Civic Education and Democracy
in Post-Soviet Europe
By Matthew Orr
Soviet Union
Russia
Constitution ratified:
1993
Major amendments:
2008, 2014, 2020
“Democracy Index 2020":
3.31 / 10
Belarus
Ukraine
Constitution ratified:
1994
Major amendments:
1996, 2004
“Democracy Index 2020":
2.59 / 10
Constitution ratified:
1996
Major amendments:
2004 (overturned 2010, reinstated 2014)
“Democracy Index 2020":
5.81 / 10
Introduction
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe, followed by in the Soviet Union itself in 1991, was celebrated as a democratic breakthrough. The newly independent Eastern Slavic nations of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine at first also largely embraced the mantra of democracy and liberty. This is profusely manifest in the text of their constitutions, which were written and passed in the 1990s with significant Western support. Surely, many scholars and experts believed, the “end of history” was upon us. But once the dust had settled in the late-1990s, it was clear that the path to democracy in these states was neither straightforward nor inevitable, as even policymakers seemed to believe at the time. Problems of nostalgia, corruption, and electoral fraud, among many others, posed serious challenges to these nascent democracies.
30 years later, looking at all 15 of the former Soviet republics reveals a broad spectrum of regime types and ratings on global democracy indices, despite decades of similar education and top-down Soviet rule.
“R/MapPorn - Democracy in the Former Soviet Union,” Reddit, accessed May 15, 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gc586h/democracy_in_the_former_soviet_union/.
How did we get here?
This question is particularly interesting when looking at the Eastern Slavic states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, where there is still considerable variation in regime type and democracy score despite their geographic proximity and closely linked histories, languages, and cultures.
This website uses civic education as a window for understanding the variation in democratic outcomes and peculiarities of regime types in the region.
It will describe the civic education regimes in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and explain civic education's role in the viability of each country's political system. This “civic competence” approach argues that civic education in schools is an informative lens for both explaining the common Soviet origins of these states’ democratic deficits and elucidating the outstanding preconditions necessary for the appearance of more democratic outcomes.
Defining Terms
Democracy
will generally be conceptualized relative to three preconditions:
1) Majority rule
2) Protections for minorities
3) Free and fair elections
Civics and Civic Education
refer to formal subjects in school that teach children about their societal structure, political system, and ideology.
Soviet Civics
In order to understand the flaws in today’s civics curriculum in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, one must first understand its history. Civics curriculum in the region remains largely the result of Perestroika era reforms to older Soviet civics. Perestroika era civics were given a mostly cosmetic makeover following independence in the 1990s to become the basis of civics in the region for years to come.
While the word “democracy” has carried a normatively positive association throughout these curricula, the understanding of “democracy” (i.e., ideology) broadly promoted in them remains essentially authoritarian and paternalistic. This is due to flaws in civics content and methods stemming from these nations' Soviet past.
The concept of "civics" is quite differently understood in the post-Soviet context. Specifically, people of the former Soviet Union perceive the idea of civics differently from Americans, and this rather different conception manifests itself in how post-Soviet countries continue to think about politics and education. Soviet civics, known by the Russian term grazhdanskoye vospitaniye, is really better understood and translated as “civil upbringing,” and is therefore immediately much more associated with moral and ethical personality than “civics” or “civic education” when used in, say, a U.S. high school, as American civics is more directly associated with knowledge and the fulfillment of concrete civic duties. In fact, after speaking about Russian civics, Russians have often said that the American conception of civics or civic education is probably better translated into Russian as grazhdanskaya gramotnost', “civic literacy”, which puts more emphasis on factual competence. Only in the 1990s and 2000s did a more neutral formulation grazhdanskoye obrazovanie, “civic education,” become widespread.
Furthermore, in the history of Russian political thought, the ideas of citizenship and patriotism have been inseparably linked since tsarist times.[1] Accordingly, a good citizen was historically a good patriot, and a good patriot was one who unquestioningly submits to the sovereign.[2] Some very early Soviet pedagogues in the late 1910s and 1920s attempted to add knowledge and abilities to the idea of grazhdanskoye vospitaniye, or civics, but such methods were later decried as “individualistic petty-bourgeois psychology” during the totalitarianization period of the 1930s, and quickly forgotten.[3] It wasn’t until the late 1980s and really 1990s that such competence-focused conceptions of civics sprang anew Russia. But, unsurprisingly, analysis shows the historic, “patriotic upbringing” understanding of civic education is the one still more popular today, plaguing the curriculum.[4]
The pillar of civic education in the Soviet Union from the 1925 until the country’s collapse was the course Obshchestvovedenie, which when translated means something like, “knowing (or conducting) society.”[5] The essence of the subject was to ensure that in the minds of Soviet schoolchildren lined up a clear system of understanding the world through the prism of the views of Marx and Lenin. The system, albeit squarely through an ideology, trained students to understand the country's existing political regime, social goals, and state objectives as they stood before high-ranking Soviet politicians. One could say that Obshchestvovedenie was just the formal or academic part of the Soviet patriotic education in schools.[6] A single textbook translated into multiple languages came with a guide telling teachers “what, when, and how to teach, so that on each day, each pupil was to be taught in the same way throughout the country, where they would record, memorize, and regurgitate word for word what they read in their book and were told by their teachers.”[7]
Other than this nascent subject, political education of Soviet youth was left directly to the CPSU, via extracurricular organizations—the Komsomol, Pioneers, and Little Octoberists—though these organizations comprised only a small percentage of the Soviet youth in the 1920s and 1930s.[8] In fact, it was the Central Committee that controlled the minutiae of school curricula, and who denied attempts by Narkompros to introduce classes on Soviet politics into all schools. Later that year, a persistent Narkompros was able to introduce new classes for seventh and tenth grade about Communist Party history and the decisions of the Seventh Party Congress, albeit for a mere two hours a week, but the classes were removed after the following year. The Central Committee in 1936 and Sovnarkom in 1939 each condemned the organic attempts by schools to teach Communist Party history, arguing that a matter as delicate as the revolution could not be entrusted to the nation’s “incapable instructors and pupils.”[9] Thus, in the early years of the Soviet Union, children were largely expected to receive practical political knowledge, as opposed to theory, from news publications and participation in party activities. The only knowledge related to civic education within the formal primary education system was within history class.
Education policy began to change immediately after World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied a new place on the world stage as a global superpower. Accordingly, Narkompros was reorganized into the Ministry of Education in 1946. It is in this period that we see the first standardized textbooks for schoolchildren that sought to explain the Soviet political system, Constitution, and the individual’s place in it.
