Keywords

Setting the Field of Analysis

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine for the first time became a fully-fledged sovereign state in the modern sense (I omit here the short-lived Ukrainian state entities created at the beginning of the twentieth century such as the Ukrainian People’s Republic or the Hetmanate; Plokhy, 2015). From the very beginning when Leonid Kravchuk was appointed president, Ukraine has chosen the path of democratization with an elected parliament and president. Despite the high level of corruption and the associated oligarchization of Ukraine’s political and business elites, the country managed over the following decades to maintain democratic institutions with a vibrant political life and viable elections (Klimina, 2015). In subsequent elections up until 2014 and the outbreak of the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian authority had a changing character: Different political groups representing different interests as well as different ideologies were coming to power. On one hand, pro-Russian forces were present in terms of the Russian-speaking voters from eastern and southern Ukraine where heavy industry and mining are concentrated. On the other hand, pro-Western and pro-European forces were found mainly from the central and western regions who saw Ukraine’s future exclusively in terms of integrating into the structures of the European Union. However, one can argue that 2014 was a turning point for Ukraine’s entire political system (Leshchenko, 2015). This was because the Revolution of Dignity, the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych, and the Russian Federation’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas had both symbolically and realistically ended this kind of ideological competition (Hrytsak, 2015). Since then, pro-Western electoral orientations began to dominate in the war-torn Ukraine, and pro-Russian forces have been outlawed over time. As of 2023, the support for having Ukrainians join the European Union reached 83%, with only 3% opposed (Rating Group, 2023).

Thus, 2014 was a time caesura that divided two different periods in Ukraine’s history, as well as two different developmental trajectories of the state and society as a consequence. I will therefore take 2014 as the dividing point of my analysis and focus on education as one of the most important areas and examples over which the two trends can be compared. I will consider the extent to which the reforms in the education system correlated with or were a result of the more general political trends of the respective sides. I will then consider the differences between the educational policy that was pursued during the transition and after the outbreak of Russian aggression, by which I mean the defined directions, goals, and anticipated effects of the educational reforms. All these questions are meant to answer the more general question of how significant the war was in terms of the modernization tendencies in Ukraine.

Resentment Versus Narrative Nationalization

The starting point of my comparative analysis will be to refer to the process of political transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in an educational context. For most of the Eastern Bloc states, this primarily meant two things: democratization and the sovereigntization of education. One area where these processes could be observed was in the educational historical policy of the young states. This was also the case in Ukraine, where these phenomena had begun back in the late 1980s. Georgiy Kasyanov (2018, p. 204) called this the “nationalization of the past” as a natural consequence of gaining independence and therefore involves the definition and adoption of certain elements of the past by a given community (civic or national), as well as a process of combining the isolated elements into a single grand narrative (Kuzio, 2016). The result of this process then becomes the nationalization of the grand narrative by the state as representative of the citizens. The fact that perhaps the most important field in which the nationalization of the official narrative was realized has been the field of education is important to emphasize, especially its elements that refer to historical memory and therefore the mother tongue. This is because, as in the case of Ukraine, the overriding aim of the transformation was to transform a non-historical nation devoid of any sovereign narrative about itself into a historical nation (i.e., one that becomes not an object but a subject of history). This is what happened in the late 1980s when the historical discourse of nation and state as a regional variant of the so-called Soviet man began to be transformed into a nationalized discourse in Ukraine. Kasyanov (2018, p. 207) noted that Ukrainian universities didn’t even have separate faculties for Ukrainian history back in 1990.

The two decades following its independence, however, were not a triumph of nationalized consciousness in Ukraine, not even in the educational space. This was the period that outlined the ideological conflict that had defined social life in Ukraine until 2014, which I mentioned at the beginning of the article. This was because nationalist tendencies in education were opposed by the Soviet-nostalgic tendencies (i.e., those rooted in post-Soviet resentment and represented in social and political life by people associated with post-communist circles). The first clear breakthrough in this ideological confrontation occurred in 2003, one year before the Orange Revolution that brought Viktor Yushchenko, who was considered a pro-European democrat, to power. An example of such a shift can be seen regarding the issue of the state-level commemoration of the Holodomor (Applebaum-Sikorska, 2017), which was only officially recognized as genocide in 2003 (Graziosi, 2004; Kasyanov, 2019, pp. 413–428; Kravchenko, 2015).

