NEWS AND VIEWS: The significance of education (11/15/98)

NEWS AND VIEWS

The significance of education

by Bohdan Oryshkevich

Dr. Myron B. Kuropas's narrowly focused op-ed piece (The Ukrainian Weekly, October 4) on the diaspora's ethnonational survival and the year 2020 concerned me. Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky's wish list of things to happen to help preserve the diaspora (October 25 and November 1) brought to light the tremendous disarray of the increasingly suburban diaspora.

Ethnonational survival in the American "melting pot" context can occur only with a strong emphasis on education. Without education and without the consequent understanding of the core values to be preserved, what remains is little more than nostalgia.

Many ethnic groups have simply disappeared, yet their Churches have evolved into quintessentially American and Americanizing institutions. One can see this happening with the Orthodox Church in America. It has happened with the Lutherans who came from Germany and the Catholics who came from many parts of continental Europe. Religion ultimately deals with one's relationship with God and with the universe, not with one's ethnic background. While religion hopefully sets up an ethical framework, it has little to do with language and ethnic preservation. The Ukrainian Byzantine Rite liturgy can take place in English. Without relevance to spiritual needs, a denomination is likely to wane for lack of purpose. Judaism, so closely tied to Ukraine, may be the only (albeit partially successful) exception to the assimilative tendency of religion.

At the same time, it is hard to see how the purchase of life insurance policies from the Ukrainian National Association would preserve the rapidly declining Ukrainian identity in America above and beyond the capital it would provide indirectly for Ukrainian activities. The survival of the Ukrainian National Association as it exists today is important, but not intrinsic, to the survival of Ukrainian American activity and identity in America. There is nothing intrinsically Ukrainian about Soyuzivka or IRAs or mortgages. One can also stay in touch and be informed immediately about the diaspora and even about Ukraine in Ukrainian (nonetheless) by various Ukrainian periodicals and bulletins on the Internet. One can buy virtually any Ukrainian newspaper, magazine or book from http://www.eastview.com/.

Perhaps Dr. Kuropas has very limited objectives in pushing for Ukrainian ethnonational survival. His concerns may lie only with the Ukrainian National Association, but what will keep the increasingly dispersed potential members of the diaspora together?

People who are poorly educated are not likely to understand their past or be good Americans. Education is more than simply literacy and the acquisition of a profession.

Ukrainian Americans need to put a much greater emphasis on education in order to advance in this society, develop a better self-image, keep up with changes in Ukraine, and at the same time preserve or develop their identity and maintain their own institutions. This emphasis on education is more important than ever now that Ukraine is independent, is sadly declining into a not so pre-industrial state and exposing the fundamental fault lines in Ukrainian identity and culture. Education is more than glorification of a past, which in the case of Ukraine is one that is tragic.

Education will require more than the continuation of Ukrainian folk music and arts, and the similarly limited field of Ukrainian studies. Education to preserve the Ukrainian identity will require extensive home-stays by Ukrainian American students in Ukraine to experience Ukraine first-hand and to learn the reality of what is Ukraine. You cannot miss or care for what you have not seen or experienced first-hand. Summer immersion into Ukrainian studies in America is simply too uni-dimensional to achieve the understanding necessary for a coherent and productive ethnonational identity. But, most importantly, this education will require the best in liberal arts education. This liberal arts education will enable students to understand the complexities of a multidimensional identity and the development of analytical abilities to develop a functioning identity for themselves and help Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine solve the tremendous challenges that Ukraine is facing.

Without the challenges presented by Ukraine, a Ukrainian American identity is largely meaningless and serves little purpose since assimilation is a natural, benign and reasonable process. It is not the bogeyman that "involuntary ethnics" portrayed it to be. America has its own extremely varied and continuously evolving identity and problems that deserve the undivided participation of its ever-assimilating citizens. One does not need a mediocre limited Ukrainian American identity to be a first-rate American.

