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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

MARIYA CHUMARNA: “MY CHILDREN WILL ENTER THE WORLD ENLIGHTENED” Lviv poetess has founded the only author school of Ukrainian studies

13 November, 2012 - 00:00
Photo by Mykhailo Markiv: Mariya Chumarna

“God created the day out of the night, something out of nothing, everything out of nothing, light out of darkness.” (In the Light of Day: textbook supplement, 1997). “Once upon a time a huge colorful bird was flying from one star to another. Somebody scared it, and it laid a huge egg. It was cold all around, and the egg turned dark and hard. For millions of years, it accumulated the dust from the Cosmos. This is how the egg gave birth to the world in which we now live.” (Andriy Ditchuk, 9 years old)

So it all started with the cosmos, the bird, and the seven days. Started solemnly, for many years. It coded its force in numbers. “One – sacred – means a singularity, inseparable entity containing all infinity. This singularity carries in itself a pair-two means the maternal and paternal origin, water and fire. Three is the trinity of the world formation, the creator, the three dimensions of the world. Four closes a square, in our system of symbols it is marked with a crossed-over rhombus that signifies the sowed field and the family at the same time. Five, the sign of the earth, means a closed nature of biological space. Six stands for entrance to the celestial dimension. Seven completes the unity of the universe and signifies full harmony-seven colors of the rainbow, seven days of the week. Eight is the cosmic dimension, the number of the Mother of God – the octagonal Christmas star. Nine is the strongest number – nine archangels. In a magical, fairy-tale kingdom at the other end of the world, the three dimensions of the universe are multiplied by three, and the world becomes nine-dimensional. This is the kind of the fabulous paradise that the entire humankind dreams of. Finally, ten stands for the absolute, complete, and integral.

Human beings should know the laws nature is based on. Once they used to know them and called this system of knowledge a guardian. People guarded themselves with knowledge-they embroidered it on their towels, painted it in their houses and on their thresholds.

ONE

Several thousand years ago some peculiar people inhabited this land. They talked to the land, the air, the water, and worshipped fire. They spoke their own peculiar language, of which today we only have some bits and pieces left: RA-kRAsa (beauty), RAiduha (rainbow), RAi (paradise). These are sunny words, pronounce them and your soul will smile.

I am taking a close look at a unique supplement to a primer, with non-standard pictures and ancient Trypillian symbols that to this day live on towels decorating icons in our rural homes. The supplement offers an unusual approach to acquiring reading skills-mother is not cleaning a window anymore, instead God is creating day out of night and light out of darkness.

Sitting next to me is Ukrainian poet Mariya Chumarna, a co-author of the supplement. She also founded the Chumarna author's school of Ukrainian studies in Lviv, the only school of its kind in Ukraine. She is telling me about the symbols inherent in numbers. Her story is about Ukrainian, but all I keep thinking about is an analogy with a foreign language: one — “this is the house that Jack built,” two — “and here is the little bird that,” and so on. Finally, ten — “in the house Jack built”, i.e., in the school Mariya built, in the country we built, and in the world God built.

IF THE WORD “WATER” DISAPPEARED

“We are very much removed from nature now because human beings have given reason precedence over feeling. This is the essence of the Fall — do not listen to what you are told but take the fruit of knowledge. However, by knowledge we imply only logical comprehension, while overlooking the sensual dimension. Since intellect is only the first phase of cognition, human beings lost contact with nature by placing the intellectual above the spiritual. The coding of knowledge takes place on the subconscious level, which is now skillfully abused by the enemies of humanity-for example, when children are shown 25 pictures in a row. While leafing through this little supplement, you probably noticed that everything in it had been carefully selected and thought out. The whole book is illustrated with ancient Trypillian symbols, and the words were chosen specially to develop in a child a root structure of the language. Even though nobody knows for sure how language evolves, it is possible to assume it develops the way it was created.

“While developing, people follow the process of human evolution. All knowledge is coded in them at birth.”

“This sounds like what Plato said: we all come into the world with a certain store of knowledge and then spend our lives retrieving it.”