Reforms of the Education System in the Transition Period

Referring directly to the education system and the relevant legislation, these can be said unequivocally to have been subject to continuous reforms over the last 30 years without producing the expected results (Novakova, 2017). The directions of the reforms should be emphasized as being in line with the ideological orientations of the reformers and thus to have differed, sometimes significantly, over the years. The new Educational Framework Law was enacted on April 25, 1991 while Ukraine was still formally part of the Soviet Union. As an indication of the importance that members of the Verkhovna Rada attached to the renewal of education, the document defined the main goals as achieving a high degree of national self-identification. Subsequent legislative regulations emphasized the need for national rebirth and the reconstruction of Ukrainian statehood. Already at the beginning of the journey toward independence and democracy, the achievement of the envisaged goals under these new conditions was realized, at least at the declarative level, to depend first and foremost on the construction of a modern national system of education (Gavrilenko, 2021).

The Crisis of Finance and Optimization in Education

The 1990s were a time of deep crisis in Ukraine’s transformation, one which took its toll on education. The need to seek savings, which was called optimization, resulted in a decline in the number of schools, teachers, and, in subsequent years, students themselves. For example, at the beginning of the 1990s, Ukraine had more than 22,000 general secondary schools. More than 20 years later, it only had 14,900 (Samohin, 2014). However, this may have been due to a large decrease in the number of students, going from about 7 million after independence to 4.2 million in the 2020–2021 school year (Gavrilenko, 2021). In any case, a crisis had begun with the education system reforms that led to the state becoming largely indebted to educators; consequently, a decrease occurred in the prestige of the profession, followed by an exodus of qualified staff. The 1990s were also associated with frequent strikes by employees in the educational sphere. In such a case, a growing gap occurred between the declarations of successive governments and the actual situation in schools. In 1996, the government adopted the Education Law, which stated that education should be a central part of the Ukrainian economy. This was to be ensured by the provision to allocate 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP) to education (Chernina, 2017). However, this level of spending on education was never achieved in Ukraine. Rather, it declined throughout the 1990s from 5.6% of GDP to 4.3% in 1999, despite oligarchic fortunes growing at the same time. The situation seemed like it would improve with the recovery from the crisis in the first years of the twenty-first century. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) even indicated the percentage of GDP allocated to education in 2009 to have been 8.2% (Bashko, 2016). Unfortunately, with the onset of Russian aggression in 2014, the situation took a turn for the worse, with this indicator falling by almost 2% in the following years. In addition, this indicator doesn’t accurately reflect the structure of the state’s educational expenditures. Most of these funds went not for development investments but to provide teachers’ salaries (i.e., more was given to maintain the systemic status quo).

The Crazy Run of Reforms

The first decade of the twenty-first century was a turbulent time for Ukrainian education and was associated with tectonic shifts correlated with political changes, namely whichever political orientation happened to be in power. Ukraine entered the twenty-first century with a pro-Russian government. The political course of the country only slowly turned toward the West with the events of 2004 (i.e., the Orange Revolution).

The main motivation behind the education reforms the various governments at the time introduced was to combat the most serious disease in Ukrainian social life: corruption. The introduced changes were therefore aimed at objectivizing the assessment process. Significantly, some of the changes introduced after 2004 (i.e., after the Orange Revolution) had resulted from the course adopted for integrating into the structures of the European Union. They were therefore a derivative of the ideological orientation of the pro-democratic elites in power at the time. These changes occurred one after the other. In 2001, the Ministry of Education introduced a 12-point grading system for students. The ministry’s reasoning behind the introduction of this change is interesting, as it didn’t only specify the change to be precisely about objectivizing the assessment process. Another argument referred to a change in the philosophy of assessment in general directly related to the departure from post-Soviet patterns. Namely, the new grading system required teachers to focus not on students’ failures (as had been the case in the old four-point system) but on their level of achievement (Gavrilenko, 2021). This also meant a change in the definition of teachers’ roles, as well as a change in the definition of students themself. In short, a shift can be said to have occurred from thinking in terms of punishment to thinking in terms of support.

Further changes followed practically year after year. In 2002, a 12-year teaching cycle was introduced. The argument here again was to focus on the students, who were being given more time to master difficult material (the reform was reversed in 2010 after pro-Russian forces came to power). Another change occurred in 2003 with the introduction of the provided educational services being licensed. A major structural change again took place when Ukraine joined the Bologna Process in 2005. Of course, this brought Ukrainian universities closer to European ones and had been a result of the orientation chosen by the democratic political forces of the time toward integrating into the EU structures. An important argument for joining the Bologna Process was also a civilizational one that emphasized belonging to the Western world.