Ukrainian Americans should spend a much greater effort on identifying their best and brightest young students in achieving their life goals and on encouraging them to integrate their Ukrainian and American identities in their academic, professional and employment lives. Such integration will not come easily, for it will require a new openness to excellence and academic freedom that is visibly lacking within the Ukrainian American community and in Ukrainian studies programs. It will also require a massive reallocation of resources to educational programs for gifted children and young adults. Such programs are largely absent within the Ukrainian American and Canadian communities. Student dances, sport teams, summer camps, dance troupes, Ukrainian pop orchestras and even music schools do not meet the strategic needs of the Ukrainian community. The various patriotic Ukrainian youth organizations have largely failed to bring up a leadership corps capable of leading the diaspora in a new era of assimilation and independence.

By emphasizing purely recreational rather than cognitive skills, the Ukrainian American community has long been institutionalizing a very limited ethnonational identity, accelerating the assimilation of the Ukrainian American youth. It has been losing the best and the brightest to a purely American existence.

The education of the diaspora (for its own preservation) and the education of Ukraine are closely linked. Both are critical to Ukraine in an era of a global economy. This is especially vital in the Washington-to-Boston corridor with its world-class universities, Wall Street, the U.S. government the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and a whole plethora of similar world important institutions. In an isolationist America these institutions provide sustenance to those with an international, if not an ethnic perspective. The increasingly suburban and comfortable Ukrainian American community has yet to develop more than a token presence in these critically important organizations.

At the same time, the Internet and the rapidly evolving information technology revolution are making the world an infinitely smaller place with an interlocking set of identities and interests.

To illustrate some of the critical issues facing Ukraine, I have chosen to illustrate three different but related problems confronting Ukraine - none of which have been extensively discussed in The Ukrainian Weekly or elsewhere in Ukrainian American circles.

At this time Ukraine is ranked 50th out of 50 countries in economic competitiveness according to the World Economic Forum at http://www.weforum.org/.

According to the United Nations Development Program (http://www.undp.org/) Ukraine is ranked 102nd in development in the world in 1998, below such countries as Botswana, Albania and Russia. Canada is ranked first, as usual, and the United States is fourth. Ukraine is ranked low despite its high literacy rate, thus underlining that there is more to education and development than simple literacy.

The British Council under contract to the United Nations has prognosticated that Ukraine will suffer as many as 1.6 million deaths from AIDS by the year 2016 (http://www.britcoun.org/country/ukraine/). This and other health and economic factors are projected to lead to a decline in the population of Ukraine to 40 million people by the year 2016, to the creation of hundreds of thousands of new orphans and to a generation of pensioners without children to help support them.

Education and world-class skills are the only elements that will provide Ukraine and its diaspora with the skills to address these inadequacies and problems, and maintain a functioning rather than a dysfunctional identity. In recent weeks, both the newspapers Den and the Kyiv Post have pointed out the fundamental decline and corruption in Ukrainian higher education. The diaspora, especially that in the United States, could clearly serve as an example of emphasis on education in Ukraine. Sadly, it is not.

In light of such challenges, the sale of insurance policies by the Ukrainian National Association as the salvation of the Ukrainian American identity seems rather far-fetched. People are likely to seek to cherish and preserve the culture and institutions of a successful diaspora and country. And a successful country is more likely to have the funds to help a far-flung diaspora preserve its culture.

No matter what the diaspora hopes to believe, its future is more closely than ever tied to the future of independent Ukraine and to education. Without a reason to maintain an identity and without the skills acquired through education and experience the Ukrainian American community in the United States will have neither the technical expertise nor the will to run its own fraternal and other organizations. Ukrainian Americans with true education, albeit with a practical dimension, might reanimate the Ukrainian National Association and other organizations with new services and a new vision, if not a new rationale for their existence.

But this emphasis on education will depend upon a tremendous change in emphasis and unprecedented cognitive, temporal and financial investment by the younger generation of "voluntary ethnics" who can pursue education much more comfortably within the American sphere.

Bohdan Oryshkevich is a physician based in New York. He is the founder of the Ukrainian Student Association of the U.S.A. (USA-U.S.A.)

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