Closed schools. Abandoned temples of learning. An ode to the modern education system

For thousands of school leavers, after a many-year marathon of dictations and tests, the last bell has sounded as a leitmotif. Saying goodbye to their school and their teachers, yesterday's pupils have stepped, with dreams and hopes, onto the new starting stage of adult life. However each person's path in life turns out, through all the rises and falls, achievements and failures, we are all bound by an unbreakable invisible thread to our school, our teachers, our friends. The wise word of a teacher is always with us, and their blessing before the long road. At different moments in life we return in our thoughts for an instant to our own school, climb the school porch and enter the classroom where there was so much that was important and essential. Reunions of classmates and teachers are often held within the walls of the alma mater, and a wonderful immersion into the times of happy childhood and youth takes place. 

Not all former pupils have anywhere to come back to, because their schools are not only closed but destroyed by mismanagement and indifference.

 

Mykolaivka, Donetsk region. An abandoned school

What schools did the officials attend who put their signatures under the decision to close educational establishments? 

Do the bureaucrats remember their own school mistakes - those who determined the low level of knowledge of rural pupils from the results of the external independent testing, which served as the main factor in liquidating educational institutions? Do the ministry functionaries know that a rural pupil does not always have the chance to raise that level with the help of a tutor? No attempts whatever were made to breathe a second life into the small schools, taking into account the specific character and features of the countryside.

 

An abandoned school in the village of Kamianka, Donetsk region

The projects for saving educational institutions, worked out by enterprising teachers and lecturers, were not taken into consideration by the functionaries. The administrators in the education system did not take into account the international experience of small schools working, and did not calculate how many difficulties would be added by transporting pupils to hub schools along broken roads in any weather.

 

The abandoned former school in the village of Novopavlivka, Donetsk region

In 2016 the optimisers reported that in 2 years 269 schools had closed in Ukraine. Before the 2019-2020 school year almost 200 more schools stood empty. And in all, since 2010 the number of day general-education institutions has been reduced by 3,362 schools.

 

The emptied school in the village of Antonivske, Dnipropetrovsk region

These are dreadful statistics of education in Ukrainian villages, and the sad figures will only grow, because the optimisers are continuing their destructive race.

 

The school gone wild in the village of Khutoro-Chaplyne, Dnipropetrovsk region

The reformers closed perfectly sound buildings in Soviet times too, but can anyone say that optimisation has told positively on the quality of a rural pupil's education? Perhaps some of the buildings were old and needed major repair, and maintaining them was considered inexpedient. But quite a few teaching blocks were in satisfactory condition.

 

The school nobody needs in the village of Vasylivka, Dnipropetrovsk region

An enormous number of buildings have been abandoned with no further use. In the ghost schools the roofs have fallen in and the windows gape. The ruin in these temples of learning makes an oppressive impression. The empty corridors and classrooms of what were the centres of education, culture and social activity of the Ukrainian village are drowning in darkness.

A school left uncared for in the village of Mykolaivka, Donetsk region

Some buildings the local residents try to preserve; they look after the grounds and the building and hope for better times. But the better times, of course, are no longer ahead. People are taking care of what was created by collective labour for their own children and for future generations, and they remember that a school is not only a centre of enlightenment - it was always a good, sacred cause, in big towns and in little villages. But nobody can protect the school buildings excluded from active life from looters and from lovers of visiting abandoned buildings.

 

A school left unsupervised in the village of Mykolaivka, Donetsk region

What schools did the uninvited guests attend, and what did their teachers inspire in those who smash glass and pull out the wiring, tear up floorboards and doors, knock out bricks and turn the walls into art objects?

 

A half-ruined school in the village of Mykolaivka, Donetsk region

Perfectly usable buildings are left unattended, no use is found for them, and nobody bears responsibility for their preservation. Because of acts of vandalism the structures quickly decline and become unsafe. The closure and destruction of schools becomes one more step towards the dying out and liquidation of villages in Ukraine.