a Ukraino-centric point of view, examining The Young Repent History is not the only realm in which teaching students. Performing and visual arts based on folk differs significantly from elite to standard public culture are a means to do so. In the post-Soviet world schools. Religious education has emerged as another of nation-state, a folk-based culture is used to notable distinguishing factor. A class on the history authenticate the construction of Ukrainian national of religion is offered on an optional basis in some identity. As the invention of cultural, linguistic, and public schools, where the teachers almost universally historical differences accelerates, an essentialized, claim to be atheists. Religion is generally taught as folkloric, ancestral-based interpretation of nationality Greek and Roman mythology. In many of these new keeps pace. Using blood-based concepts of private schools, religious study is mandatory. nationality, the faculty consciously and strategically Religion classes cover such themes as ancient reconfigures conceptions of individual and collective Ukrainian mythology, the history of religious practice identity in a process of de-Sovietizing through including pagan rituals in Ukraine, and, perhaps most Ukrainianizing. Folk culture is held up as a means of importantly, lessons on the vast array of religious redeeming the hopes of the past and eradicating the holidays which are replacing Soviet holidays. In Soviet experience. another curious twist, Soviet teachers often were required to stand outside churches on religious In conjunction with the emphasis on aesthetics, these holidays to ensure that children did not attend holiday schools devote more time to the study of nature and services. Teachers from these schools take the ecology as opposed to the traditional subjects of children to church on holidays to ensure that they do biology, chemistry, and physics. Given the ecological attend. devastation everywhere apparent in Ukraine, the founders and teachers of these schools consider it Fueling an interest in religion often creates sharp paramount to reinstate a respect for the land among generational conflicts at home. During decades of their students. Soviet rule, many parents went to church much like an excursion to an art museum --an outing to see Within the Monastery beautiful things. Their children, often anxious to In January 1994 a small school opened on the embrace the teachings of the church, are troubled by grounds of the Kiev Pecherska Monastery called the their parents' skepticism of organized religion, which Kiev Pecherska Collegium. The rector and founder of remains highly politicized and often corrupt in the school had been a history teacher in Soviet Ukraine. The deep mistrust of the church's schools and an employee at one of the monastery's manipulative powers and memories of the Orthodox museums before opening his three-room school. The church's collaboration with the KGB keeps the older school's curriculum features theater, karate, oratory generations at bay. Undeterred, many children decide skills, Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian history, for themselves which service they will attend and go religion, kraioznavstvo or "Ukrainian material and to church together. Regardless of which school they spiritual culture," and offers a specialized program in attend, the reversal of religious atheism is occurring, archeology and museum studies. When the school in spite of parental disdain, as the young rush to opened, it had 16 students, nine girls and seven boys, repent. ranging in ages from 11 to 15. Sixteen teachers, all Aesthetic Sensitizing on one-year renewable contracts, are employed at this school. Tuition as of spring 1994 was 200,000 In addition to a Ukrainocentric perspective on history kupons a month (ca. $3), making education here a and a religious component, the curricula at elite luxury for almost all save the old and new monied private schools distinguish themselves from public classes. Tuition pays teachers' salaries. The main schools by emphasizing the importance of aesthetics. sponsor, a financial services company, contributes The specifics of the courses differ but theater, art, student lunches and material support for the school singing, or oratory classes are prominent in their and, of course, the Orthodox church provides the curricula. An oft stated goal is to cultivate building. In addition, the school runs a kiosk that individuality, creativity, and confidence among sells artwork to tourists on the grounds of the monastery to earn money to support the school. This renovated day care center on the outskirts of Kiev, combination of sources has thus far allowed the offering a specialized program of study in aesthetics. school to refuse state funding, thereby freeing its The program is specifically designed to foster curriculum of state requirements. creativity and individuality. All classes are conducted in Ukrainian. In its first year this school accepted According to the rector, the biggest obstacle to the twenty-six 11-year-olds to the 5th class, each year school's success is the very entity he wishes to adding a new 5th class. The director personally protect: the state. He laments the "colonial selected the teachers from among former public psychology" of bureaucrats resistant to educational school teachers or university lecturers. The director reform who "do nothing but open sabotage." "They previously was a Communist Party member and will never fight for Ukraine," he sighs, "Their job is worked as a school inspector. More recently, he has their feed box [kormushka] and they can't tear authored a book on Ukrainian