In her 1948 work, Constitution of the Soviet Union: An Accompanying Reader for Middle School, Dr. Maria Pavlovna Kareva, a Doctor of Juridical Sciences from Moscow State University, offers a fascinating look at what Soviet political scientists sought to engender in the youth. The book is worth examining in detail not only because it is ostensibly Russia’s (at the time the Soviet Union) first attempt to standardize civic education specifically about the country’s political system for all schoolchildren, but also because it exhibits and helps us better understand some of the fundamental challenges still facing civics educators and students in Russia to this very day.
While textbooks and classes stressed knowledge in the structural form of the Soviet system, they did not show or even address how students could actually exercise their rights and responsibilities within their lives or stimulate interest in the politics of local government of children’s communities. Both in 1948 and in contemporary Russia, institutions largely failed to live up to goals so loftily set for them, with corruption rampant amongst government officials and basic constitutional and legal protections disregarded on a wide scale. Both in today’s Russia and in Kareva’s time, this led to the conclusion that the problem in society is a deficit of vospitanie, i.e., “moral-political unity,” patriotism, or “spiritual-moral values,” which are all phrases present in both Kareva’s book and current Russian civics curriculum. It is safe to presume that most pedagogues in Kareva’s time would have explained a theoretical or perceived democracy deficit in the USSR not as failure of the institutions themselves, but instead as a failure of the moral and patriotic education of the society that raised the older, pre-Soviet citizens and officials.
In reality, the problem was not that the youth were not brought up patriotically enough, but rather that young people failed to know or identify with their actual representatives in government. This happened because of a lack of focus on students’ own political lives in their civic education classes. This is precisely the failure that existed in Soviet times and is best evidenced by the “questions for repetition” at the end of each chapter of An Accompanying Reader for Middle School. Kareva’s book is correct to explain the structure of the Soviet system as it is intended to function, and some of the exercises, such as, “List the basic rights granted to all citizens by the Constitution of the USSR,” are indeed useful, if somewhat abstract and aspirational. However, more importantly, the book has no questions whatsoever in the other, more important realm: students’ own political reality. The book never asks the students, i.e., the reader herself, to identify by name his or her actual deputies, up the chain of soviets from the town, district, city, oblast, republic and supreme level and so on. It never asks the reader to do or know anything connected with his or her own civic or political life, such as, “Identify when and where are the next elections in your territory?” or more substantively, “What is a topic on which two aspiring deputies disagree in the elections, and what are the arguments for and against each side?” This failure to have students not just memorize abstract facts, but also engage with their own political realities, existed in the Soviet Union and still exists in contemporary Russia, both in textbooks and in practice, as we will see later.
The real solution was and remains to help the youth be competent not only in their government system, but also in their actual representatives and their activities as they relate to them, which is achieved through scenarios, discussions, and debates among students, within reasonable constraints.
[1] И. С. Еремина, “Гражданское Воспитание в России. История и Современность.,” Психопедагогика в Правохранительных Органах 3, no. (46) (2011): 44.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 45.
[4] Ibid, 48.
[5] Галина Сахаревич, “Обществоневедние” (Проект, March 24, 2021), https://www.proekt.media/narrative/obschestvoznanie/.
[6] “Что Такое «Обществознание»,” Единый Портал Обществознание, accessed April 18, 2021, http://humanitar.ru/.
[7] Long, Education of Teachers in Russia. 99.
[8] Larry E. Holmes, “School and Schooling under Stalin, 1931-1953,” Vera Kaplan, Larry E Holmes, and Ben Eklof, Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies and Prospects, vol. 20, The Cummings Center Series (London u.a: Cass, 2005), 59-62, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203318676.
[9] Ibid, 72.
Russia
Leading up to and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, well-intentioned reforms to Russia's education system meant to democratize and decentralize the top-down and choiceless system tragically had the opposite effect in the long run. Civic education was marred by chaos and disorganization at exactly the time it most needed centralization in order to forcefully spread a distinctly democratic vision of the country to young people, resulting in a failure to make a hard break with the past by effectively corresponding to the new 1993 Constitution and stressing practical civic competencies.
One of the best indicators of Russia’s flawed civic education regime over the past 30 years is the state of civic education today. This is because civic education remains startlingly similar and often identical to what it was nearly three decades ago (and, in certain ways, even longer than that). This failure to update civics manifests itself in statistics about Russians’ understanding of political engagement. A study from 2018 shows that even three decades since the Soviet collapse, more than 40% of Russians said they did not understand the meaning of “democracy.”[1] Of the 57% of Russians who claim they know what democracy means, less than half favor democratization in Russia.
[1] Theodore P. Gerber and Hannah S. Chapman, “Familiarity Breeds Contempt? Knowledge and Understanding of Democracy, Support for Democratization, and Global City Residence in Russia,” Democratization 25, no. 3 (April 3, 2018): 496, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2017.1387537.
In 1990, Eduard Dneprov, who was 13 at the time of publication of Kareva’s An Accompanying Reader for Middle School, and thus likely read the book in school, is the newly appointed Minister of Education of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which was flexing its independence under RSFSR President Boris Yeltsin. As a historian of 19th century liberal educational reform movements, Dneprov passionately believes that decentralization, democratization, and privatization will lead to an outpouring of public initiative and finally rebuild Russian education from the bottom up.
Accordingly, Dneprov believed that the biggest flaw in the Soviet/Russian education system was that the teacher was deprived of the right to pedagogical creativity. Put bluntly, the teacher was turned into chinovnik (a government bureaucrat), and as a result, a system of triple alienation was formed: school from society, student from school, and teacher from student.[1] Much like his contemporaries in the economic realm, such as Yegor Gaidar, who attempted to rapidly and unapologetically thrust Russian society into a new, capitalist society with so-called “shock therapy,” Dneprov was skeptical of the idea that Russian teachers and society had to be first “prepared” for reforms or made “ready,” instead opting for immediate, foundational attempts at change, opting to deal with any backlash later.
As a result, despite their liberal democratic intentions, his reforms backfired catastrophically for democracy in Russia by hindering the development of proper civic education. The reason early 1990s reforms had the opposite of their intended effect in the long run is that they left the Ministry of Education with less power over curriculum at exactly the time when it needed to be as strong as possible in the mid-1990s, in order to effectively transition schools across the country ideologically from communism to capitalism and democracy in an orderly manner.[2] Civic education suffered, and remained largely Soviet as a result of the newly federalized system, where staunch communist and other anti-democratic educators in Russia’s regions gained more control over curriculum. The pro-reform center lacked authority and capability to ensure a unified, democratic direction during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when schoolchildren were almost assuredly confused and searching for an explanation as to why their country was changing its name.
