The Ukrainian state has almost failed to educate young people who are being raised by Tik Tok, Instagram, and Russian Telegram, while the state’s influence on its new generation remains minimal.
Paradoxically, our country does not even see a serious problem at the state level that a foreign Chinese app has a greater influence on the education of Ukrainian youth than a Ukrainian school, family, or church.
In the fourth year of the war, Ukraine has not yet created a massive children’s and youth patriotic organization that would educate the future generation of Ukrainians-those who will work for the economy and create technology tomorrow.
A school limited by hundreds of bureaucratic regulations and blindly copying Western models of student-centered education without proven effectiveness cannot cope with education. The participation of Ukrainian teenagers in terrorist attacks organized by the FSB via Telegram is a clear signal that something is wrong here.
Education as such has been replaced in school education by school subjects, without a separate behavioral and ethical component. Teachers are busy with thousands of methodological reports and do not have enough time even to teach quality subjects, let alone to educate. Meanwhile, in Russia, certain subjects are being introduced about “heroes of the sword,” where war criminals are being glorified. But this propaganda can influence the motivation of Russian schoolchildren to join the army tomorrow.
A huge number of Ukrainian high school students plan to leave the country before the age of 18, and the “Single Telethon” continues to show hackneyed experts who spend hours spouting refined and balanced phrases. The main thing is that it should be bland, boring, tolerant, and not offend anyone. We are losing the younger generation, and there is no high-quality and motivational content created for them that will convince young Ukrainians not only to defend the country, but at least to stay here to live and work.
Instead, in the Russian Federation, the state has created dozens of films and TV series for children and teenagers with mandatory ideological and propaganda content so that they know whom to hate. How many feature films have been created to educate Ukrainian teenagers? Not translated by others, but created by ourselves?
At the same time, the Russians are paying great attention to the development of Putin’s youth movement, the Yunarmiya, and to the development of compelling information content for those teenagers who will fight for Russian interests tomorrow. Recently, the Russians released a separate app for communication and messaging for the Yunarmiya, thus creating a sense of separateness and specialness among these teenagers, while isolating them from other information influences. In Ukraine, such projects are not even talked about.
Thousands of Russian schoolchildren have already been trained to fly drones so that tomorrow, after the age of 18, they will be able to launch them in combat in Ukraine. In our schools, only a few enthusiasts teach Ukrainian children this.
In Russian schools, a lot of attention is paid to political, or in fact, propaganda education. Every week, there is a lineup with political propaganda, five-minute hate speeches, explanations of who to hate and why we should kill the “enemies,” i.e. us. In Ukraine, Russian songs dominate the playlists of teenagers, and the few patriotic events held by teachers are far from being fully covered, let alone effective.
Russians, in a completely Soviet style and on a mandatory basis, take schoolchildren to help the mothers of soldiers with their “svo”: fetching water, chopping wood, cleaning, etc. In Ukraine, women and mothers whose husbands have joined the Armed Forces do not even hope for help from the local school.
The channeling of youth energy into quadrobing is a clear indication that the enthusiasm of a nation at war is being misdirected. While Russian and Chinese children are being taught to kill and master killing technologies, in the West, and in Ukraine in particular, teenagers are becoming quadroblers.
If Ukraine does not immediately and organizationally engage in the patriotic education of Ukrainian youth, in a decade we will not only have no one to protect these fertile black soils in Europe, but there will not even be anyone left to live and work in this country.
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