Trapped values of education and threat to national security in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine

Abstract

The strong democratic nations tend to follow UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) while weak states choose the way of war for immediate self-affirmation. This destructive way is an insurmountable obstacle for SDGs tracking as a whole and primarily in the educational sector.
Despite the influence of “the Fair War Theory”, the war is perceived as a source of destructive aggression, deaths, destructions, violence and moral degradation. Any war is aimed at the occupation of territories when the occupation regime uses vari-ous instruments and the collaborationism is the most widespread. Within the scope of this article the educational collaborationism is subject to a special analysis as it plays one of the major roles in creating an effective occupation system. We do not aim at providing the comprehensive consideration and interpretation of the phenom-enon of “Educators’ Collaborationism”, as well as the identification and detailed ex-planation of the entire spectrum of its destructive consequences. The purpose is to articulate the mentioned phenomenon within the problem of using education as a tool of occupation and threat to the national security of the occupied state. The methodological design of the study is based on a situational approach, which em-phasizes the importance of considering a number of factors influencing the changes in the educational process during the occupation, as well as the identification of situational variables that affect the level of access to higher education (HE), its quali-ty and content on the occupied territories. The method of qualitative case-study re-search made it possible to formulate certain generalizations about this phenomenon and its effect on HE in particular.
It was found out that in the temporarily occupied territories education is used as a tool to strengthen and legitimize the occupation regime. Among the key agents there are also the occupiers’ assistants from the educational sector. The analysis of spe-cific situations gives reason to claim that the conscious, voluntary cooperation of educators with the enemy provokes the erosion of the ethical principles of educa-tion, its degradation and blocks the SDGs accomplishing. Such activity has negative consequences as it aggressively denies managerial autonomy, the right for academ-ic freedom and other components of quality HE and other SDGs as they all are inter-linked.
Unfortunately, we are to admit that the educational transformative occupation causes total paralysis and even erosion of the national education system in the tem-porarily occupied Ukrainian territories. Therefore, the consequences of the implemen-tation of educational transformative occupation should determine the directions of the processes of de-occupied territories education restauration.