Today’s school-age children are the human capital Ukraine will need to rebuild and put its economy on a sustainable path to prosperity.
World Bank Group, 25/03/2025
Templates
Who gets to shape visions of the future and who will be mere agents in service of implementing such visions? Time and time again, education has been cast as a vehicle for fixing larger issues. If filled with the desirable input, young people will produce desirable outputs. The input represents a template for the future that is to be materialised. However, if young people are to have a share in painting the future, they must be able to co-create templates.
The idea that young people should be included in policy-making and curriculum-design has made it into intergovernmental frameworks (UN, 1989; UNICEF, 2009; UNESCO, 2016; OECD, 2018) and also into the national legislation of some countries, with Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence standing out as a strong blueprint emphasising student-involvement. However, conflict-torn zones face the challenge of negotiating reconstruction and reform. Policy recommendations for education in times of crises amplify the terms ‘resilience’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘access’, and ‘continuity’. Decision-making power is given to municipalities, school administrators, and wider community actors while student agency remains side-lined if mentioned at all (IIEP-UNESCO, 2010; ACER & IIEP-UNESCO, 2021; IIEP-UNESCO, 2023, Council of Europe, 2024). This diverging legitimisation of student voice between emergency- and non-emergency contexts raises concerns regarding the right of young people to have a say in matters affecting them, as enshrined in Article 12 of the UN Convention on Rights of a Child (UNCRC).
I will focus on Ukraine, scrutinising the extent to which the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform empowers students to shape their futures. I argue that the NUS and associated implementation projects largely remain within the rationale of dominant social, political, and economic systems, catering towards their preservation and reconstruction rather than allowing transformation. For instance, the World Bank, a major donor towards education initiatives in Ukraine, casts school children as “the human capital Ukraine will need to rebuild and put its economy on a sustainable path to prosperity” (World Bank Group, 2025). The template of the future of Ukraine is there already, and children are to implement it, not participate in creating it.
Yet, I want to stress that, at this stage of my research, I refrain from judging ‘dominant systems’ as inherently good or bad; Indeed, the EU-aligned NUS reform seeks to promote values and approaches of which I am sympathetic, such as democracy, human rights, and student-centredness (Eurydice Unit Ukraine, 2024). For now, I merely wish to point out that NUS seeks to preserve and enlarge established neoliberal democracies, underpinned by an interest to aid Ukraine’s EU accession.
Aesthetics
To analyse the prioritisation of restoration over transformation, I will draw on Jaques Rancière’s theory of the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In his words, sense distributions “[determine] the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution” (Rancière, 2012, p.7). Put differently, we learn to judge aesthetic experiences—what we see, hear, feel, taste, smell—as ‘normal’. The perception of what is normal becomes ‘common sense’ and thus unites us in a community of like-minded perceiving subjects. It is when we start to question what appears normal or refuse to comply that we find ourselves outside this common-sense community and might struggle to continue to participate within it.
Example: Prior to the Fridays for Future movement, climate discourse was dominated by scientists, politicians, and corporations. Young people were not viewed as political actors. Greta Thunberg and millions of students disrupted this distribution by skipping school to make a political point, thereby redefining who can have a voice in climate discourse. A new ‘common sense’ manifested regarding who is visible and what is sayable.
Rancière’s theory could enlighten this research in two ways: firstly, it helps scrutinise education reform processes for underpinning common-sense perceptions of what Ukraine’s future looks like and who gets to define it; secondly, it opens space for ideas on how common-sense perceptions might be redistributed.
Research questions
From the reflection above, the following tentative research questions can be derived:
- In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion, to what extent, if at all, do students in the Ukrainian education system participate in constructing visions of their futures?;
- What education policies and practices could empower students in shaping transformative visions and processes in line with Article 12 of the UNCRC?;
- How might this case study inform other conflict-zone contexts and the democratisation of emergency politics more broadly?
Between the lines
A self-reflexive note: As I am dealing with a sensitive reality while writing from a cosy place, (so far) not affected directly by the aggressions of the Russian Federation, I am aware that conducting such research comes with decisive ethical complexities. I take seriously the exhortation that it might be more ethical for outside scholars to stay silent, thus giving space to the voices of those with direct experiences or extensive expertise (Howlett & Lazarenko, 2023).
Finally, I want to end on an reflection by Iya Kiva, a Ukrainian poet, writer, and journalist (Shuvalova, 2024):
We’re like a forest that has been burned over and over again through centuries of statelessness, yet our [Ukrainian] identity keeps sprouting back, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. At the same time, […] [c]an there really be a victory when you consider all the lives lost and the devastation? Can we call it a victory if the war ends here but continues somewhere else?
This much shared yet isolating pain will stick between the lines.
References
Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) & International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO). (2021). Building resilient education systems: A rapid review of the education in emergencies literature. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374997
Council of Europe (2024). EDURES. Institute of International Sociology. https://eduresplatform.org/
Eurydice Unit Ukraine (2024, December 13). Ukraine: Reform of general secondary education – the new Ukrainian School. Eurydice. https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/news/ukraine-reform-general-secondary-education-new-ukrainian-school
IIEP-UNESCO. (2010). Guidebook for planning education in emergencies and reconstruction. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000186423
IIEP-UNESCO (2023). Guidelines and toolkit for a diagnosis of the education in emergencies data ecosystem. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000388204
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2018). The future of education and skills: Education 2030. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264291012-en
Rancière, J. (Ed.) (2012). The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics. In The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (pp. 7–14). Bloomsbury Academic. dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350284913.ch-002
Shuvalova, I. (2025, November 30). Iya Kiva: “My writing stemmed from this feeling of otherness” (A. Petelina, Trans.). Craft | Magazine. https://craftmagazine.net/en/iya-kiva/
UNESCO. (2016). Education 2030: Incheon declaration and framework for action: Towards inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245656
United Nations (UN). (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. UN. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). (2009). Child-friendly schools manual: How to make schools child friendly. UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/education/files/CFS_Manual_EN_040809.pdf
World Bank Group. (2025, July 11). Learning and school reforms continue in Ukraine despite war challenges. World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2025/03/25/learning-and-school-reforms-continue-in-ukraine-despite-war-challenges
