Children Ready to Solve Adult Problems

The idea is for local high schools students to form commissions involving representatives of different countries working on key UN issues (like education, environment, health, social protection, and human rights). Boys and girls arriving from 50 schools in Ukraine are expected to work out and submit programs aimed at solving world as well as local pressing issues.

Too much burden on their young minds? A convincing answer to the opposite was provided by school students from Artemivsk and Donetsk oblasts. They said they were ready to face a "new responsible stage" in their lives. They also declared, "We must be raised and educated, but not at the age of 19 or 20, but literally starting with our first tentative steps," adding, "because everything turns out to be our responsibility in the end." The latter is perhaps their way to reproach the grownups for showing today's lack of initiative and unpardonable conformism. In any case, the younger generation says we all must learn to make important decisions.

After the conference The Day's reporter asked Hennady Udovenko whether there was something one ought not to borrow from UN experience. His reply was, "The United Nations has remained rather conservative for a long time. The UN General Assembly session which I had the honor to preside over made apparent a certain resistance to reforms within this world body. Yet the organization retains tremendous potential which must be tapped."

Valentyna Dovzhenko, Ukraine's Family and Youth Minister, spoke during the conference, wondering whether the younger generation could be trusted to cope with life in Ukraine in the twenty-first century and had to admit that there was simply no alternative.