This brings us to a key culprit for electoral authoritarianism in today’s Russia—the teachers and substance of the civics classes, which are rooted in the 1990s reforms. The key reform attempt was the introduction of the course Grazhdanovedenie (civics), which was developed starting in 1991 and entered schools in 1993, eventually being taught by 17 thousand teachers across the country and had printed nearly 12 million textbooks.[3] The word was totally new in the lexicon and sought to replace Obshchestvovedenie (Soviet civics) by placing the individual citizen at the center, rather than society. The textbooks for the course were written by Leonid Bogolyubov, the author of Soviet civics textbooks, and contained hundreds of pages of text without a single graph, graphic, or photograph to illustrate or bring the material to life.[4] Reading the 1993 version of textbook makes it clear why many pupils and educators may have found it useless and boring, but his textbook is the basis for Russian civics to this very day, despite maintaining the bureaucratic language typical of Soviet texts and still arguing for the advantages of socialism.[5]
Scholars agree that the first texts written for Grazhdanovedenie and Man and Society were not totally successful in excising the hortatory, dogmatic, and abstract tone that characterized Soviet textbooks (and their successors to this day), with educators finding them difficult to use. These subjects were taught well into the 2000s before being phased out by 2008.[6] By 1996, the privatization and federalization of education started in 1992 had resulted in an explosion of textbooks for various civics courses, with names such as, Law and Politics, The Rights and Freedoms of the Citizen, Responsibility for Preservation of the Law, The Modern World, Fundamentals of Law, Politics and Law, Introduction to Political Science, Democracy: State and Society, to name just a few.
Three main obstacles to civic education reform in Russia can be identified: conceptual, material, and ideological/pedagogical. The initial failure was conceptual, in part due to the definitional misunderstandings mentioned in the previous section, which prevented the separation of civic instruction (obuchenie) from moral and ethical upbringing (vospitaniye), resulting in the continued focus on civic upbringing rather than on competence, which is part of the general reluctance in Russia to divide civic duty from moralism and patriotism.[7]
Materially, one of the most commonly cited errors during the 1990s was the lack of new materials or a failure to adapt civics materials and literature specifically to the Russian Constitution and political context, or what one scholar called the, “embeddedness of an American version of democracy being exported abroad.”[8] When Russian educators found the old and new Russian civic education materials still out of step with reality, they began translating directly from Western materials into Russian, but this led to “naïve and useless” materials precisely because they were not geared to the Russian political context.[9] What was instead needed was a similar text about the new Russian system and Constitution, but apparently no such material was ever widespread.
The overly intellectual verbiage in 1990s textbooks allowed the meaningful new ideas and rights contained in them to become superficial and routine, resulting in the same situation as in the Soviet Union: an ideology of lies made cynical because of its detachment from any political reality.[10] Still worse, it caused cynicism among many Russian educators, as the words “democracy” and “humanism” became devoid of meaning, resulting in scholarly literature that actually criticized democratization for its excessive individualism.[11]
The problem is that the changes in civics of the last twenty years, mirroring the political situation in Russia more broadly, have been predominantly geared toward diluting any progress made in the 1990s and instead subtly reasserting an authoritarian conception of citizenship, with the speed of these trends accelerating dramatically since 2014. The reassertion of an authoritarian conception of citizenship is not only due to formal civic education classes, but also to a proliferation of myriad “patriotic education” initiatives in and outside the classroom meant to supplement the official civics regime, and specifically to replace, refute, and distract from its democratic elements.
As of 2021, the pillar of Russian civic education is Obshchestvoznanie, a social studies course that runs from grades 6 to 11. In total, at basic schools, 280 hours are allocated to it: a mere 1 hour per week from grades 6 to 9, and 2 hours a week from grades 10 to 11. On paper, the current civic education regime in Russia focuses predominately on “knowing-that,” i.e., on discrete, “dry” facts (and often not useful ones), but despite this overwhelming focus, competency in many crucial civic facts remains low.
But the more critical problem is systemic inadequacy in the realm of “knowing-how,” or being familiar with and able to effectively participate in the institutions of one’s own civic life with the acquired knowledge. “knowledge-how” competency is failing most likely because of the shortage of interactive activities, such as discussions, debates, role-playing games and scenarios about concrete issues facing the students in the future, a problem going back all the way to Soviet times.
One only needs to read the officially approved textbooks for these courses to comprehend the full extent of the ongoing catastrophe in civic education in Russia. As of 2021, the Ministry of Education allowed a choice of seven approved textbooks for Obshchestvoznanie.[12] Astoundingly, earlier editions of three of the same textbooks (those of Bogolyubov, Nikitin, and Gurevich), were on the Ministry’s list when it debuted in 1996. Bogolyubov’s textbook remains by far the most widely used in the country to this day, despite being adapted from a textbook written in 1990. For this reason, in October of 2015 a conference was held that sought to write a single, universal state textbook for Obshchestvoznanie, which if realized would probably make the textbook problem even worse.[13] That effort resulted in a government order confirming this direction toward a unified conception, as with history class.[14] Thus, while today’s civics textbooks are flawed, they are likely to become even worse in the coming years due to the push toward standardization and nation’s unabashed ideological movement toward authoritarianism.
Before looking at the civics textbooks themselves, it is important to understand the authors. The two most popular Obshchestvoznanie textbooks are lead-authored by Leonid Bogolyubov and Albert Kravchenko. Bogolyubov was a Soviet textbook writer of over 90 books who died in 2018 at the age of 87, and his obituary proudly proclaims that “his textbooks are still used by millions of Russians.”[15] In 1966, he defended his Ph.D. candidate’s thesis on “Studying the modern history and social science of the workers and communist movement in school courses,” and in 1981 a full doctorate dissertation on the “Formation among secondary school students in the process of studying history of the ability to correctly navigate in social and political life” (emphasis mine).[16]
It is astounding that Bogolyubov, a distinguished writer of specifically Marxist-Leninist textbooks for decades, was in the 1990s able to seamlessly transition to writing the most popular civics textbooks for (supposedly) a completely different country with a cardinally different ideology and constitution. Furthermore, his foundational texts for the most popular civics textbooks have gone through only sporadic updates over the last 30 years—and essentially no one saw anything strange in this. His textbook continues to be updated, revised and printed posthumously, although one would expect the book to eventually fall out of favor given his passing. Albert Kravchenko, 71, the author of the second most popular Obshchestvoznanie textbook, is a Moscow State University sociologist with a similar biography.[17]
A look at their texts reveals the most problematic moments. Upon reading, for example, the 2017 editions of the Bogolyubov regular Obshchestvoznanie textbooks, it becomes obvious that the textbook is focused entirely on “knowing-that,” i.e. historical facts and theoretical social science, along with mostly abstruse philosophical meditation. The book fails completely in terms of asking the reader to understand how they are part of and can participate in the systems being described. There is only a single short chapter on political activity, which does not mention anything about the current political parties, Russia’s political history, or the political events going on in students’ own lives. The questions at the end of the chapter ask the student to either recall a fact from the text, or provide a theoretical or philosophical quote and ask the student to think about what the author meant, without tying the thought experiment to real life. An example using a quote from “Putin’s favorite philosopher”, Ivan Ilyin, begins the 9th grade civics textbook.[18]
Entry on philosopher I. A. Ilyin at beginning of 9th grade Obshchestvoznanie textbook
The quote uses the vague and politically tinged phrase dukhovnogosudarstvennyy avtoritet (Spiritual-state authority), but nothing is explained, and students are likely to move on having only understood that Ilyin is wise, and that Putin probably has the positive “Spiritual-state authority” Ilyin is talking about.
