What About Education - Intro

V. is preparing for her third year of medical college under the MUCH Transportation Scholarship

After ten years of developing the MUCH outreach programs for disadvantaged children and those with disabilities, we have sorted our programs into three categories: health care, education, and clothing. In this article, I will begin to discuss the topic of education.

The schools of Ukraine provide a good educational program, similar to that of the past Soviet educational system. Since the fall of Communism in 1991, Ukraine has been rebuilding itself as a country. One of the many realities during this time was the weakening of the educational system, in a large part, due to the fact that many of the teachers were not being paid.

The teachers, a breed of their own, continued as long as they could, providing the same quality of education as before. After many months of no pay, their personal economy became desperate. They began to take matters into their own hands. They charged the students in different ways. Some for grades, some for diplomas. That was then. Unfortunately, when you corrupt the moral fiber of a people whose government was already corrupt, changing that fiber to the positive, is not so easy.

Having spoken about this problem with some of the teachers that I interact with throughout Ukraine, I asked about the quality of education today. They all agreed that it had taken a turn for the worse two decade ago, but it was getting better. The computer age has helped education, but it has had an equally negative effect on the children. On the plus side, in 2011, the first generation of children born in freedom graduated high school. They, unlike their parents, learned the truth about the world and life in other countries, having access to an overwhelming amount of information. On the negative side, the children prefer the video games and anything that they can learn how to download for free. Becoming flooded with choices has greatly distracted the children from their focus on studies.

About six years ago, after watching the development of the children from difficult homes at the Emmaus Food Program in Illichevsk, I began to understand the bigger need for these children. It was higher education. Without it, their lives would most probably imitate that of their parents, low-income work, alcohol abuse, and no vision for their future. This is bad, but what makes it worse is that Ukraine is on the fast track to change, and change in a big way. You can read in the  http://tinyurl.com/2012jannewsletter about the first university graduate and the second student beginning her third, who participate(d) in the MUCH Transportation Scholarship Program.

I invite you to follow my article series at it unfolds.