Another profound systemic reform took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2008, a procedure called the External Independent Assessment (EIA) was introduced as a condition for admission to all higher education institutions in the country (Supreme Council of Ukraine, 2007). From that year onwards, an external examination regarding specific subjects had to be passed in order to enter a university. The result of the exam allowed admission to a specific higher education institution. In the case of this reform, a combination of arguments was also found referring to pro-European aspirations. On one hand, the centralization and removal of entrance examinations from the competence of the committees of individual universities had become part of the fight against corruption in education. On the other hand, the discussions about the EIA emphasized that work on the procedure was to be carried out with the participation of NGOs and Western partners. Undeniably, the procedure was also part of Ukraine’s pre-2014 pro-European developmental trajectory.

In conclusion, Ukraine can be said to have been dealing until 2014 with reform efforts of successive governments that had no clear directions, and these efforts did not constitute any unified coherent strategy for transforming Ukraine’s education system. The reason for this was the post-communist legacy that was present in the form of high levels of corruption and extreme underfunding of the system. Alongside natural demographic processes, this necessitated a radical slimming down of the school network (Romaniuk & Gladun, 2015). Throughout the first decade of transition, therefore, Ukraine at best was dealing with efforts to preserve the status quo. The watershed moments during this time were correlated with political events such as the Orange Revolution of 2004, the result of which saw pro-democratic forces being able to bring Ukraine into the Bologna Process and to have assessment objectivized at the central level. Each of these changes was presented not only as a reform measure but also as a civilizational choice that turned Ukraine toward the West, thus breaking with its subordinate position toward a hegemonic Russia.

War and Changes in Education After 2014

As stated earlier, 2014 and the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine represents a time caesura and marks a decisive change with Ukraine’s education system. This is linked to the political changes in the following years, the most important of which is the consistent removal of openly pro-Russian forces from the political space. At the same time, the Russian attack on Ukraine broke the long-standing balance of supporters and opponents of integration with EU states in favor of those supporting EU and NATO accession.

Every moment of historical shift is conducive to leading radical change (Minakov, 2018). In the case of the education system, this took place on many levels. Ukraine’s deep financial problems, together with the authorities’ declared need to ensure a high equal level of education, were an argument for the liquidation of schools with small numbers of pupils that were generally located in small towns or villages. Pure neo-capitalist logic was at work here. In 2017, educating one pupil cost the budget 9,600 Ukrainian hryvnia. However, in rural schools scattered in the remote regions of the country, this cost could be as high as 20,000–60,000 hryvnia (Chernina, 2017). The state therefore proposed a solution by creating a system of supporting schools (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine [MON], 2022). These are the schools that are considered to be the best in each region with larger numbers of pupils. They will be provided with better technical and teaching facilities and tasked with taking over the pupils from the smaller schools that are closing down. The project would provide free transport for children from closed schools to supporting schools. As a result, almost 1,400 schools were closed in the country from 2014–2018. As expected, this resulted in an increase in the number of pupils in the supporting schools, thus putting a strain on teaching staff. In smaller schools, this took on paradoxical forms, where a teacher of mathematics for example would have to act as a physical education teacher at the same time. Such burdens created a shortage of teachers in remote schools, which then became another argument for their closure (Kurovs’ka & Mulavka, 2018).

Similar changes were only a prelude to much deeper transformations of the entire Ukrainian education system. These changes need to be mentioned as being part of a more general transformation of the country as a result of the war. I am referring to the process of the decentralization of Ukraine that had started under the presidency of Petro Poroshenko, namely a reorganization in which many decision-making, as well as financing processes, would be transferred from the center to successively lower levels of local authority. This decentralization was one of the elements in the cardinal reform of the entire state and was designed to bring it closer to the standards and practices of European democratic states. The most profound educational change in Ukraine is associated with the initiation of the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform in 2016. In a nutshell, the creators of this reform can be said to have intended it to shift the system to a completely new trajectory involving not just the acquisition of knowledge, school autonomy, and motivated teachers but also being student-focused with a partnership pedagogy, as well as oriented toward the pragmatic side of knowledge and competence. The NUS project concretely defines the profile of new students as the product of the school. Students are conscious Ukrainians, comprehensively developed and responsible citizens and patriots who are not afraid to take risks and therefore to look for new solutions. Students are critical and deeply moral people who respect human rights (NUS, 2017).

