Kirovohrad: a city of contrasts and harsh realities in central Ukraine (06/07/98)

A Ukrainian Summer: where to go, what to do...

Kirovohrad: a city of contrasts and harsh realities in central Ukraine

by Oleh Kolodiy

KIROVOHRAD, Ukraine - My arrival in Ukraine on a bitter cold winter day in January of this year was not without its own adventures. My baggage went to Latvia as I went to Kyiv. So, in the middle of winter I arrived in Kirovohrad, in south-central Ukraine, with just the clothes on my back and had to make due for the next seven days.

Apprehension at essentially what at first seemed like a foreign city, was eased somewhat as I realized that people on the street and in shops who normally speak Russian, will in fact, speak some form of Ukrainian if addressed in Ukrainian. The official language here is Ukrainian and in all of the schools that I visited it was the primary language of instruction. Students, however, normally spoke Russian to each other. Professors at the university always spoke to me in Ukrainian, but occasionally would speak Russian among themselves or to students.

Notwithstanding the language problem, all residents of Kirovohrad considered themselves to be Ukrainian; most blamed their language problems on their northern neighbor. They realize that their language is of a mixed form, but they were quite adamant to point out to me that this is not eastern Ukraine. They consider themselves part of central Ukraine and closer to Kyiv than to Dnipropetrovsk or Kharkiv in character and language. They pointed out that in the area's villages Ukrainian is spoken more purely.

Even though Ukrainian was not commonly spoken here, most people could and would speak Ukrainian when I spoke to them in Ukrainian. It was particularly interesting that people who normally spoke Russian among themselves, cheered and spoke in Ukrainian at the local professional soccer game, including the announcer. It was pointed out to me that merely 10 years ago Ukrainian was never heard in Kirovohrad and very few people even knew the language, so a lot of progress has been made.

March 8 is International Woman's Day here and it is a big holiday. Normally schools and many businesses are closed, but this year the holiday was on a Sunday. So Friday was party day (praznyk) at the university, as women were toasted and honored. It does appear that women truly are the backbone of society here. They have the difficult job of keeping the family together, as well as earning money in very difficult times.

Times are difficult not necessarily because people have so few materials things, but because of the uncertainty of their economic life. People cannot count on getting their paychecks every month, so when they get one they are not sure what to do with the money because they do not know when the next check will come. They keep working for almost no pay, however, because whatever they get is better than nothing and it still counts toward their pension.

Kirovohrad is an economically depressed area with essentially little functioning industry. Most industry from the Soviet era has closed down. The airport, which once offered daily flights to various cities, is essentially closed with perhaps a weekly cargo flight taking off. Some people in fact blame their economic troubles on the break-up of the Soviet Union and wish things would go back to the way they were.

With no industry, the main place of employment is the local bazaar (rynok), where people resell things they buy elsewhere or bring produce from gardens and farms to sell. The rynok is the heart of the city and I often went there to buy goods or just to look at the people. No matter how harsh the weather, people will barter in freezing cold, snow or rain.

Kirovohrad is a pretty city built in a European style of architecture. It has two opera theaters (one can see a play in Ukrainian for 2 to 4 hryvni), a soccer stadium (the local team, Zirka, plays in Division I), a baseball stadium (Kirovohrad is the center of baseball in Ukraine). It also has many parks and a large system of public transportation. There are a no Catholic churches, but there are a few Orthodox churches, which I had the opportunity to visit. The choirs in these churches sing so beautifully that one could sit there all day.

However, I came to Ukraine as a Fulbright scholar to teach, so my first interest was to find out about Ukraine's educational system. I taught at Kirovohrad's Volodymyr Vynnychenko National Pedagogical University. Teaching resources at the university are extremely poor. There are probably two or three overhead projectors at the university and that was essentially all the teaching support. I had to haul all materials that I used in teaching a course to the classroom myself. Some of the blackboards were unusable and the classrooms were rather dingy and poorly lit.

