Only that fraction of Crimean pupils will be able to gain an education in the Ukrainian language

On September 1 all Crimean schoolchildren entered or returned to school. Like the rest of Ukraine, educators there have also switched to a 12-year curriculum, with children starting school at six. On the eve of this, the Second Congress of Schoolteachers was held in the peninsular capital of Simferopol, followed by city and district teachers’ conferences where educators debated the concept of the national educational program, just imagine, for the whole of the twenty-first century. And everywhere there were joyous reports of successes scored in the area of education, like summer salaries paid in full and decreasing pay arrears. Amid the alleluias came the fact that education in four Ukrainian language-based schools (out of the Crimean total 600) and separate classes in 68 more schools will be taught in Ukrainian.

Is it really something to boast about? Only one percent of peninsula pupils get an education in Ukrainian, while the share of Ukrainian parents in Crimea’s total population comes to over 25 percent.

The newspaper Krymska svitlytsia called this situation linguacide. As the paper puts it, this fact will have a negative political impact for it, first, prevents the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar children to have a stable native language environment during learning which would help them acquire the spirit, psychology, and culture of their peoples, and, second, imposes the supremacy of Russian culture over the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar ones. Third, it obstructs Ukrainian statehood on the peninsula which is Ukrainian in spirit and in language and the feeling of homeland for Crimean Tatars who have no other homeland. Fourth, it endangers the cultural integrity of Ukraine, turning Crimea into a linguistic and cultural appendage of neighboring Russia.

The local Ukrainian People’s Movement (Rukh-Kostenko) circulated a press release, protesting Kyiv’s waffling over educational policy on the peninsula. “Mr. Ohnevyuk, Deputy Minister of Education, who attended the teachers’ Congress and did nothing in the face of this new collapse of Ukrainian language-based education in the Crimea, should have been duly impressed with such a large number of Ukrainian magnet schools, the Rukh press release goes on. This might have been the reason why the official refused to listen to Chairman of the All-Crimean Prosvita Society Serhiy Savchenko. Problems facing Ukrainian-based schooling were equally ignored in the congress resolution. The only remaining option seems to be to make a desperate appeal to the world community demanding it protect the constitutional right of Crimean schoolchildren to learn in their native languages.

Early this year, a public committee to help start Ukrainian language schools was established on the initiative of the Crimean branch of Rukh. Authorized representatives of the committee have repeatedly met with peninsular Minister of Education Valentyna Levina and Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Kazarin. A commission from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine has also arrived to study the situation. All this activity resulted in a resolution No. 3/7 of Apr. 25, 2001 of the Crimean Ministry of Education board obliging heads of district education departments to place in the media announcing enrollment in Ukrainian language magnet schools. But most of district education bosses ignored it.

When the authorities in Bakhchysarai gave School No. 3 the status of a Ukrainian language magnet school, various pro-Russian communities headed by the peninsula’s Deputy Minister of Education V. Kavraisky assaulted the parents. The pitiful bottom line is: there is no Ukrainian magnet school in Bakhchysarai and parents wishing to educate their children in Ukrainian were forced to submit enrollment application to Russian language-based School No. 4, which runs separate Ukrainian classed in grades one to ten. The unanimous opinion is that there would have been many more applications had there been a separate Ukrainian magnet school. There is a host of similar cases. A major problem is the lack of textbooks in Ukrainian. Such is the pitiable result of ten years of Ukrainian independence, a mere four Ukrainian magnet schools of the total of 600 schools in the Crimea.

The editors of Krymska svitlytsia believe that the present educational situation on the peninsula is immoral for the Ukrainian state, saying that the only acceptable norm here is when Russian-based classes would be opened in Ukrainian language-based schools run by the Ukrainian state, similar to the practices in other countries with the need to provide schooling in non-native languages, not the other way around. Opening Ukrainian- based classes in Russian language magnet schools, the editors say, merely leads to emasculation of the Ukrainian spirit, waste of funds, and reduces Ukrainian-based education to an amateurish optional level. Such educational policy only helps preserve the present lamentable status quo, with Russian-based schools located in well-built and well-equipped houses and the Ukrainians getting ill-equipped or wrecked premises to teach their children in the official state language, and all this is happening in the eleventh year of Ukraine’s independence.