Many pro-Ukrainians who have remained in occupied cities like Kherson and Melitopol are reluctant to send their children to the ‘schools of the enemy’. But the pressure is great. According to the Ukrainian government, the occupation authorities even threaten to remove parents who refuse to be removed from parental authority. In that case, their children go to a boarding school.
The introduction of the Russian curriculum is a clear indication that the Kremlin intends to eventually annex the conquered territories to Russia. According to Ukrainian Education Minister Lilija Hrynevych, Moscow’s goal is “to erase Ukrainian identity.”
Through education, Russia hopes not only to indoctrinate the youth, but also to get a grip on the parents. If they continue to be obstructive, it will be at the expense of the future prospects of their children. In the Soviet period, this was an important motive for parents to accept the situation, even if they did not agree with it.
Criticizing at home will, as then, become more risky under the new system, especially now that the occupation authorities appointed by Moscow have imposed penalties for ‘defaming the Russian armed forces’. You have to be careful that your child does not talk his way out of school at school.
Ukrainian parents also fear that their children will be forced to participate in “military-patriotic” classes that have become popular in Russian schools under President Putin. According to his supporters, these are now even more necessary to teach the youth a ‘positive image of the soldier’.
By order of the ‘military-civil authorities’ appointed by Russia, the Ukrainian teaching materials in the few schools that survived the war have already been replaced by Russian textbooks. Also, almost all Ukrainian books have been removed from the libraries, even fairy tales.
The switch to the Russian curriculum also presents the Ukrainian teaching staff with a painful dilemma: choose their students or their homeland? Well before the start of the new school year, they were told that they had to agree in writing to the Russian curriculum, a procedure reminiscent of the declaration of loyalty that the German occupiers demanded from Dutch teachers and students during the Second World War.
The staff were sometimes even visited at home to put pressure on them. Anyone who refused will lose their job, was the message. Nevertheless, according to the Ukrainian government, the vast majority of teachers would not have succumbed to the pressure of the occupiers.
Teachers who do cooperate with the Russians face a penalty. They can be jailed for several years under Ukrainian law for collaborating with the enemy. Even worse is the stigma of ‘traitor’ that they carry forever, although Ukrainian partisan groups operating behind Russian lines have said they will not carry out attacks on ‘defectors’ in schools. Recently, several other ‘collaborators’ have been blown up in occupied territory.
It is still unclear how many schoolchildren will show up in occupied territory on Thursday at the start of the school year. To counterbalance, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education is organizing online classes for students on the other side of the front. But that can run into technical problems: Russian ISPs have now taken over in many places.
Conversely, the occupation authorities are faced with an acute shortage of personnel. Pro-Russian teachers who remain have been sent on refresher courses, sometimes even to Moscow, but apparently there are far too few. The Ministry of Education in Moscow has been busy recruiting staff in recent months, including from schools and teacher training colleges in Siberia.
Some Russian teachers volunteered for ‘patriotic motives’. They dream of helping to restore an empire in which the Ukrainians are ‘just Russians again’. But opposite Novaya Gazeta. Europe, to the Russian newspaper in exile, some candidates admitted that they had been lured mainly by the salary or by the house with garden that was promised to them. Apparently they are convinced that Putin will never again hand over the occupied territories.