Being responsible: a new logic of patriotic education in a country at war

Ukraine has been living in a state of great war for the fourth year. The eleventh is in the reality of a constant threat. But our system of national-patriotic education is still built as if we are in a peaceful country that remembers its own history of struggle as something distant and museum-like.

It is enough to open the framework document – The concept of national and patriotic education. It lists civil-patriotic, spiritual-moral, ecological, and military-patriotic directions side by side as equal components of one system. Such equality could exist in times of peace. Today, it has turned into a dangerous escape from reality, in which it is the military dimension that determines the possibility of the existence of all others.

The war ceased to be a temporary circumstance – it became the environment in which a new generation is formed. Today’s teenagers live in a world where news about missile strikes, casualties and the country’s defense sound every day. For many, war is not “out there”; it is in their families, in dinner conversations, in forced relocations, in the loss of acquaintances, in the sounds of sirens. They do not grow up in the peaceful projections of the past, but in the war reality, which will become the foundation of their adult life. Therefore, the question of education today is not “how to teach to love Ukraine”, but “how to teach to be ready to defend it”. And this is already a question of the military dimension.

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Despite common stereotypes, military-patriotic education has nothing to do with Soviet drills or the romanticization of war. Its modern meaning is in the formation of maturity and responsibility. It is about understanding defense as a civic duty, about the ability to act in a crisis situation, about basic safety and self-help skills, about resilience and discipline, about the awareness that the freedom of the country rests not on symbols, but on the daily decisions of people who are ready to defend this freedom. Patriotism detached from defensive consciousness is decorative.

That is why the central place in the education system should be occupied by people who bear the truth of war – veterans and military personnel. They cannot be considered as “heroic decoration” for school holidays. They are carriers of experience that cannot be reproduced in textbooks. They speak the language of reality: the language of loss, fear, responsibility, loyalty, humanity and choices made not in words, but in deeds. Their presence restores honesty and maturity to upbringing. It creates a level of trust that does not exist in any theoretical model.

The military component should be not just a part of the system of national-patriotic education, but its framework, because it gives structure to all other directions. Civic education becomes meaningful when young people understand that responsibility for the state begins with its protection. History ceases to be a set of dates and turns into a living legacy of struggle, which is continued by modern defenders. Moral and ethical values ​​lose their abstractness and are filled with real examples of honor, loyalty and service to the community. Thus, the military dimension disciplines the entire system, making it mature, consistent and honest.

Putting the military-patriotic direction in the center does not mean turning the school into a barracks. This means protecting young people from two extremes: from the romanticization of war and from the dangerous illusion that there is no war.

Young people do not need parades and slogans, but an understanding of the logic of the country’s defense, an awareness of their own role in the stability of the state, the skills to behave in a crisis, the ability to act and not get confused. It also means access to conversations with those who know the price of freedom not from history lessons, but from experience.

Our time is a time of war. Therefore, the military-patriotic component should become the core of the education system – its basis, its logic, its nerve center. Because without an understanding of how the front is held and what price the country pays for its freedom, any upbringing turns into a ritual – beautiful, but empty. Without content. Without truth. Out of touch with life.

Oleksiy Fandetskyi

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