“Yes, and for this reason, the fundamental theosophical formula says, 'know yourself,' not your present self but your coded self dating back to the beginning of the world. Related to this is the problem of cloning, whereby a biorobot can be created out of one small cell. This biorobot, however, will not have a soul since it did not come into the world by God's will. Its genetic supply carries all the genetic information, but it will be just a duplicate of the person who donates the cell.

“If we assume that a child's language and understanding develop in accordance with laws of creation, then the basis for this development should be a vocabulary denoting a number of concepts that laid the foundations of the world. We cannot imagine that the word 'water' will some day vanish from our language because should that happen, the concept itself will disappear as well. At the same time, children in their early age can do fine without such words as 'intellect' or 'computer.' This aspect of language instruction has been neglected: what do children learn during the first years of their lives? Some everyday vocabulary, basically a random selection of words. Meanwhile, the archetypal vocabulary, by exerting a direct influence on the subconscious, opens up a child's spiritual potential. And the sooner it happens, the greater are the capabilities of the child.”

THE LAND, JUST LIKE A CHILD, CANNOT BE FOOLED

Listening to Mariya Chumarna's story, I cannot help drawing an analogy – the same fate befalls all “albinos” in Ukraine. I mean the schools that place emphasis on students rather than teachers. I remember my rather recent studies at the Kherson Journalism and Business Lyceum. It happened that our teachers treated us as human beings, which is generally unusual for regular secondary schools. We also aspired to something and liked it that way. Our students won numerous inter-school competitions in various subjects, which made other school principals green with envy, “Of course, your school has gifted children...”

“I am often told I am lucky because I have gifted children. But I have normal kids! The most important thing in working with them is to try to open up their inner potential. The next element is, of course, the atmosphere in which the children develop. Unfortunately, parents do not know how to work with their children. Children's perception of the world is based on their feelings, where the creative way of thinking is prevalent. It is important that there be no insincerity in interaction with children. A child cannot be fooled; he or she feels everything with his or her heart. A farm manager from Poltava oblast put it very nicely, 'The land, like a child, cannot be fooled.' This is why a child should be raised in a warm atmosphere.

“The most important thing in pedagogy — and school principals agreed with me at a recent conference in Kyiv — is to create appropriate conditions for a child to want to learn. This is a 90% guarantee of success. People are made in such a way that they want to do everything by their own will. And by nature, people are willing to learn. The main thing is not to destroy their will to do so.”

A “COMPOSITION” IN A CONTEMPORARY SCHOOL

“Is this actually your own approach to teaching, or did you borrow it from Western methodologies?”

“There were no borrowings from anywhere. I simply followed the basic logic of people's interaction with the world. As a writer, I just could not reconcile myself with the leading role of pure grammar in school. I also could not come to terms with the fact that the very concept of creativity has been distorted beyond recognition. You know what has become of school compositions nowadays, when they come out in books. Why did this happen? Because our schools focus on teaching useless grammatical structures rather than on in-depth comprehension of the language as the spiritual core of the people. Children's interest in the language is destroyed at an early age by subjecting them to dry drills, trivial examples, and forced learning.”

“What is really frightening is that the same methods are applied at universities as well.”

“True, for students majoring in Ukrainian, there does not seem to be much point in studying grammar for ten years in a secondary school and then going over the exact same rules for another five years at the university level.”

MARY POPPINS: “DON’T WASTE WORDS!”

“Our curriculum includes a subject called the living word. It combines teaching grammar with literature as a creative process. For such classes we select highly artistic texts so that children can experience the joy of living in this world. They are not forced to write those endless paragraphs and construct meaningless, artificial sentences. The word is divine, and one cannot treat it like rubbish. The same applies to poetry: the word game we often see in it now is in and of itself very dangerous. Not without reason, the Gospel says that a person will be acquitted by every word and punished for every word.

“We explain to our children that the word has a triune structure — word thought, word said, and word acted upon. If you thought one thing but said another, you have sinned because the word has a soul.

“In-depth religious upbringing, human contact with God by means of natural knowledge and language learning are all tied into one single process at our school. It is for this reason that the school is called an author's school. To date, two author's schools have been registered in Ukraine — the Huzyk school in Odesa oblast and mine.”

