Education in Ukraine

Education is rooted in very old traditions reaching back to the pagan times…

In the 16^th-18^th centuries, an increasing number of schools were set up by national religious-educational communities – ‘Brotherhoods’, for instance, in Lviv (1585), in Kyiv (1615), in Lutsk (1620). The Greek-Slavonic-Latin Collegium, Ukraine's first institution of higher learning, was founded in Ostroh in 1576. At the turn of the 18th century the level of public literacy placed Ukraine ahead of a number of Western and Eastern European countries. The first universities appeared in Kharkiv (1805), Kyiv (1834) and Odesa (1865). Later, "specialized institutes" were opened for training industrial, railroad engineers, agronomists, physicians and specialists in other fields. Present-day independent Ukraine has inherited a rather developed system of education from the previous regime, which answers the standards of the developed countries.

General secondary education in Ukraine is used to be free but compulsory. Despite today's hardships resulting from the economic crisis, a programme of educational reforms aimed at integrating the national schooling system into the world's educational medium, at satisfying the people's national cultural needs and protecting their rights, irrespective of ethnic origin. The educational system includes over 23,000 so-called pre-school educational establishments where some 2,000,000 children are taught their mother tongue. The basic link in the chain of public education in Ukraine is the "general education (grade) school," of which there are 21,350 now, with a student body of 6.9 million. Each has three stages: primary, basic and senior. Nowadays new types of schools are there in Ukraine: gymnasiums (121), lyceums (124). Over 50 private schools have appeared recently. There are 1,176 vocational training schools providing almost 800 qualifications. In most of them (69%) the working students are: also taught the complete curriculum of secondary education. Post-secondary education is provided by 754 institutions of what is known as the 1st and 2nd Level of Accreditation, for example, technical schools and colleges training young specialists, and by 161 institutions of higher learning, such as universities, academies, conservatories, institutes. There are 14 classical and 45 technological and branch universities, 30 academies and 72 institutes. Ukraine numbers a total of 1.5 million college-and-university students.

Institutions of higher learning enroll some 12,000 foreign students, postgraduates and visiting graduates, of whom 8,000 are on Ukrainian government scholarships. More than 120,000 specialists from 130 countries across the world have graduated since World War II.