I taught a course on the Internet as well as methods courses in teaching mathematics and science. There was a handful of computer labs but only one lab had computers that ran Windows software. The university had one e-mail connection and one central Xerox machine.

The students were varied, as anywhere, but many found what I teach rather strange. The educational system is geared toward the best students, and using hands-on materials to teach mathematics was not something that was done past preschool. The students were not very receptive to doing things in class; they seemed more geared toward listening rather than being active. Each class has the same schedule all year, and one student, called the "starosta," carries the roll book around to all the classes.

The students take many courses, sometimes eight to 10 different courses at once, however each course meets only 1.5 hours per week. There weren't many innovative assignments I could assign, as there were essentially no resources. The students usually didn't have their own textbooks but either shared books or used the library.

I brought some of my own resources, such as physics computer problem simulations, but the physics professors at the university did not express much interest or understanding of these. They considered the computer problem sets as nice games for American children, in spite of the fact that I used these problem sets in a physics course I teach at Rutgers University.

However, the educational system is not uniform throughout the city. There is an institute to upgrade teacher qualifications that has ties with a Cybernetics and Technical College (essentially a junior college) that is much better equipped and progressive than the one at which I taught. They are connected to the Internet and have 10 schools networked to their server .

I also had the opportunity to visit one of the best schools in the city, School Number 8, and it was truly impressive. Every class has an overhead projector, a television connected to a central studio and other goodies that we take for granted. These schools expressed a much greater interest in many of my innovative teaching materials, as well as an interest in communicating with Ukrainian children in the U.S. (For anyone who is interested, their e-mail address is [email protected]).

Elections have come and gone, and even though people in the diaspora were rather surprised at the strength of the vote for the Communists, the people here were not. Given the history and the current economic situation, things could not have possibly been different. Many sectors of the society long for the return of the USSR. When a woman expressed this view to me, I then asked why Ukrainians voted for independence. She replied that they thought they were voting for cultural independence, not real independence. Herein lies the crux of the Ukrainian problem, and it is tied to the educational system and the educational philosophy.

At first glance, the educational system is at a much higher level than in the U.S. The ninth grade mathematics classes I observed were covering 10th and 11th grade honors material in U.S., but essentially, by the time students get to 5th grade, they are already categorized from an educational perspective. Past fifth grade the final years ofquality education are designated for the best students. Others are assigned to an educational curriculum that will give them a life where they either will go out in the street to make due or try to find manual labor.

Education in the U.S. is designed for 90 percent of the population. I pointed this out when a teacher asked me what the differences were between education in the West and in Ukraine. She then quoted Lenin, who apparently supported the idea of education only for the brightest. "But everyone will be involved in deciding the future of the country, not just the upper echelon of the population," I pointed out to her. In eight years of independence Ukrainians have been unable to elect anyone into office who can make economic changes because they have no idea whom to vote for and don't understand what type of changes need to be made. The educated part of society is ready to make changes, but the remaining population is not smart enough to make a decision. So these segments of society work against each other and elect officials who work against each other.

Even worse are very common misconceptions about world events. The misconceptions that I encountered included a belief that the radiation levels throughout Ukraine are dangerously high (they, in fact, are below norms); that the Polish gentry has re-established control in western Ukraine and that Ukrainians there are once more subjugated to them; that President Bill Clinton has made a statement that he supports an independent Ukraine with a total population of only 10 million. When I tell people that it is impossible for Clinton to have made such a statement, they merely stare at me in disbelief.

One of the brightest moments during my stay in Kirovohrad was my association with people from the youth organization Plast. I didn't even know that Plast existed in the area, but I got a call from Lviv giving me a phone number to contact. It turns out that there is a small but active Plast group here and in nearby Svitlovodsk with four "Plastovi yunatski hurtky" (foor teens) and also some "novatski roii" (for children). The people in Plast seem to recognize many of the problems of society and see Plast as a way to educate youth both nationally and morally.

A Ukrainian Summer

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