The first test of the effectiveness of the NUS reform was indeed global and linked to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Ukrainian context, the lock-down-induced changes, unprecedented for a modern global reality, were superimposed tectonically on the social changes that the warfare had caused. As a result of the piling up of crises in Ukraine, ensuring the continuity of schooling among Ukrainian children and youth became crucial. The local needs of Ukrainian society immediately began to dovetail closely with the global agenda articulated in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) documents, in particular, the “Every Child Learns: UNICEF Education Strategy 2019–2030” (UNICEF, 2019). Of the three main goals of this strategy (i.e., equitable access to learning opportunities, improved learning and skills for all, and improved learning in emergencies and fragile contexts), equalizing access to education and improving learning conditions in a crisis situation, such as warfare or occupation undoubtedly, proved to be unexpectedly relevant for Ukraine. UNICEF data at the beginning of 2023 indicated that warfare had a traumatizing impact on 5.7 million Ukrainian school-aged children. The scale of the crisis is so great that effective aid must be coordinated and delivered from an international level. In the case of UNICEF, it was dealing from the outset with not only activities in Ukraine itself but also in the neighboring countries that had taken on the main burden of hosting and caring for war refugees. A strategy combining traditional approaches with high-tech solutions was therefore chosen, as this was the only way to reach the largest group of children both in Ukraine itself and those who’d been displaced. In concrete terms, this meant that support had been started to promote access to formal and non-formal education in the country and in places where this was possible by providing the necessary educational materials and Internet access, as well as psychological support for both children and young people and also the education staff (UNICEF, 2023). The activities implemented in neighboring countries had a slightly different nature, as they namely focused on contacting local educational institutions in order to help integrate Ukrainian children and youth into the local educational conditions that differed from their native ones, hence causing particular adaptation problems (e.g., language, curriculum differences, integration, intolerance).

Concrete examples of the implementation of the described strategies that were coordinated internationally but implemented locally can be clearly seen in the field of distance learning. Since the beginning of the Russian aggression, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science has identified prioritizing the creation of opportunities to keep Ukrainian students in contact with the state education system, especially the teaching of the Ukrainian language, history, and literature, as these are subject areas that cannot be full if at all implemented when displaced students are in a non-Ukrainian educational system (MON, 2022). Such contact is also necessary for being able to obtain official documents certifying the attainment of particular educational degrees. One tool for realizing such defined goals is the All-Ukrainian Online School (Всеукраїнська школа онлайн) at e-school.net.uae-school.net.ua. This is actually an educational platform designed for the remote education of pupils from Grades 5–11, and also offers methodological support to teachers. The objectives for creating this platform fully reflect UNICEF’s goals of providing every Ukrainian child and teacher with equal, free, and safe access to quality educational content. Interestingly, the example of this platform illustrates well the importance of the experience of fighting a pandemic in the educational system’s continued struggle with the effects of war. Indeed, the project started its operation during the pandemic, but as a result of the openly aggressive warfare by the Russian Federation, it has become a ready-made tool that can be used to continue teaching under warfare conditions. Moreover, the project is a good example of cooperation between governmental and non-governmental institutions both in Ukraine and abroad. Indeed, while the educational materials on the platform are in line with MON’s official recommendations and have been certified by the Ukrainian Institute for the Development of Education, they were realized by the non-governmental organization Osvitoria with the financial support of the Swiss-Ukrainian Decentralization for Improved Democratic Education (DECIDE) project and with the substantive support of UNICEF. DECIDE is thus a model example of cooperation between national structures and international institutions pursuing global goals while also assisting Ukraine’s systemic transformation to European standards with regard to such aspects as decentralization.

Importance is had in mentioning that this is just one of many examples of cooperation where national educational policy goals have interacted and been realized with Ukraine’s global partners. One example worth mentioning is the World Bank’s Human Capital Project (World Bank, 2021), which aims to promote investment in human capital and increase equal opportunities. Here again, the pandemic experience has proven to be an important impetus by forcing global questions about the meaning of investment in human capital. In Ukraine, the war activities have added a specific context for these global goals and been implemented in the form of Ukrainian Educational Hubs. The aim of these hubs is primarily to organize catch-up classes so that learners can fill in the gaps in their education, as well as to organize basic skills courses on soft skills, psychological support, language learning, information technology (IT), and health education. Similar to the previously described project, all of these have been approved by MON and made available online for anyone interested in improving their competences in the form of continuing education.

