1992: A LOOK BACK: Initiatives in education (12/27/92)

1992: A LOOK BACK

Initiatives in education

An area that deserves special focus this year is the field of education and scholarly activity.

Ukraine's independence, the new reform impulse coming from the Ministry of Education, and the need to restructure educational institutions throughout Ukraine have given impetus to a whole range of scholarly-teacher-and-student exchanges, research and institutional collaborative projects and educational and scholarship initiatives.

It is investment in this field that may well have the most far-reaching effects for Ukraine's future.

Institutional changes

The nomination of Petro Talanchuk as Ukraine's minister of education signaled the determination to renovate the leadership and reform the entire educational structure of Ukraine. A respected educational innovator, former rector of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute (KPI) and president of the Academy of Engineering Sciences of Ukraine, Dr. Talanchuk visited the United States on March 11-24 as part of a delegation of ministers of education and sciences from the newly independent states. In an interview in The Weekly, Dr. Talanchuk explained his views and reform priorities: the need and opportunity to institute a program of national education consonant with the newly achieved statehood and with the advanced scientific and technological needs of a modern economy and society; the need to modernize and democratize the educational system in order to overcome the legacy of the "repressive pedagogy" of the Soviet regime; the need to establish Ukrainian as the language of instruction at every educational level and to raise and reinstitute the Ukrainian language at the governmental level; the need to restructure the completely antiquated structure of the Academy of Sciences to reflect and meet the demands of the times.

On par with this official effort stands the private initiative to revive the historical Kiev-Mohyla Academy as a modern private university. The leading center of humanist education in 17th- and 18th-century Ukraine, closed down by Tsar Alexander III, was reopened in September on the initiative of Dr. Viacheslav Briukhovetsky, who became the university's first rector. Built around a modern curriculum taught both in Ukrainian and English, the renewed institution aims to educate an independent and creative intelligentsia. The University of KMA has been working to establish exchange programs with leading American and Canadian universities.

Professional contacts

On March 15, 13 members of the Ukrainian Engineers' Society of America were inducted into the newly founded Academy of Engineering Sciences of Ukraine by the academy's president, Dr. Talanchuk, at a ceremony held in East Hanover, N.J.

The newly formed International Ukrainian Economic Association (IUEA) held its first congress in Kiev on May 18-22, with the participation of approximately 100 economists from Ukraine, 40 economists from the West, as well as participants from other newly independent states. Ivan Koropeckyj, professor of economics at Temple University, Philadelphia, was elected president, while Serhiy Pyrozhkov of Ukraine became the first vice-president and president-elect.

The 11th annual conference on Ukrainian subjects was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on June 22-27. Some 130 scholars from Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Poland and the Netherlands were in attendance. The theme of the conference was "Ukraine and its Neighbors."

Scholars and scholarship

The project to publish the English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's nine volume "History of Ukraine-Rus'" got off to a successful start. The translation of the first volume was completed, and Dr. Frank Sysyn, director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research at the University of Alberta, obtained a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the translations of volumes 7 to 9, which deal with the history of the Ukrainian Kozaks. The first rendition of Hrushevsky's monumental work into a Western language, the English translation will make the work available to a wide scholarly community.

Dr. Orest Subtelny's "Ukraine: A History," first published by The University of Toronto Press in 1988, was translated into Ukrainian and published in Ukraine. The Ukrainian edition is likely to repeat the publishing success of the English edition. Canadian Friends of Rukh bought 43,000 copies of the first printing for free distribution by Rukh in Ukraine. Minister of Defense Konstantyn Morozov requested copies for all military officers.

Another important publication project reached a new milestone. The first 1,200 manuscript pages for the concluding volumes of the English-language Encyclopedia of Ukraine were turned over to the publisher, the University of Toronto Press, on September 21. Volumes III, IV and V, edited by a board headed by Prof. Danylo Husar Struk, are scheduled to appear in the fall of 1993.

The executive boards of the two American Associations of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) met on November 21 to reconcile their differences and create a single association. The unified association will comprise about 100 members.

The University of Kansas in collaboration with Ivan Franko University in Lviv is planning to offer specialized graduate work in Ukrainian studies within its program in Russian and East European Studies. The University of Kansas will become the first institution to offer a complete Ukrainian Area Studies Program in five principal fields.

Dr. James Mace was appointed as a post-doctoral fellow in modern Ukrainian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, hopefully as a first step in establishing a program in Ukrainian studies. During the nine-month fellowship which began in August, Dr. Mace plans to write a history of the 1933 Ukrainian famine.

The All-Ukrainian Association of Researchers of the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 held its founding meeting in Kiev on June 27. The research group was initiated by the late Volodymyr Maniak, former co-president of the Memorial Society, and author-editor of "Famine 33."

Dr. Zenon Kohut, a leading authority on 18th century Ukrainian history and a specialist on contemporary Ukraine, was named the-new director of the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine and associate director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research, at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

Student/faculty exchanges

The Education Fund, a scholarship grant project undertaken by the Ukrainian American Association of Professionals and Businesspersons of New York and New Jersey on the initiative of Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky, enabled four students from Ukraine to study at Harvard's Ukrainian Summer Institute.

While more than 80 American volunteers went to Ukraine this summer to teach English under a program coordinated by Dr. Zirka Voronka under the sponsorship of the Ukrainian National Association (see section on the UNA), 13 students from Ukraine participated in the Siena College project, an English teaching program developed by Lydia Tarnavsky, with primary funding by Americans for a Democratic Ukraine and services donated by Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y. Apart from immersion in American life and culture, the program offered exposure to the latest U.S. teaching methods, with an emphasis on interactive ways of teaching English.

Sixteen students from the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy in Kiev studied at Purdue University's School of Agriculture in West Lafayette, Ind., during the fall semester. A similar contingent of American students from Purdue went to Ukraine to study the agricultural and economic situation. Students and staff from the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy in Kiev, the leading agricultural institution in Ukraine, also visited Iowa University and Penn State University.

Wayne State University's School of Business Administration hosted a second group of M.B.A. students from the Lviv Management Institute who took part in an intensive orientation program examining various aspects of the free enterprise system and a market economy.

With financial support from the Pauline U. Bruggeman Fund for Entrepreneurship in Ukraine, a collaborative research project and student exchange program was established between the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to form a business incubator in Kiev. The project is led by Profs. Pier Abetti from Rensselaer and Victor Ivanenko from KPI.

The Institute for the Professional Development of Teachers, under the auspices of the Educational Council, World Congress of Free Ukrainians, has been set up to train Ukrainian teachers in Western teaching methods, particularly for the teaching of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian language. As part of this project, the Lviv Board of Education will organize summer training courses for teachers from throughout Ukraine. Project coordinator is Nadia Luciw.

Finally, as a symbolically relevant event, on May 10 an honorary doctorate of human letters was conferred on Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk by La Salle University in Philadelphia. Sponsored by Prof. Leonid Rudnytzky, a member of the university's foreign language department and president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the conferral of the honorary degree set the stage to pay homage to Ukraine's first democratically elected president both by American dignitaries and the Ukrainian community at large.

| Home Page |