A STATE LEVEL EXPERIMENTAL PROVING GROUND

“We started together with the independent Ukrainian state in 1991, and we will have our first graduation in the year 2000, which is symbolic for us. My 'World of the Little Ukrainian' author's curriculum of Ukrainian studies has been officially endorsed by the Ministry of Education and recommended for introduction in state-run schools. This is a curriculum of solid, integrated knowledge that includes subjects like Ukrainian fairy tales, the living word, and world view. The latter, a kind of a customs calendar, is extremely important. Today we have a thoughtless, ultra-patriotic restoration of national holidays without a real understanding of their significance. And this is very bad since without understanding the real meaning of holidays, we engage in profanity and blasphemy.

“A good example of this is the inappropriateness of Ivan Kupala celebrations at children's day care centers. It is really a holiday of mating, a kind of a wedding ritual! By lowering the plank of children's sexual development in such a way, we push them into horrible sin. And those flower headpieces that women wear on Ivan Kupala! Only girls used to put them on as a sign of their innocence. One chronicle says that a Czech princess was burned at the stake because she wore a headpiece with flowers at some carnival. And once I was outraged by some older women's story about staging a celebration of the Ivan Kupala holiday in an army regiment and wearing headpieces. A woman does not have a right to put on a headpiece. Because we have lost an understanding of our traditions, we have relegated this symbol to a theatrical accessory.”

“MY CHILDREN WILL NOT COMMIT RAPE!”

“Our principal aim is to make sure that when faced with an emergency situation, children are able to make the right choice. We try to give them plenty of advice so that they can use at least some of it when making important decisions. The problem of contemporary youth is that it does not have a choice. It does not know where and why it should go.”

“And do they need to go anywhere at all?”

“All this results from a lack of knowledge. Children should be offered the fullest possible spectrum of world perception, and they will make a choice for themselves.”

“Are you sure your children will not commit a murder or rape someone?”

“I am quite confident they will not. In order for a person not to do this, he or she needs to be trusted and not programmed for crime. Ukraine is a totally sick country — we live in pervasive envy and distrust of one another. People have blank looks in their eyes, they cannot smile at one another anymore. You are riding a tram and all of a sudden someone smiles at you and offers you their seat – and for some unknown reason it makes you happy. There establishes some kind of invisible contact between you and that person because, after all, we are all God's children, we all have light that we should share with others. But if we treat everybody like a potential criminal, we will only provoke one another to commit crimes. I am a great optimist, and I believe that my children will enter this world educated and enlightened.”

BLANK VERSE

The little verse below, written by ten-year-old Marta Huryn, is part of the Magic Mitten collection of children's literary works. Marta Huryn is a student of the Chumarna school.

I want to meet with a star

that wanders

in the darkest recesses

of the transparent sky.

“Not long ago, The Ukrainian Lullabies audio album was released, which included poems written by the students of our school. A collection of their works was also on display at a Kyiv exhibit for the EBRD meeting participants in May.

“I am fully aware that my school is ahead of this world, and for this reason many officials do not understand our system and have even attempted to shut the school down. We do not enjoy any financial support from the state and exist only on the funds allocated by the International Support Program. It turns out that Ukrainians nowadays consider learning English most prestigious. This would be unthinkable anywhere else in the world! Our servile, colonial mentality is projected at our children as well-we totally disregard our native language. We should be responsible for being Ukrainians, rather than just take pride in it.

“As a member of the Writers Union, I hoped that my ideas would be supported immediately. Now all I want is to be left alone so that our state level experimental lab survives — it now includes a kindergarten, an elementary school, and a secondary school. The average size of a class is six to ten students, and no more than 15 are allowed. Elementary school students are not given grades or assigned homework. In order for us to exist and for the children to be able to stay here from 9 a.m. till 6 p.m., we have to charge money. Still, we always find ourselves begging for money. It seems like Ukrainian businessmen with the national idea have not arisen yet. But perhaps this is the school where they will be raised.”

 

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