Bogolyubov’s textbook is most interesting in the way that it approaches (while not directly addressing) today’s political reality. It asserts that political parties have a sort of preordained “role” in society, and United Russia’s role is that of the “party of power.” Very little mention is made of United Russia other than this, despite it running the country for two decades. Bogolyubov is very eager to assert that a “change of elite” took place in the 1990s, even though most scholars would assert otherwise. Most of the high-ranking officials in Putin’s cabinets were members of the CPSU.
One of the most confusing and contradictory topics is protests. The author explains, in an overly intellectualized way, various pathological forms of protest, and notes that “in contemporary democratic society citizens make their demand clear through marches, demonstrations, protests.” Bogolyubov then takes a very hard line against “extremism” and notes that “young people are increasingly being drawn in to illegal, totalitarian sects,” but doesn’t explain when a protest is an expression of democracy vs. extremism, and dismisses protestors as dangerous mobs.[19] Young people are thus deliberately left with the contradictory impression that protests are simultaneously a sinister trap laid by criminals to be avoided at all costs, but also so commonplace as to be entirely unimportant.
Bogolyubov is ambiguous on what kind of political regime exists in Russia. After paragraphs describing the “authoritarian type” of political culture and the “democratic type”, he at first states that Russia’s political culture still hasn’t settled, before stating that a political culture based on democratic values is forming.[20] Thus, Russian civics materials reassert the propaganda trope of Russia being in a “transitional phase” toward democracy, even as the opposite trend is observable. When discussing the types of regimes, the textbook does not explicitly state that the Russian Constitution only permits democratic regimes, but on the contrary, discusses democracy with skepticism, pointing out that democratic regimes constantly risk devolving into anarchy or ochlocracy.
Finally, it is necessary to mention the horribly politicized and corrupt nature of the textbook publishers themselves. In 2011, Putin’s childhood friend, judo partner and oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, infamous for his construction of Putin’s pet projects such as the Crimea Bridge, acquired the former Soviet school textbook monopoly Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment), which still controlled 30% of the market, presumably as part of Putin’s effort to quietly assert his authority over the content of civics and history textbooks amid his return to the presidency and mass anti-government protests that year. In just seven years, by 2018, Prosveshchenie once again controlled 70% of the textbook market.[21] Analysis by the investigative journalism outlet Proyekt in 2021 confirmed that structures close to Rotenberg still owned the publisher and that the politicization of the textbook content had grown worse, becoming even more paternalistic and socially conservative.[22] Just days after this scandalous report, business daily Kommersant reported that Sberbank and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) were negotiating the purchase of the Prosveshchenie, and that the vice president of Sberbank and former deputy minister of education Marina Rakova had registered a new subsidiary company, Sber Obrazovanie, with Sberbank's press service explaining that the company “will develop digital products for the national education system.”[23] The above scheme is most likely intended to conduct a further tightening of civics materials toward authoritarian ideology under the guise of digitalization and “modernization” of textbook content, although much of the dirty work of politicizing the curriculum has already been carried out.
In Russia, however, the pro-democracy political opposition has, curiously, failed to make reform of civic education a central issue, despite the crucial nature of effective civics in securing democracy in the long term. Attempts at reform without political change appear virtually impossible, given the top-down nature of the Russian education system. However, the changes that have taken place in education show that change can happen, but currently political forces, NGOs, and journalists have given very little attention to civic education as a place clearly in need of change, likely because they too believe changing the education programming is impossible.
The Russian opposition and liberal intelligentsia have been extremely reluctant to speak publicly on the specific flaws in school civics classes and the importance of the issue more generally. There are several reasons why this is. The biggest of them is that they believe it would be a strategic misstep on a political communications level, as one of the Putin regime’s most popular attack narratives on opposition politicians is to accuse them of “political pedophilia” due to their support being demographically skewed toward younger people.[24] Therefore, the opposition believes speaking about the issue would risk falling into a PR trap that pro-Putin forces have been setting for years. The second reason is that independent media, particularly until recently, have published few stories on the issue, meaning that the democratic opposition has very few informational publicity opportunities to bring up something like civics, given all the other pressing topics the pro-democracy forces must deal with in an environment oversaturated with urgent issues. A third reason is that some educators believe drawing attention to civics would be counterproductive, simply bringing the government’s attention to the issue and resulting in content that is even more anti-democratic. For example, if jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team devoted an entire video to the outdated and inadequate civics curriculum, then that could serve is the pretext to replace the old 1990s-based materials with textbooks that are even more unabashedly paternalistic and politicized, alienating potential allies among educators sympathetic to the opposition.
The reasons above have made civics into a quagmire for pro-democratic forces, which they believe there is no point in entering because no change can even be achieved in civic education until there is fundamental political change at the very top of the government. While the emergence of electoral authoritarianism in the late-1990s did take place in the opaque, patronal politics of the Kremlin, its consolidation and maintenance under Putin today is, to the contrary, not a matter of chance, but rather in part a result of persistent errors in civic education.
[1] Ibid, 23.
[2] Eklof, “Introduction - Russian Education: the past and the Present,” 8.
[3] “История Граждановедения,” Научно-методический Центр «Гражданин», March 31, 2011, http://www.xn--80adkkb3aeirm.su/civics/civics-history.html.
[4] Л.Н. Боголюбов, Человек и Общество: Учебное Пособие Для Основной Школы (Москва: Новая Школа, 1993).
[5] Vaillant, “Civic Education in a Changing Russia,” 255.
[6] Janmaat and Piattoeva, “Citizenship Education in Ukraine and Russia,” 227-228.
[7] Vaillant, “Civic Education in a Changing Russia,” 239.
[8] Michelle D. Cude, “Teaching Democracy,” Curriculum & Teaching Dialogue 14, no. 1/2 (January 2012): 61, http://ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=92624074&site=ehost-live.
[9] Isak D. Froumin, “Democratizing the Russian School,” Vera Kaplan, Larry E Holmes, and Ben Eklof, Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies and Prospects, vol. 20, The Cummings Center Series (London u.a: Cass, 2005), 141, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203318676.
[10] Ibid, 142.
[11] Ibid, 146.
[12] “Обществознание,” Федеральный Перечень Учебников, accessed April 2, 2021, https://fpu.edu.ru/?name=&fio=&schoolClass=&subjectAll=164&publisher=&fpuGroup=&educationLevel=&subjectArea=&subject=&language=&submit=&page=2.