The example of the above projects alone clearly shows how the process of transforming the education system in Ukraine is strongly coupled with international development initiatives. Most of the comprehensive innovative solutions in the field of education and those designed to help overcome the consequences of the war have been implemented in close cooperation between the international organizations and the official governmental institutions and non-governmental organizations from Ukraine. The specifics of the conflict in Ukraine (i.e., the massive internal displacement and refugee movement to European Union countries) have evidently resulted in a preference for remote education innovations. In this sense, the paradoxical positive impact can be observed from the pandemic experience that inculcated the basic practices of remote learning and provided the opportunity to build the digital foundations of educational platforms in Ukraine that have proven essential after 2022.

Cases Regarding the Implementation of New Strategies

The NUS reform proposed a number of changes for implementing the strategic objectives of the reform. This section will now look at the most significant changes that demonstrate the depth of the reforms and their fundamentally new dimension.

Patriotism

I would like to draw attention to the aspects of the project’s assumptions related to patriotism. The project planned to allocate as many as five lesson hours to the topic of “Defense of the Homeland” that was based on the subject with the same name and introduced back in 2015. It involves lessons on patriotic education that are compulsory for students in Grades 10–11. If one looks at the recommendations for the subject, one can say that patriotism is boiled down to preparing young people for the military. The assumption is that students would be given knowledge of the structure of the Ukrainian army, taught how to use weapons, and gain knowledge about self-defense techniques and first aid. However, the practice of implementing this subject in schools has shown another interesting regularity. A change occurred in 2020 regarding the name of the subject, going from “Defense of the Homeland” to “Defense of Ukraine” (MON, 2020). Upon looking at the ministerial reasoning behind this change, Minister of Education and Science Hanna Novosad is seen to have stated this change to be a break from the Soviet paradigm in Ukrainian education. This is because the old name had been inherited from the Soviet era. Six years after the start of the war and 29 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine can be said to still be dealing with a process of sovereigntization of education, which is understood as a move from the Soviet-nostalgic narratives to national narratives. The rupture took place in the rhetorical field, which underscores the vitality of the long-standing authoritarian narrative patterns.

Competing Learning Cycles

With these reform assumptions in mind, this section will now look at their ideological entanglements by using the example of the changes related to the compulsory education cycles. As I wrote earlier, the reform in 2000 had resulted in a shift from an 11-year teaching cycle inherited from communism to a 12-year cycle. This had caused dissatisfaction in general, partly due to resentment, the unpreparedness of the reform, and parental calculations, suggesting that a shorter cycle would allow children to move on to tertiary education sooner and thus consequently enter the labor market sooner. Interestingly, after the pro-Russian post-communist forces came to power, the Soviet model was reverted to in 2010 under President Viktor Yanukovych. The length of schooling turned out to be indicative of the support for the developmental direction of the country as a whole. When being uprooted, the 11-year cycle had been supported by people burdened by post-communist resentment, while those supporting the 12-year cycle expressed their pro-European convictions. When work on the NUS reform was underway in 15 regions of the country in 2015, the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Ukrainian Sociology Service had already conducted a survey on attitudes toward the 12-year cycle. According to the results, 70% of the questioned parents and 68% of educators were against this cycle being introduced (Osvita, 2015). What is interesting in this case is the arguments on the other side that had proposed the change. The 12-year cycle implies the adoption of European quality standards and is therefore more or less nothing but another step toward EU integration. The opposite side of this argument concerns the post-Soviet system that was in force at the time in countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Armenia. To break away from it was to sever further ties with post-Soviet countries and therefore was a civilizational choice. Therefore, regardless of the low support, the creators of the reform unsurprisingly had introduced an extended learning cycle in 2018 because they were indeed pursuing civilizational goals.

Teaching the Mother Tongue

The latest example of a shift in the state’s education policy would be one of the most controversial provisions of the reform that came into force in 2017. It concerned the provisions related to teaching in the languages of national minorities living in Ukraine, especially Paragraph 7 of the reform titled “Language of Education.” It states that the language of instruction in Ukraine is the state language (i.e., Ukrainian). At the same time, people belonging to national minorities were guaranteed the right to learn their own language. Their language could also be the language of instruction alongside Ukrainian but in separate classes or groups at the level of pre-school and early childhood education (Grades 1–4). The indigenous peoples of Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars, the Karaites, and the Gagauz retained the right to full education in their own language.