folklore. themselves away. When important people in the administration couldn't stand khokholi [a pejorative Admission to the Collegium is selective and based term for Ukrainians] yesterday, then today they can't primarily on three criteria: an assessment of the fall in love with them. They'll stand on the barricades psychological condition of the child, his or her level to defend their positions but they won't let us in," he of verbal skill, which is tested by a dictation in says. In spite of endless problems and, what one Ukrainian, and an analysis of the child's character. teacher referred to as the rector's bulldozer approach An unspoken criterion for admission here, as at all to solving them, he seems undaunted by the challenge schools, is the parents' ability to procure scarce or of launching this school to create a new generation "deficit" goods and services necessary for running the "that is not psychologically twisted like my own." school. Parents are primarily members of Kiev's intelligentsia and nouveaux riches. Most are fierce Recently, the rector turned away a bank that wanted critics of Soviet-styled education and they seek a to contribute to the school because it was not in radical alternative for their own child's education. At keeping with the "national idea of the Collegium." the Collegium some of the children speak Russian at The bank stipulated that the aid come in the form of a home, all of them speak it on the streets of Kiev, but Russian culture class. Much like at public schools not one offers resistance when required to speak across Ukraine, Russian literature has been Ukrainian at school. Rather, they lament the eliminated as a subject and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky "unnaturalness" of Ukrainians speaking Russian in are now covered in the "world literature" class. At the Ukrainian capital. this school, like at many other private schools, is now considered a "foreign To reinstate consciousness of a particular cultural language," on a level with, say, Polish or Czech. heritage the Collegium offers an extensive array of courses designed to develop aesthetic sensibilities. In I realized how slowly the Soviet past fades when the reaction to the aesthetic desensitizing fostered by the students at this Collegium reminded me that I had seemingly omnipresent gray drabness of Soviet arrived on Lenin's birthday, April 22. Although his architecture, the founder of the Collegium has birthday hadn't been celebrated in schools for three pioneered a curriculum which features folk traditions, years (and some of these students were old enough to folksongs, folk crafts, folk theater, and folk dancing. have partaken only once or twice in a school A reduction of instruction in natural sciences, a celebration of Lenin's birthday), three years after strength of Soviet schools and a requirement in Ukrainian independence the children paused Ukrainian schools today, has cleared the way to nonetheless to note Lenin's birth and to tell me of all expand the humanitarian side of the Collegium's the school festivities they had enjoyed. curriculum.

The Folk and the Nation Aesthetic training becomes a vehicle by which to inculcate the national component of the curriculum. Another elite school, the Kiev Mohyla Collegium, The students perform folk tales in theater class and in opened one year after independence in 1992 in a choir and music classes they sing Ukrainian folk program of study has earned it the nickname, "new melodies, which are legendary for their melancholy higher party school," after the old "higher party and beauty. All children study arts and crafts in schools," which trained Communist Party cadres. addition to drawing and calligraphy. By incorporating a folk-based interpretation of Ukrainian national Recapturing the Essence culture into performance at school, the folk songs, There are many ways in which reformulated gender folk costumes, folk traditions, etc. become part of the relations and gender-based conceptions of self are experience and memory of youth for these children. promoted in elite schools. While public schools By the time the Collegium opened its doors in remain coed, almost all of these elite schools September 1992, it had already fulfilled the goal of advocate single sex education. The faculty of the many elite schools. The administration found three Collegium shares the conviction that Soviet society banks to support their specialized program of study, contaminated and vulgarized the essence of allowing the director to develop and implement his masculinity and femininity in the course of pursuing version of an ideal curriculum and refuse state gender equality. They believe the system empowered funding for the first two years. The school must pay a and masculinized women, particularly in the 37% tax on all cash donations received from workplace, at the expense of men, who were sponsors. This is a sharp incentive to encourage correspondingly disempowered, denied the role of funding in the form of goods and services, yet this provider and encouraged to take refuge in drink. The leaves the Collegium hard pressed to pay salaries. Soviet project to create gender equality deformed the When the school opened, five children whose parents inherent psychological subtleties that differentiate work at the banks sponsoring the school applied for men from women, they argue. Women did achieve admission. Two were accepted and a third began measured advances in the public sphere, through attending in January. education and professional development, and assumed positions of some authority and power. Yet When the director set the Collegium's tuition in 1992- in