[13] Алексей Куденко, “Эксперты обсудили контуры единого стандарта по обществознанию,” РИА Новости, November 15, 2015, https://sn.ria.ru/20151015/1302572447.html.
[14] Юлия Старостина, “Учителя и Эксперты Выступили За Создание Единого Стандарта Изучения Обществознания,” Коммерсантъ, November 15, 2015, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2832442.
[15] “Умер Леонид Боголюбов,” Просвещение, January 12, 2018, https://prosv.ru/news/show/3226.html.
[16] “Боголюбов, Леонид Наумович,” in Википедия, January 1, 2021, https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Боголюбов,_Леонид_Наумович&oldid=111424776.
[17] “Кравченко Альберт Иванович - Социологический Факультет МГУ,” Факультет Социологии МГУ, accessed April 3, 2021, http://www.socio.msu.ru/index.php/о-факультете/кафедры-и-лаборатории?id=147.
[18] Елизавета Сурначева, “В Поисках Мудрости,” Коммерсантъ, January 20, 2014, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2383840.
[19]Л.Н. Боголюбов, А.Ю. Лазебникова, and А.И. Матвеева, Обществознание - 9 Класс (Просвещение, 2014). 301.
[20] Ibid, 315.
[21] Анастасия Якорева, “Учебники под редакцией Аркадия Ротенберга Почти 100% школьного рынка получили структуры, близкие к другу Путина. Вот как это произошло,” Meduza, October 19, 2019, https://meduza.io/feature/2019/10/21/ministerstvo-prosveschenie.
[22] Сахаревич, “Обществоневедние.”
[23] “«Коммерсантъ» узнал о планах Сбербанка, ВЭБа и РФПИ купить крупнейшего издателя учебников,” VTimes, April 7, 2021, https://www.vtimes.io/2021/04/07/kommersant-uznal-o-planah-sberbanka-veba-i-rfpi-kupit-krupneishego-izdatelya-uchebnikov-a4284.
[24] Каринэ Мирумян, “‘Политическая педофилия’. Как российские телеканалы освещали протесты в поддержку Навального,” BBC News Русская служба, January 25, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-55792820.
Belarus
Civic education in Belarus remains the most similar to that of the Soviet Union. In fact, Belarus' civics course still carries its Soviet name - Obshchestvovedenie. Educators insist that in public educational institutions the term "civic education" essentially does not exist, being replaced only with "ideology". For decades, Belarus has lacked a clear conception of an efficacious Belarusian citizen in the 21st century.
This, along with the declarative assurances of rights and freedoms Belarusians receive in school, was a major contributor to the massive and ongoing outburst of dissatisfaction, protest, and brutal repression the country has endured since the contested August 2020 Presidential election. Lukashenko's government was unprepared for a new generation of Belarusians that began to actually demand the realization of the rights and freedoms that social studies textbooks said were guaranteed by the president and constitution.
Civic education in Belarus arguably remains the most similar to that of the Soviet Union of any of the former Soviet republics. In fact, Belarus' civics course still carries its Soviet name - Obshchestvovedenie. Educators insist that in public educational institutions the term "civic education" essentially does not exist, being replaced only with "ideology". As a result, Belarus has lacked a clear conception of an efficacious Belarusian citizen in the 21st century.[1]
During Perestroika and following independence in the early 1990s, Belarus did bother renaming the Soviet-era civics course, Obshchestvovedenie, despite its connotations. They made only piecemeal adjustments to it's content to reflect the Belarus’ independence and the steady development of the new ideology of President Alexander Lukashenko. In recent years, the course is best understood as an introduction to social studies intended to prepare young people for the realities of Lukashenko’s regime in such a way that they will not become politically active or mobilized to protest. But, as we will see, the course has failed and possibly backfired in this goal due to flawed content, which paired with increasing disgruntlement over Lukashenko’s lavish lifestyle compared to average citizens', spilled into the streets.
Obshchestvovedenie appears in the schedules of Belarusian schoolchildren for only three years, from grades 9 to 11, for only an hour or two a week. They learn the basics of social science along with basic legal terms and structures in 9th grade. In 10th grade, they are exposed to the four spheres of social life: spiritual, social, economic and political. The idea is to immediately give a general idea of the key aspects of a person's existence in the social world: perception of self, relationships with other people, and as a subject of culture. In the 11th grade, students study the main branches of law in more detail, for example, civil, labor, family. They study the Belarusian Constitution in the 11th grade, a topic unlikely to make young people look favorably on Lukashenko’s rule.
A look at the content of the most recent Belarusian civics textbooks, updated in 2019 and 2020, reveals numerous interesting moments worth mentioning. This is important because many Belarusian students’ futures are being ruined for sticking up for what they were told in these textbooks.[2]
The textbooks claim that Belarus is “a democratic state in which citizens participate in its governance, the creation of norms and rules of state life, and the formation of government bodies. In the Republic of Belarus, the only source of power is the people.”[3] It says that the republic of Belarus recognizes the priority of generally recognized principles of international law and ensures the compliance of its legislation with these principles The textbooks note Belarus’ cooperation with the OSCE to uphold UN standards in the area of human rights. Accordingly, it claims that the state ensures freedom, inviolability and dignity of the individual, and that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion, belief and their free expression (freedom of speech and freedom of the press), to freedom of assembly, rallies, street processions, demonstrations and picketing.[4] The books also says that democracy is the rule of the majority, but in which the part of society that remains in the minority is guaranteed protection from persecution for the views that do not coincide with the majority.[5] Because the above declarations do not correspond to Belarusian political and social reality, they have only fueled resentment.
The textbooks also look to subtly reinforce Lukashenko’s authoritarianism in several ways. One is the outsized role prescribed to the president. “The president personifies the unity of the people; guarantees the implementation of the main directions of domestic and foreign policy; represents the Republic of Belarus in relations with other states and international organizations. The President takes measures to protect the sovereignty of the Republic of Belarus, its national security and territorial integrity, ensures political and economic stability, continuity and interaction of state authorities, mediates between state authorities."[6] Of course, making such lofty statements that Lukashenko “personifies the unity of the people” and "protects the sovereignty" of Belarus does not actually mean that he does so. Quite the opposite, reading these statements only piques the cynicism and disgruntlement of younger people.
The only Belarusian politician or public official mentioned in any of the three books is Alexander Lukashenko.
We see this subtle reinforcement of authoritarianism in way similar to those seen in Russia. “An authoritarian regime is a transitional political regime: from totalitarianism to democracy or from democracy to totalitarianism. Under an authoritarian regime, political power is concentrated in the hands of an individual or a group of people, however, outside the realm of politics, relative freedom remains.” Thus, Lukashenko’s regime is not an outlier to be alarmed about, but a natural, unavoidable stage in a society moving toward democracy. This explanation is analogous to the one in Russian civics textbooks and their use of the “transitional phase”.
