Comparative history in humanities’ teaching in Ukraine

Abstract


 
 
 History as a Magistra Vitae encompasses a lot of mutually complementing research and teaching subjects. It should be taught step by step from local and simple items up to global generalizations taking into account the age, educational level, and professional interests of audience. The pupils at the primary and secondary schools learn at first about their native towns or districts, later in more detail about their motherland as a whole, and common patterns of Europe with just basic names and data of the World. The higher schools are to combine minimal information of history necessary for any civilized human being with emphasized attention at the respective fields’ past separately for future lawyers, physicians, engineers, etc. In Ukraine as an extremely exhausted nation it is crucially important to break deeply rooted complex of inferiority, to prove indivisibility of domestic history with East-Central and the rest of Europe. We should overcome as soon as possible a situation when large territories had been devastated by Holodomor and colonized by alien settlers from other parts of the Soviet Union after this genocide. The newcomers’ offspring gradually will get accommodated to their new homeland yet during Transition they are an easy target for destructive impacts from abroad. To counteract subversive propaganda, we need highly educated teachers and lecturers. The pro-European liberals in Ukraine had been exterminated by notorious totalitarian purges or forced to exile and replaced by mercenaries of Russian revanchist forces. The huge traditional Universities hardly can be reformed and modernized, as they inherited stereotypes and prejudices from the past. Newly created, seemingly more flexible and certainly less corrupted higher schools attract capable and ambitious people yet their alumni feel temptation of more easy opportunities. Ukraine needs patriots now more than ever desperately fighting for survival against aggressor in current Hybrid war. The prospects look optimistic, yet for the time being it requires a lot of efforts. History teaching becomes still more important to promote unity of interdependent philological, historical, political, and state making generations of national rebirth aimed at the repatriation to modernity.