“I like studying in Ukrainian!”
Children in Donetsk who attend schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction say they enjoy learning in Ukrainian. Schoolchildren and their parents alike are convinced that for them Ukrainian is the language of the future.
In recent years, the Donbas region has done its best not to forfeit its questionable reputation as a region that insists on using the Russian language exclusively in all spheres of life. This applies especially to the region’s educational establishments. The actions of the Donetsk city council are a case in point. It has gone to the extreme length, “in order to improve work,” of “preventing the planned increase in the number of students studying in Ukrainian and the expansion of the network of Ukrainian-language schools and classes.”
But in practice, the anticipated beneficiaries of these measures are debunking this initiative. Statistics indicate that increasing numbers of parents in Donetsk oblast are choosing to send their children to schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction.
“When Hannusia went to school, we did not hesitate: I enrolled her in a Ukrainian class. I think this will help her in the future, when she will be applying to universities and later, when she will be looking for a job. She will know Russian anyway, because we speak Russian at home. But I want her to know Ukrainian too — but excellent Ukrainian, not the “surzhyk,” that mixture of broken Ukrainian and Russian, which is spoken on our streets.
“But in order to learn Ukrainian, you have to read a lot and use it in other subjects,” this reporter was told by Liudmyla Pohrebynska, the mother of Hanna, an 8th-grade pupil. Hanna has been studying in Ukrainian for the past eight years, and likes it. Next year she will enroll in a Physics and Math lyceum, which has an all-Ukrainian curriculum.
“I have never regretted studying Ukrainian. It’s really cool that I am learning three languages at once — English, Ukrainian, and Russian. So I have a better chance of getting into a prestigious university. And I won’t feel inferior because I can’t translate a mathematical problem from Ukrainian into Russian — a problem that one of my friends has experienced,” the girl said. According to her, students who are taught in Ukrainian have better opportunities for learning: there are fewer students in every class, so they get more attention from their teachers.
“There are only four Ukrainian grades in our school: two, four, eight, and ten,” Liudmyla Ivanova, the vice-principal of school No. 69 explained. “Every class was formed according to the parents’ applications for their children to be taught in Ukrainian. As a rule, there are up to 20 students in these grades. The other grades are taught in Russian. However, to meet the children’s demands, we organize optional classes in Ukrainian language and literature, which are attended by a number of students.” Responding to the children’s requests, the school teaches two optional classes: Ukrainian for Business and Ukrainian Literature.
Teachers say that schoolchildren in Donetsk do not encounter any problems when they want to study in Ukrainian. Every district of Donetsk alone has at least one Ukrainian school, not counting such specialized educational institutions as colleges, gymnasiums, and lyceums that are everywhere.
According to educators, students appreciate the quality of their education. “At school I deliberately chose a Ukrainian class to be able to enter the Machine-Building Academy after graduation because welding, which is my specialty, is taught at there in Ukrainian. My school gave me such a good grounding of the language that sometimes I correct my lecturers at the academy,” said Andrii Zhuravliov, who just graduated from Kramatorsk School No. 10.
In their turn, teachers are happy about the students’ level of knowledge. “Our second-graders speak Ukrainian so well that we are sometimes afraid of not keeping up with them. I have to read all the time in order to build up my vocabulary, and sometimes I learn a lot of new things from the kids,” Ivanova said, adding that the younger the children, the more likely their parents want to register them for a Ukrainian class.
However, in Donbas there are still many people who insist on exclusively Russian instruction for their children. A lot of them consider Russian their mother tongue, and they are reluctant to “overload” their children with another language. This is the opinion of Olha Nikolenko, whose daughter Khrystyna, a fifth-grader, is studying in a Russian class. “I am glad there is no hurry to Ukrainize everything here in Donetsk. We are a Russian-speaking family, and we have the right to have our child taught in our mother tongue. We don’t want our daughter to get confused from translating sentences from one language into the other,” Mrs. Nikolenko said.
Her daughter is not against being taught in Ukrainian. “It’s all the same to me. Anyway, last year I got 12 points (the highest score). I like those lessons, and we have a good teacher,” she said.
The majority of her peers agree with her. They say that it doesn’t matter which language they study in as long as the teacher is good, and the class is friendly. As a matter of fact, teachers have noticed that Ukrainian classes are cohesive and friendly from the very beginning. “The children are united by common values and feelings of harmony, which probably stem from the fact that they are different from their peers. Maybe they feel somewhat superior to other children of the same age, or maybe the Ukrainian culture itself is kind and soothing, and it builds their characters accordingly,” Ivanova said.
The parents of “Ukrainian” schoolchildren in the Donbas have a different explanation: they think Ukrainian will be the language of the future, and clearly their children already feel this.
“We think that no matter what the situation is in Donetsk, Ukrainian will be the language of the future,” The Day was told by Iryna and Mykhailo Stepanyshyn, the parents of Kostyk, a second-grader. “This is so not just because our children will use it in university. This is a question that relates to the distant future. We are thinking primarily about the moral aspect of this question. We think it’s disgraceful not to speak Ukrainian in Ukraine.”