The implicit logic of the Belarusian civics materials appears to be that if the state claims, even without supporting evidence or addressing counterarguments, that democracy and freedom already exist in the country, that the people already have them, then the citizens won’t protest to demand those things. This is a very Soviet logic based on the total lack of societal organization and solidarity, a kind of learned helplessness.
The approach to politics in the textbooks is so clumsy that it almost assuredly leaves Belarusians with more questions than answers. They write: “deputies elected by the citizens of the country express the interests of various strata and groups of society, pass laws. Political parties play an important role in political life.” but the Belarusian textbooks make no mention of any of the political parties or organizations existing in the country.[7]
The books also use conspiratorial innuendo, geopolitics, and emergency powers to justify the violation of the very rights and freedoms it claims are already guaranteed: “In especially difficult situations, the state can temporarily restrict human rights. According to our Constitution, this is possible in the interests of national security, public order, protection of morals, public health, rights and freedoms of others (Article 23 of the Constitution). The geopolitical status of our country is characterized by its location at the junction between Western European and Slavic Orthodox civilizations. On the one hand, a huge benefit for the country is to be on the border of civilizations. the worldwide spread of Western standards of behavior, lifestyle, consumption, leisure; the formation of the ideology of "globalism" that seeks to substantiate the inevitability of the ongoing changes, their positive nature, as well as to ensure the consent of public opinion and the active participation of the broadest social and political forces in the formation of a new world order under the leadership of the West and with the leading role of the United States.”[8]
Due to decades of repressions following presidential elections, the Belarusian diaspora and civil society community in Europe has grown and several organizations have appeared to support proper civic education. One example is the East European Network for Citizenship Education, a network of organizations working in the whole region. The mission of the Network is to contribute to the sustainable development of civil society in the Eastern Partnership region and Russia by expanding the field of civic education and strengthening the capacity of organizations and experts working in this area. They provide training, education, information, practice and activities that, through the transfer of knowledge, skills and understanding to students, as well as the development of their attitudes and behavior, are aimed at empowering them to exercise and defend their democratic rights and responsibilities in society, value diversity and play an active role in democratic life in order to promote and protect democracy and the rule of law.[9] This and other organizations are looking to become even more active since August 2020, but face new restrictions on their activities.
2020’s post-election protests and ongoing crisis have prompted the state under Lukashenko to take youth political education more seriously. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said as he met with representatives of the country's academic community on 5 February, 2021 that, “the post-election events showed that we need to approach the education of our youth more seriously. Otherwise, we will face tremendous problems in the future. Unless we reverse the situation, we will come close to a war. I am afraid that against the backdrop of a geopolitical rift (we will probably return to this topic later at the meeting) we will not be able to stay afloat in the event of an internal discord and a kind of civil war: other players will definitely intervene.”[10]
On 23 February 2021, an interagency working group was established in Belarus in order to work on a government program on the patriotic upbringing of the population in the period till 2025, as announced by the Head of the Youth Affairs Office of the Belarusian Education Ministry. In her words, it is supposed to focus on modern approaches to nurturing patriotism and civic consciousness in the younger generation. “It has to start not in school but in families. The role of parents in instilling patriotic qualities in their children, love for their motherland, for the place they were born in, for the history of their family should be increased,” the official noted.[11] Furthermore, The BRSM Youth Union and the Belarusian National Pioneer Organization announced the launch new patriotic projects intended to define patriotism for the new generation.[12]
Through these and other initiatives, the Lukashenko regime is looking to increase measures outside the classroom meant to ideologically define and control the population, cultivating a distinctly authoritarian perception of citizenship in order to keep the country in Russia’s orbit, while tuning a blind idea to the flawed civics curriculum.
[1] Марина Мазуркевич, “Гражданское Образование в Беларуси - Что Это?,” dw.com, April 6, 2007, https://www.dw.com/ru/%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5-%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D0%B2-%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D0%B8-%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%BE/a-2576441.
[2] “Belarus: University Students Expelled from Universities and Imprisoned for Peaceful Protest,” Amnesty International, May 24, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/05/belarus-university-students-expelled-from-universities-and-imprisoned-for-peaceful-protest/.
[3] А. Н. Данилов, Обществоведение. 9 Класс (Minsk: Национальный институт образования, 2019), 127, https://uchebniki.by/rus/skachat/id01988s.
[4] Ibid, 137.
[5] А. Н. Данилов, Обществоведение. 10 Класс (Minsk: Национальный институт образования, 2020), 67, https://uchebniki.by/rus/skachat/id01988s.
[6] Данилов, Обществоведение. 9 Класс. 143.
[7] Ibid, 91.
[8] М. И. Вишневский, Обществоведение. 11 Класс (Minsk: Национальный институт образования, 2010), https://uchebniki.by/rus/skachat/id00597s.
[9] “About Us,” Eastern European Network for Citizenship Education, accessed May 31, 2021, https://eence.eu/about-us/.
[10] “Lukashenko: Post-Election Events Prompted Us to Take Youth Education More Seriously,” Belta, February 5, 2021, https://eng.belta.by/president/view/lukashenko-post-election-events-prompted-us-to-take-youth-education-more-seriously-137200-2021/.
[11] “Interagency Working Group to Work on Belarusian Government’s Patriotic Upbringing Program,” Belta, February 23, 2021, https://eng.belta.by/society/view/interagency-working-group-to-work-on-belarusian-governments-patriotic-upbringing-program-137697-2021/.
[12] “Belarus’ Youth Union Launches New Patriotic Project,” Belta, April 14, 2021, https://eng.belta.by/society/view/belarus-youth-union-launches-new-patriotic-project-139070-2021/.
Ukraine
Ukraine serves as an effective foil for developments in civic education in Russia and Belarus, even if the fate of civic education and democracy generally in Russia arguably has greater ramifications for democracy in Ukraine and Bealrus than developments in the countries themselves. Indeed, As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote in a 2018 op-ed, “If Ukrainians can make democracy work, they might inspire Russians to want the same. Therefore, Putin remains deeply committed to undermining Ukraine’s still-fragile democratic project.”[1] Nonetheless, Ukraine’s experience provides a rough understanding of how civic education could have and can develop in Belarus or Russia, and why Putin’s government stepped in to prevent the development of similar democratic civic education curriculum in Russia.
[1] Michael McFaul, “Ukraine’s Democracy Is Approaching ‘Make or Break’ — and the West Is Missing in Action,” Washington Post, May 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/05/01/ukraines-democracy-is-approaching-make-or-break-and-the-west-is-missing-in-action/.
