Two Sides Of Education: Oppression In One, Flourishing In Another
How Huge Is The Difference In Education Between The 50th And The 10th Ranked Countries?
By the age of 17, I purely attended Ukrainian schools and was exposed exclusively to Ukrainian forms of education. I bring up being 17 because my move to the Netherlands in 2022 completely altered the embodiment of school in my eyes.
My first and only Dutch school became the 7th institution I have changed, but it is another story.
Given my current dual experiences, I’m interested in comparing the two and sharing them with you. In terms of education, The Netherlands is considered the 10th best country, while Ukraine ranks 40 places lower. Although it may not appear significant on paper, the impact of this difference is quite dramatic, taking it from a personal life experience.
So let’s waste no time further, and get into it.
Throughout my whole life, I was not a big fan of the educational structure and hierarchy in Ukraine.
I did not always understand how the things that we learn will come to be useful or will help me integrate them into society. The following questions: Why? Or How? became the building essence of my curiosity during the study period. Although the usual answers to those questions were overly vague or deflected with another question, the answer to who I would become as a result was still missing.
I have always tried to shut those questions down and suppress my curiosity about everything because this was the right way.
In my school, we did not practice such things as effective learning. To put it bluntly, we did not know how to study. You had to learn to adapt to the method of storing information at the back of your mind by yourself. However, when you don’t know what you’re learning or why, this short-term memory only functions once. Most of the time, you are bombarded constantly with information and either you follow the flow or look for the holes in the system and cheat.
In both scenarios, you are not actually getting knowledge.
Now I would love to elaborate on the school environment and the attitude of teachers towards students.
As you may assume in the post-soviet country, the appearance of discipline and control cover the explicit abuse.
The screams and shouts that young kids were consistently exposed to just for getting something wrong are ridiculous. Those same kids who were bombarded with the information were usually also the victims of verbal and sometimes physical abuse.
Unfortunately, I see the complete picture just now, but as young buddies, we did not stand our ground and allowed others to take control of us. In reality, what could have we done? We were just kids, but reminiscing about this, I would love to be near my past self and just speak out for him.
So when I shared with you a bit of personal education background in Ukraine, I think we are ready to shift to the current reality — The Netherlands.
Moving to the Netherlands in 2022 exposed me to a completely diverse system and culture, and now I feel like I wouldn’t even notice the difference if this hadn’t happened.
When I just got immersed in a more liberal society, with plenty of opportunities, I realized how constrained I was. Whether it has been a choice of what subject you want to do, or how you decide to behave, I certainly felt a big difference in the Dutch environment.
I have never seen a teacher in Ukraine as a friend, and even using their name as a way of addressing them was considered impolite. If you don’t worship the teacher verbally and formally, it means that you are being disrespectful.
Sounds like a complete nonsense, isn’t it?
Ukrainian teachers tend to take on a dominant role, dictating the course of events and treating students as mere observers and yes-people. Conversely, Dutch teachers opt for a more cooperative approach.
In Dutch education, the teacher tries to become a friend of yours, cooperates, and as a result, educates the students about their mistakes.
The biggest difference I felt between the Ukrainian and Dutch school environments is that my opinion matters.
It gave me freedom, a room to discover myself as more than a living being, and not constrain myself to what I have to or should do.
While I am grateful for the mandatory aspects that helped me during my school years and the wonderful Ukrainian mentors I had later on, I couldn’t help but notice the true impact of being forced into certain things after freeing myself from them.
New hobbies and identities made me reborn. It is crazy how big of an influence this part of your life has on you. Either it is going to be an encouragement of every step that you take or the constant limit of your opinion and actions.
It is worth mentioning that at times, Dutch education appears to be overly lenient to me. The blurred lines between control, responsibility, and freedom, can lead some individuals to become excessively self-centered, careless, and lacking ambition.
However, there are always certain outliers and extremes in every part of life, so this is inevitable.
When you showcase the lower limits, people are going to abuse it. When you showcase the bigger limits, people are going to hate it and seek ways of cheating and fighting.
Now let’s get into some data:
- Were you aware that, for instance, in the United States, 25% of students have experienced at least one traumatic event by the age of 16?
- Or what are your thoughts on the fact that approximately 500 Japanese students under the age of 20 take their own lives every year? The circumstances of those students are even harsher than the ones I experienced in Ukraine.
School should not be remembered as a traumatic experience in the life of the child, and then adult.
- School has to be a place where you get the answer to all of your questions.
- The place that doesn’t focus on worshipping another person, or the place where older people are compensating for their miserable life by shouting at another kid.
- It should be home, or at least feel like one. It should be a place where you get the answers to the questions:
Should I? Or Have to?
What does take it to become a decent human being?
And Who is essentially a decent human being?
Those are all minor questions that form an enormous gap in the education that we currently have and demonstrate that we are so far away from a utopian society.
We should not simply improve this system, we should change the exact purpose of it. This lack of freedom, and the messed up system, has killed plenty of ambitions within the young people and will kill more.
At the end of this article, I want you to think about your school and your experience in the school years.
1. How do you remember your school days?
2. Why do you remember them like this?
3. What do you think you would have changed, if you came back to school today?
Let those questions be the food for the thought.
And thanks for reading!