Perhaps the most important provision of the law from the point of view of the controversy it has caused is that, regarding the educational institutions and in accordance with the adopted core curriculum, one or more disciplines may be taught in two or more languages (i.e., the state language, English, or another official EU language). The consequences of the provision are primarily twofold: on one hand, the statutory possibility of learning in a minority language is preserved; on the other, learning in Russian is excluded. This situation shows that the main intention of the legislator was primarily the gradual de-Russification of the educational system in Ukraine (i.e., the Ukrainianization of this system; Siegień, 2018).

Ukraine’s attitude stems primarily from the Donbass experience, when the language problem was used as an instrument in confronting the weak Ukrainian state. Russia, wishing to strengthen separatist tendencies, reached for the demagogic argument of language discrimination. Indeed, the concept of Russkiy Mir [Russian world], which was an ideological screen for aggression in eastern Ukraine, was based on the argument of defending the Russian language and thus was a weaponization of the role of language (Ryazanova-Clarke, 2017). The issue of education in the mother tongue had thus been a kind of weapon in this war. Consequently, the gradual introduction of teaching in Ukrainian can be perceived as a defensive strategy. Let me add that this is a far overdue response from the Ukrainian state to the threat of separatism inspired from the east. Working on the language would then be a kind of ideological prevention that would be able to limit the reception of Russian propaganda. Thus, the war can be said to have been the result of the earlier absence of the state and education in the Ukrainian language in the Donbass as well as other regions.

Conclusions

Regarding my research questions, I should state that 2014 can be considered a time caesura in the development of the education system in Ukraine. Over the last 30 years, the proposed and implemented changes have been closely correlated with the general political trends. Until 2014, Ukraine had been at a political crossroads, as the country’s social and political life was dominated by the radically different competing policies: integrating into the European community and rapprochement with Russia. When combined with economic stagnation, this meant that most of the changes in the field of education were of a sham nature and aimed at maintaining the status quo. Significant reform impetuses at that time came from pro-European political forces, which led to the integration of the Ukrainian education system into the Bologna Process. This can be viewed not so much as a political but rather a civilizational choice. The need to defend this pro-European course was, among other things, behind the outbreak of the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. The main effect of the Revolution and consequently of the Russian-Ukrainian war was the adoption of strategic development assumptions, within whose framework one condition for integrating into EU structures was the decentralization of power and the decisive fight against corruption. In this context, a shift in education policy can be mentioned, as comprehensive and strategic changes had occurred within it for the first time, changes where the education reform was coherent and followed the generally accepted reform directions of the whole country. The culmination of this process has been the introduction of the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform. Emphasizing the ideological dimension of these reforms is important. Patriotic education as an implementation of the sovereigntization of education and the unequivocal shift to teaching in the mother tongue are examples of the Ukrainianization of the education system, something which until the outbreak of war in 2014 had not been achieved since its independence. In this sense, a glaring example is seen of the modernizing effects of war (Bandura & Staguhn, 2023), with the outbreak of conflict forcing radical corrective steps to be taken in order to maintain the sustainability of the state system as it is.

One tragic test of the resilience of the system undergoing reform was the open aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. As of January 2023, 1,259 schools (11% of all schools in the country) had been damaged as a result of hostilities, with 223 having been completely destroyed. Also, 13% of students have left the country and remained abroad. Teaching in the country was halted for a fortnight but resumed online or in places where certain conditions were able to be met (e.g., having a bomb shelter in the school). Currently, 36% of schools work in mixed mode (i.e., online/stationary), and another 36% work exclusively online (Kohut et al., 2023). While the central government creates a long-term plan for the reconstruction of the school network and plans to continue the implementation of the NUS reform, the regional authorities ensure that schools can work on a daily basis, coordinate assessment and ongoing repairs, and cooperate with international aid organizations. This means that the decentralization of power and the building of local structures has been successful because it has allowed a flexible response to war and a rapid return to an operational state even under conditions of warfare. Apart from local authorities, the most important element of the resilient response of Ukraine’s education system has turned out to be the teachers themselves, who showed initiative under extreme conditions, continuing to teach in shelters without electricity or turning gas stations stocked with electricity generators into remote teaching hubs for students (Hook, 2023). Under conditions of war, the educational system and its participants have proven to be one of the most effective points of resistance in the fight against aggression.