Does the government want children to forget how to read?

In early April this year Kyiv’s House of Teacher hosted the launch of a new project on the world literature (this is a project of the Institute of Innovation Technologies and Content of Education, Ministry of Education, Science, Youth, and Sport, and Poltava-based Korolenko State Pedagogic University) for the forms 5 and 9 of secondary schools. After the discussion the teachers turned to the newspaper Den/The Day for support, because they think that the offered course can oust world literature from the senior students’ curriculum on the whole. According to pedagogues, it has been offered to squeeze the course of world literature previously taught in forms 10 and 11 into the curriculum of the forms 5-9.

Kyiv’s pedagogues condemn the project: nearly 100 teachers signed the petition to Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk. They demand to revise the project of the world literature program and involve “unbiased and authoritative specialists” in its improvement. “We are immensely disturbed that such project for forms 5-9, approved without any proper democratic discussion by teachers’ association, may give impetus to total elimination of world literature from the basic curriculum of senior students, which may lead to mass firing of teachers, as well as to liquidation of the major educative factor of senior students, which in its turn will lead to deterioration of the nation’s spiritual health,” the petition of Kyiv-based teachers and researchers reads. Pedagogues appeal to the fact that the draft was negatively assessed by the Department of Methods of Teaching Russian Language and World Literature at the Drahomanov National Pedagogic University.

In its turn, Ministry of Education, Science, Youth, and Sport states that owing to the new project on the world literature for forms 5-9 the curriculum will be “modernized” and “unloaded.” “Any changes should take place for the sake of children, so that the abyss of misunderstanding in the modern world (in which children orient better than the adults) got smaller,” the ministry opines. Therefore the unloading will be apparently made to create more space for computer studies and economics.

The project is going to be discussed till April 20 of this year and it is planned to approve it approximately on April 26. According to the plans of the Ministry of Education, Science, Youth, and Sport, it will come into force next school year.

Tetiana STETSENKO, teacher of world literature at Kyiv’s lyceum No. 142:

“Currently we are working according to the curriculum approved in 2005, which was designed for studying world literature in the forms 5 to 11: we study the development of literature since ancient times till nowadays, and in the 11th form we make children acquainted with postmodern literature. The authors of the new program suppose to finish the studying of literature as soon as in the 9th form (so, it is planned that there will be no subject such as world literature in the 10th and 11th forms). Now, the postmodern works will be introduced in the 9th form. These are works complicated for understanding: Milorad Pavic, Ernest Hemingway, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilker, and Anna Akhmatova. At this age the child is intellectually incapable of perceiving them. At the same time the Ministry of Education speaks about unloading, though in fact an overloading takes place. The literature lessons in 10th-11th forms will be replaced by other subjects, whereas the world literature course will continue to be studied only in specialized educational establishments, maybe as an optional course.

“It is also important that very often we study texts simultaneously with the Ukrainian literature course. How are we going to speak about postmodernism in the 9th form, when they haven’t even talked about it at Ukrainian literature lessons? Everything is broken. The curriculum is awful. It includes many texts that bear no value whatsoever. They could have used the list of the winners of Hans Christian Andersen Award. This is a worldwide award given to authors who create literature for children of all ages. We have counted only four winners of this award in the whole course of world literature. Speaking about intellectual overloading, for example they offer A Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov for studying in the 9th form. To understand it, you need to know the history, and this historical time is studied only in senior classes. However, there are no Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s texts, as the authors considered them unnecessary. I think that this way we can lose not only the course, but also children we can communicate with.”