spite of these gains, on the home front gender roles 93 at 10,000 kupons for the entire year ,this was always remained very traditional with basic worth approximately $335. During the academic household duties, including childcare, routinely year, the kupon drastically lost value. At the considered women's work. beginning of the next academic year 10,000 kupons was worth only 63 cents. The combination of a To peel back the corruptive influence of the Soviet rapidly devaluing kupon and hyperinflation destroys system on gender identities, roles, and relations, the any incentive to develop an endowment which would Collegium offers a course called "psycho-training." otherwise be necessary as tuition covers only 2% of Given the tense situation in the country, which often the annual operating budget. In addition to the spills over into a stressful home life, the director and two vice directors, both of whom teach, administration feels that such a class is necessary for the school employs one full-time fund-raiser among the psychological well-being of each child. Anna its administrators. As support from the banks became Alexandrovna, the psycho-training teacher, formerly precarious by 1994-95, the Collegium began to taught in Soviet schools. She traces the general accept state funding. anomie, indifference, and brutality of contemporary Ukrainian society, not to mention a birth rate so low Now this school, like other private schools, has a that the population is declining, to the absence of a longer day as students fulfill curricula, both the state's mother at home. She, like many others, thinks and the school's specialized program of study. Much working mothers and day care are aberrations. ( She as the first Collegium discussed has a special is a working mother herself!) As she sees it, the relationship with the Kiev Pecherska Monastery, this mission of her female students is to have many Collegium has established an affiliation with the Kiev children, care for them, and educate them in a Mohyla Academy, an independent institution of patriotic spirit. Patriotism, she argues, comes from higher learning. The Academy's highly nationalistic mother's milk. In the girls' psycho-training class, they discuss further enhance gender distinctions by re- astrological signs, the correlation between emotions masculinizing boys and re-feminizing girls. and colors, and the importance of nurturing. The teacher hopes to "sharpen their intuition, raise their Pre-Revolutionary Traditions energy levels, and deflect aspirations to power." At Another means of gender revision and nation- the beginning of each class, which is held once a building is the resurrection of the pre-revolutionary week, each girl chooses a color which she feels tradition of "Boys' Humanitarian Gymnasiums." In represents her mood at that moment. Sitting in a 1990 one opened in the eastern Ukrainian city of circle on the floor, the girls explain their choice of and a second in 1992 in L'viv, the color and why they are feeling the way they do. Anna largest Ukrainian-speaking city in Ukraine. With 45 Alexandrovna believes in the powers and insights of students in two grades, the L'viv Gymnasium is a astrology. By examining the personality strengths and hyper-nationalist enclave located within an ordinary weaknesses associated with each girl's sign, they Russian-language Soviet-styled school. After discuss how one can best overcome weaknesses in independence enrollment in Russian-language character. schools dropped and this school was left with excess If the emphasis of the girls' psycho-training class is classroom space. Part of the government funding the on relationships and stimulating communication and Gymnasium receives is five classrooms, one of which sensitivity, the boys' class focuses on developing the serves as a teachers' room. morals and values necessary to lead. As part of their To explain why he chose a 19th century aristocratic preparation to become the post-Soviet elite, the boys tradition as a model for post-Soviet education, the are encouraged to be decisive, self-confident, and director, a historian and former teacher, said, committed to serving Ukraine through proactive "Without a cultural elite, the nation cannot exist. This problem solving. Anna Alexandrovna tries to foster elite will, of course, be male as it has always been. self-confidence by engaging the boys in role playing, With the limited resources that we have today, we sometimes relying solely on non-verbal must focus our efforts exclusively on a select group communication. They also keep a journal, which she of boys." reads and discusses periodically with each student. With rates of emigration soaring and the The director is also preoccupied with redirecting romantization of life in the West especially high gender relations. He is particularly concerned about among youth, the director considers it a top priority the increasing contempt men and women have for to instill a commitment to solving Ukraine's problems each other as evidenced by a high divorce rate and among his male students. He is not interested in the multitude of women who choose to forego training sharp minds who will then emigrate to marriage and simply raise a child on their own. America and use their Ukrainian-learned skills to Single sex education, he argues, encourages boys to benefit Western society. This is a familiar pattern develop respect for girls. In today's post-Soviet which Ukrainian teachers have seen all too often over consumer euphoria, single sex education curbs the the past 15 years. cult of materialism and Madonna-inspired desire for sexualized bodily ornamentation. The director of the