The chaotic and drawn-out formation of Ukraine’s constitutional identity necessitated a conception of citizenship based on recognition of diverging viewpoints, dialogue and activism, which helped Ukraine’s democratic development in the long run by necessitating civic education based on these very principles. Ukrainian civics slowly moved away from the “patriotic” education of the Soviet past toward an explicitly democratic conception of citizenship.
While Ukrainian civics have arguably received more scholarly attention than Russian civics, Ukrainian civics were largely overlooked by many democratization scholars until after the 2014 Euromaidan revolution. The history of civic education instruction in Ukrainian schools and through civil society NGOs is an effective lens for explaining the tentative democratic successes of the country, as well as its ongoing challenges of social unrest, cynicism, and corruption.
Ukraine finally approved its new constitution on June 8th, 1996—the very last of all the former Soviet republics. Ironically, it was able to pass only because communist hardliners boycotted the vote, calling it the “nationalist, authoritarian constitution.”[1] This rhetoric is of course highly inaccurate, because the Constitution of Ukraine reasserts that Ukraine is a multi-ethnic society and a multi-national state.[2] Additionally, the personal freedoms in the constitution, specifically Articles 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, and 36, were directly copied from the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950.[3] The Ukrainian Constitution has been characterized as a clearer rejection of the Soviet model than the Russian Constitution.[4]
While the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine undoubtedly, “dressed Ukraine in modern and universal clothes, the imperative of nation-building took priority over efforts to embrace constitutionalism.”[5] The slow embrace of a European identity rather than a post-Soviet one, as well as an active, participatory notion of citizenship rather than a passive one, came not in 1996 or before, but began slowly in the years after, and was in part thanks to changes in civic education, as the educators had to adapt to a new reality and begin to build an identity beyond banal nationalism due to the identity crisis, a task that would in part fall on civics teachers.
After obtaining independence by referendum in December of 1991, Ukraine was confronted with the immense task of transforming an outdated centralized education system, which was aimed at delivering a loyal communist workforce, into a modern system that would deal with the competing demands on the education system: nation-building, democratization, and globalization.[6]
The problem is that there is an inherent tension between nation-building and democratization. The overwhelming majority of states, Ukraine being no exception, have multi-ethnic populations. Democratization clashes with nation-building as soon as a minority group expresses a desire to secure a formal, legal status for its culture and identity in society.[7] Since education has been the main vehicle of national consolidation by the state in Europe ever since the arrival of the modern state in the early nineteenth century, it is only logical that democratization lost out to nation-building in education during the 1990s, considering that Ukraine had experienced a particularly strong degree of Russification during Romanov and Soviet rule. Ukrainian scholars and intellectuals regularly use post-colonial theory to understand and describe Russia’s historical relationship with Ukraine as colonial.[8] Understandably, Ukraine at first opted for nation-building. Specifically, the subjects of Ukrainian Literature, Geography of Ukraine, and History of Ukraine would make up a little less than half of all hours in all grades of school, meaning that, “democratization was the evident victim of the emphasis on nation-building.”[9] Thus, the opportunity to develop a civic republican rather than nationalist virtue through greater attention to participatory citizenship in this crucial period was, at first, squandered.
During the 2004 Orange Revolution, in what seemed like for the first time, young people across the country engaged in, “constant political debate and discussion with their teachers, parents, and peers” about the protests.[10] Remarkably, scholars observed that students who participated in the protests “knew about the government’s transgressions specifically due to having studied the rights enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution in their Civics textbooks,” a point that underlines the importance of certain pedagogical material in fostering political support for mobilization.[11] These findings show that civic education in schools inspired Ukrainian youth to participate in democracy, but also that the civic education of the time was not fully satisfying the greater demand for civic knowledge and engagement that existed in the 2000s.
Today, geopolitical reality will likely prevent Ukraine from backsliding catastrophically away from European values and toward authoritarianism and Russia’s orbit, barring major military action from Russia. But, in a longer-term perspective, frustration from being left indefinitely in E.U.’s “waiting room” is likely to steadily build. Thus, it is civic education that will likely have to do the heavy lifting in actively supporting a participatory, democratic Ukrainian identity to counteract this disappointment and prevent the return of apathetic, pro-authoritarian sentiments among the Ukrainian populace in the long-term.
A look at Ukrainian civic education policy and practices since 2014 shows that they mirror the country’s (geo)political developments, displaying a remarkable change that has only widened Ukrainian civics’ break from Russia and the Soviet past. Ukrainian civic education has made major strides in the years since 2014, which in part is directly tied to the above idea that “civil society saved Ukraine.”
The main pillar of Ukrainian civics is Hromadyansʹka osvita (literally, civic education), which is now a 10th grade course that has been totally revamped in the post-Maidan era. Its current form is the result of the 2016 education reform, which got rid of Ukraine’s social studies, the analogue to Russia’s Obshchestvoznanie and Bealrus’ Obshchestvovedenie.
An examination of the textbooks for Hromadyansʹka osvita, three of which are available for free online via a government portal, displays truly impressive content development, resulting in highly modern and up to date textbooks. The textbooks presuppose the use of advanced practices for developing not just factual competence but also “knowledge-how.” Activities in the textbook often include discussing and debating the issues raised with partners or with teams.
I will specifically examine the textbook from the publisher Ranok, historically one of the largest in Ukraine. The textbook starts with the individual and expands outward, with the second section immediately being devoted to human rights and freedom. The middle section of the book is devoted to how to be involved in civic life, emphasizing that the school is a democratic place from where democratic values should permeate society.[12] The book has an entire chapter on media literacy, modern communication and media ethics, which provides a table for several the types of manipulation, such as the Big Lie, mixing truth and lie, etc.[13] Moreover, the book devotes an entire chapter to the problem of corruption and how to fight against it, and is very clear that corruption is a problem in Ukraine, as well as one of the biggest impediments to Ukraine’s cooperation with the U.S. and integration with the E.U. and NATO.[14]
There are several entire content areas where Ukrainian civics books differ from or go much further than Russian civics textbooks. Setting aside the methods (ways) with which these other content areas are raised, just some examples are: an increased focus on the role of international organizations in rights defense (Transparency International, ECHR, Universal Declaration of Human Rights), women's rights (UN Declaration on the Rights of Women), corruption and lobbyism, the U.N and citizenship in a global context, modern mass media and social media, types of cognitive manipulation (lies and fake news, etc.), and civil society organizations and youth participation in them. Not only is the content itself new and up to date with modern practices, but it also displays ample use of modern teaching methods and technologies. Today’s civics textbooks all come with hyperlinks and QR codes to allow instant access to supplementary online tools such as videos, games, tests and so on.[15]
Here Ukraine has again made incredible advancements, which brings us to the role of civil society and international organizations in making Ukrainian civics more effective. NGOs and international organizations are continuing to play a large role in advancing specifically modern, democratic and participatory methods of civic education in Ukraine. One of the most acclaimed programs has been IREX’s Learn to Discern program, which has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media outlets, reached 650 schools training 1,100 teachers and at least 7,500 students.[16] Notably, the media literacy initiative continues to be a top priority for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.[17] Learn to Discern is a prime example of how Western NGOs supplement Ukraine’s new civics curriculum, as foreign programs are able to occupy time set aside flexible time set aside by teachers.
