Ukraine’s education reform amidst the war
In Ukraine, the new school curriculum allocates between 70 and 105 hours per school year to civic education and history for fifth to eighth grade pupils. This amounts to just one hour per week for Ukrainian history, half an hour for world history and half an hour for civic education. In Russia, the situation is the reverse.
December 8, 2025 -
Oleksii Lionchuk
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AnalysisIssue 6 2025Magazine
The Facebook posts of my teacher and mentor, Viktor Mysan, from my time studying in Ukraine motivated me to write this text. However, to understand the current situation, it is necessary to briefly describe the state of Ukrainian education during the period of independence.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s education system – like many other sectors of public life – was left in a precarious state. Under Soviet rule, education was treated as a low-budget priority, receiving only residual funding, with teachers often regarded by the state as dispensable. Independence in 1991 did little to improve this situation. In fact, many of the challenges facing Ukrainian educators only deepened. Low wages, particularly for young teachers, became the central problem, further eroding the social prestige of the profession. Yet, despite meagre salaries, payments were at least made with relative regularity. This dynamic partly explains why teaching in Ukraine remains a female-dominated profession: women are unfortunately still more likely to accept lower pay, whereas many men with teaching degrees either avoid the profession altogether or leave it early in their careers, rarely returning. History teachers formed somewhat of an exception within Ukraine’s education system. In the early 1990s, a brief demographic upswing brought more children into schools, which created a heavy academic workload and allowed many history educators to secure full-time contracts (18 hours per week). Yet the hardships of that decade soon reversed this trend.
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