The conviction that boys and girls have different Gymnasium abhors the current fashion of mini skirts, innate abilities and psychologies is also operative in make-up, and garish jewelry, which suddenly other classes, all of which are single-sex. The choice appeared on the bodies of 16-year-olds when the of readings in literature class and the choice of topics requirement for uniforms was dropped in many assigned in creative writing class at the Collegium public schools. The 15 and 16-year-old boys at this are guided by the conviction that girls and boys have Gymnasium are obliged to wear a suit and tie different capabilities, divergent patterns of learning, everyday to school. The students claim that it sets a and are destined for different roles in society. The tone of professionalism and that they willingly wear teaching of literature and creative writing are used to this new type of uniform. The director and several teachers of the Gymnasium emphasis on religious revival, and gender argue that peer pressure in coed classrooms creates a essentialism, sets them apart from public schools in hierarchy based on looks and access to status goods Ukraine. such as western clothing. A single sex environment promotes a different type of competition, he claims, Nationalism and nation-building often place a burden as student leaders at this school are chosen by their on the female half of the population. Casting women peers based on ability and demonstrated intelligence. as birthing machines, bearers of tradition, and Furthermore, the director insists, uniforms and a creators of patriotism disempowers them as it firmly single-sex environment set a tone of discipline and sequesters them at home. Returning women to the order sorely needed in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. hearth also hides rising unemployment and The director further buttresses his decision to exclude underemployment as women "voluntarily" retreat girls by arguing that his school demands more class into the private sphere. The advances achieved by the hours, an additional two and a half hours a day, to Soviet system in creating professional opportunities fulfill the state curriculum plus the Gymnasium's for women are rapidly vanishing. The combined specialized courses in law, ethics, and foreign effects of economic collapse and a national and languages. The discipline and physical strength religious revival have left women in a severely needed to keep up with an intense, challenging, and disadvantaged position. A look at elite schools, most elite program of study is just something girls don't of which unashamedly grant advantages to boys, does have, he argues. little to suggest that the situation for women in post- Soviet society will improve anytime soon. The motivation to create a school specializing in law and ethics was born after the director's first trip Although private schools represent a fragile abroad to Germany. Impressed by the smoothly enterprise battling incessant problems, I believe we functioning German society, their punctuality, and can expect more elite schools to open doors for the notion that Germans make and fulfill business in the upcoming years. The state in post- commitments, he returned to Ukraine with a mission: Soviet society is simultaneously revered for its ability instilling order in the face of disorder for these young to protect Ukrainian cultural interests even as the boys, for the future elite of Ukraine. government is discredited for its lack of ability to enhance the material well-being of the Ukrainian Conclusion people. This paradox has produced profound skepticism among the intelligentsia toward state- Children who attend elite schools actually enjoy the designed public education and its ability to teach experience and claim they look forward to coming to children the values and skills needed to ride out this school. Rekindling a curiosity for learning and a excruciatingly difficult period of transition. The respect for knowledge amidst economic chaos and founders and faculty of elite schools are committed to enormous social tension is a remarkable achievement an independent Ukrainian state because of the of these schools. This is in sharp contrast to the dread protection it provides for Ukrainian language and that permeates the attitude of students in public culture even as they remain concerned about the schools. Aside from stolen moments with friends state's ability to survive. One thing is for certain. The during breaks, students in public schools say they construction of a culturally distinct Ukrainian nation, detest being there, have little respect for the teachers, which will be used to justify an independent and claim that most of what they know they learned Ukrainian state in the face of sharp economic decline, in spite of the system. It is with mixed emotions that amounts to another revolution, a second "social parents turn their children over to the public schools, experiment," with consequences every bit as great as cognizant of the psychological bruises and damage to those that followed in 1917. self-esteem that the system is notorious for inflicting on young minds. Although these new elite schools References share a common ideological agenda of nation- building with public schools, their elite orientation, Arel, Dominique n.d. "Ukraine: The Temptation of the Nationalizing State" in Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed., Political Culture and Civil Society in the Former Soviet Union, The International Politics of Eurasia, Vol. 4 Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Forthcoming.

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