But an even more impressive initiative is the portal citizen.in.ua, an initiative of the Association of Teachers of History and Social Studies “Nova Doba” with the support of USAID and PACT.[18] The portal offers a full-blown interactive online textbook for Hromadyansʹka osvita that comes with its own interactive online tests and modules. According to the portal, the online textbook has been used by 15,276 students and 2587 teachers at a total of 1424 schools. The portal offers an online civic education course for adults based on the same materials.
Overall, it is hard to overstate the changes Ukraine has gone through since 2014, and civic education is no exception. When engaging with new civic education resources, one must be impressed by their quality and overwhelmed by the future possibilities opened by the changes in values and knowledge that such education will inevitably lead to in Ukraine. A democratic values-oriented educational process, competencies for successful self-realization, increasingly well trained and motivated professional teaching staff, and a decentralization with real autonomy for the schools have led to an increasing democratization of Ukraine’s school environment and the effective integration of new civic education into Ukrainian schools.
[1] Kataryna Wolczuk, The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation (Central European University Press, 2001), 213, https://www-fulcrum-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/concern/monographs/jq085k45t. This is the definitive historical account of the writing and passing of Ukraine’s constitution.
[2] Ibid, 231-232.
[3] Ibid, 233.
[4] Ibid, 246.
[5] Rezie, “The Ukrainian Constitution,” 170.
[6] Jan Germen Janmaat, “Nation Building, Democratization and Globalization as Competing Priorities in Ukraine’s Education System,” Nationalities Papers 36, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/00905990701848317.
[7] Ibid, 3.
[8] Микола Рябчук, “Біла шкіра, чорна мова,” Збруч, January 11, 2021, https://zbruc.eu/node/102635.
[9] Janmaat, “Nation Building, Democratization and Globalization as Competing Priorities in Ukraine’s Education System,” 10, 18.
[10] Ibid, 603.
[11] Fournier, “Between Mob and Multitude,” 74.
[12] Ibid, 86.
[13] Ibid, 111.
[14] Ibid, 182.
[15] “Iнтерактивне Навчання,” Видавництво Ранок, accessed April 11, 2021, http://interactive.ranok.com.ua/.
[16] “Learn to Discern (L2D) - Media Literacy Training,” IREX, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.irex.org/project/learn-discern-l2d-media-literacy-training.
[17] “Zelensky: Media Literacy Classes Should Be Included in School Curriculum,” Unian, March 9, 2021, https://www.unian.info/society/fighting-fake-news-media-literacy-should-be-included-in-curriculum-11346268.html.
[18] “3D Демократії - Думаємо, Дбаємо, Діємо. Курс Громадянської Освіти.,” citizen.in.ua, 2021, https://www.citizen.in.ua/#video.
What is the path forward for Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in further developing their civic education curriculum? While Ukraine’s remarkable progress is a starting point for Belarus and Russia, all three countries can draw productive experience from EU member states and indeed the EU itself. The EU establishes civic education standards for members regarding EU institutions, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania should be of particular interest, given their experience in overcoming Soviet legacies to forge distinctly democratic identities. However, successfully drawing on foreign best practices is difficult, and there is currently no indication that Russia or Belarus is considering this route, although there is sufficient info to speculate where each country may be headed in terms of civics.
The Path Forward
Civic education has played a significant role in both Ukraine’s delicate but observable democratization, as well as Russia and Belarus’ failure to democratize. Furthermore, democratization discourses have largely overlooked the possibility that developments in civic education have and are continuing to play a decisive role in political processes in the region. One reason that Western observers and political scientists have not ascribed much significance to developments in civics is that politicians have devoted relatively little attention to the issue, although in Ukraine this began to change following the 2014 Euromaidan revolution and its (geo)political consequences, which sent the country’s identity decisively down the path toward Westernization, Europeanization, and democratization.
So what should we expect in each country’s civic education going forward? The Russian government is likely to initiate a major overhaul of civics content in the near future for several reasons. These reasons include the shifting political landscape and further deterioration of rule of law following Putin’s constitutional changes and the assassination attempt of Alexei Navalny in 2020, the fact that the authors of the most popular civics materials are older than 70 or dead, and the fact that materials themselves are outdated from technical standpoint, lacking the level of digitalization present in other school classes or civics classes in neighboring countries.
Belarus may conduct a revamp of civics materials similar to what Russia is preparing to do, in order to dampen democratic expectations, but could just as easily leave the curriculum the same, opting to manufacture consent predominantly using methods outside the classroom, although this approach is unlikely to be successful. Like the Russian materials, Belarusian civics is likely to be more politicized and tied up in the polarization of society, focusing on the foreign nature of the “democratic threat” to Belarus. Also like Russian materials, Belarusian materials may make use of obscurantism to dissuade young people from becoming interested in politics.
Ukraine is likely to stay on its current course, with the speed and passion of education reform likely to be steady as more and more teachers trained in Soviet pedagogics retire and are replaced by younger educators, often with different value systems and the practical skills needed to make civics content engaging. The wide spectrum of opportunities for experimentation and invitation of outside NGO expertise mean that Ukrainian civics are likely to continue to experience improvement and innovation, which look favorably on the viability of the country’s democratic political course overall.
In conclusion, there are a number of practical conclusions and takeaways that can be made that form the basis for recommendations for interested parties such as politicians, journalists, and Western policymakers. But the most important takeaway is that democracy advocates should think again about continuing to shy away from civics as an issue. Furthermore, organizations and individuals seeking to support democracy in Russia and Belarus can make a major contribution by providing alternative resources to formal civics content, and making those resources widely available. Such an effort would provide a realistic alternative for how civics in Russia and Belarus could be in a democratic context and publicize how that alternative contrasts with current practices and materials. Ukraine provides a ready and successful example that must not be overlooked merely due to its ongoing challenges, including the flashy and distracting issues of war, corruption, and politics. These issues will not go away so some democratizers must look to civics as the place to stand up for these nations' respective constitutions, rather than just politics. Finally, the many existing publications on democracy in post-communist and post-Soviet contexts coming from places like the EU should not be overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant.[1]
[1] Publications Office of the European Union, “The Practice of Democracy : A Selection of Civic Engagement Initiatives.,” Website (Publications Office of the European Union, June 25, 2020), http://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/f5014beb-b754-11ea-bb7a-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF.