Seventy Years of Reform, One Palimpsest: How Ukrainian Science Education Accumulates Instead of Replacing

When Ukraine launched its New Ukrainian School reform in 2016, the most ambitious educational overhaul since independence, its architects promised a decisive break with Soviet pedagogical tradition: competency-based education, inquiry-based learning, and student-centered classrooms aligned with European frameworks. Six years later, the disciplinary subject boundaries inherited from the Soviet era still organized the secondary curriculum, and the national assessment system still rewarded factual recall and algorithmic problem-solving. A new study argues that this is not simply a story of failed implementation, but evidence of something deeper about how education systems absorb change.

In a perspective article published in Discover Education, Vita Hamaniuk, Yana Pristupa and Serhiy Semerikov of Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University propose a palimpsest model of educational change. Like a manuscript on which earlier writing has been imperfectly erased and remains visible beneath later text, education systems, they contend, accumulate successive reform layers without fully displacing what came before. Soviet-era structures persist beneath post-independence nationalizing reforms, which persist beneath European competency frameworks, which persist beneath the latest digital transformation initiatives. Each layer modifies the layers beneath it without wholly replacing them.

The argument builds on David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s influential concept of the grammar of schooling, the deep structural features of educational institutions such as age-grading, subject departmentalization, and teacher-centered instruction that have persisted for over a century despite repeated reform efforts. The authors extend this framework through institutional theory, drawing on DiMaggio and Powell’s notion of institutional isomorphism, the tendency of organizations to converge toward common structural forms regardless of their formal goals. The grammar of Soviet schooling, imposed systematically across a vast territory over decades, constitutes a particularly powerful institutional template that has proven remarkably durable even after the political system that created it collapsed.

The empirical basis is a documentary corpus of 393 catalogued items spanning seven decades of Ukrainian natural science education, of which 101 are primary legislative, archival and curricular documents. The primary record was drawn from two state repositories: the Central State Archive of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine in Kyiv, covering Soviet-era curricula and ministerial deliberations, and the State Archive of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, covering regional education department records and materials from the Kryvyi Rih Pedagogical Institute. Each primary document was coded for persistent structural elements, genuinely new layers, and inter-layer friction, passages in which the requirements of different periods stand in tension. The authors are candid that the coding frame was applied deductively from the palimpsest model rather than induced from the material, and that a documentary corpus establishes what was required and authorized, not what happened in classrooms.

The Soviet foundation layer, established during the stabilization period of the 1950s through the 1980s, rests on the deepest documentary base, with 60 of the 101 primary documents. Five features constitute its grammar: strict disciplinary organization of physics, chemistry, biology, geography and astronomy as separate subjects; encyclopedic curriculum logic aiming at comprehensive coverage; knowledge-transmission pedagogy in which the teacher delivered pre-structured content; centralized textbook control with a single state-approved text per subject per grade; and a systematic urban-rural quality gradient in laboratories, teacher qualifications and resources. The staffing dimension of that gradient is visible in the record of the early 1960s, when Zhytomyr oblast was short of 300 teachers and the shortfall was met by drafting in senior students of the local pedagogical institute.

Yet the Soviet system itself recognized the limits of this model. Late-Soviet assessments found that schoolchildren assimilated factual material without sufficient awareness of the internal content of natural phenomena, and the 1988 All-Union Teacher Congress explicitly called for diverse approaches to educational content and an end to the uniformity that had constrained pedagogical creativity. Reformers argued that science education must move beyond the accumulation of facts to develop scientific thinking and inquiry skills. But the institutional grammar absorbed this reform rhetoric without structural alteration, and the authors identify a characteristic form of friction in the period: permission to depart from the prescribed method arrived together with the disappearance of the material means to act on it, a conjunction of authorization without capacity.

Ukrainian independence in 1991 initiated the second layer. The 1991 Education Law and the 1993 State National Program established new conceptual foundations of national identity, democratization, humanization and environmental awareness, the last catalyzed by the Chornobyl disaster of 1986. Science curricula were rewritten to include Ukrainian scientific achievements and local environmental contexts, and ideological content was removed. These changes were real, but the analysis reveals a critical pattern: the nationalizing layer changed the content of natural science education while largely preserving its structure. New content was, in effect, poured into old containers. The Chornobyl case is especially instructive, because understanding nuclear contamination demands exactly the cross-disciplinary thinking that the Soviet subject structure inhibits. Yet even this powerful impetus was formalized within existing structures, with radiation physics added to physics, biological effects to biology, and radionuclide chemistry to chemistry, and no instrument requiring these treatments to be brought into relation with one another.

The third layer arrived with Ukraine’s European orientation, formalized in the 2002 National Doctrine and elaborated through the 2004 State Standard’s key competencies, the 2011 STEM-referencing state program, the 2016 New Ukrainian School concept with its ten key competencies and integrated primary course I Explore the World, and the 2017 Law on Education. Again the palimpsest pattern continued. The external independent testing introduced in 2008 rewarded factual recall and algorithmic problem-solving far more than inquiry or investigation, precisely the outcomes the Soviet grammar was designed to produce, creating an incentive structure that ran counter to the competency language of the newer policy layer. International assessment data complicate the picture rather than confirming a simple story: in TIMSS 2007, Ukrainian eighth-graders scored 485 in science, below the scale average of 500, and their weakest cognitive domain was knowing, the opposite of what a straightforward transmission-grammar account would predict. The authors withdraw their earlier claim of a palimpsest signature in the assessment data and rest their case instead on the documentary and incentive evidence.

Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 provides what the authors carefully call a critical case rather than a natural experiment, a historical disruption that renders ordinarily tacit institutional structures visible without permitting controlled comparison. By January 2023, 1259 schools had been damaged and 223 destroyed, and as of December 2022, 36 percent of schools were teaching entirely remotely while a further 36 percent alternated between remote and in-person instruction. Notably, the division of school science into separate subjects was not questioned in any emergency adaptation the authors identified: emergency guidance reduced teaching hours and compressed content but operated within the existing subject structure, and the All-Ukrainian Online School reproduced that subject-based structure in digital form. Systemic stress, they conclude, reveals which practices a system treats as dispensable, though resilience under stress confounds institutional depth with the resource intensity of the practices concerned.

The model also has a human dimension the authors advance as interpretation rather than finding. From the system’s point of view accumulation is additive, but from the teacher’s point of view the same process is subtractive: a teacher required to describe two decades of demonstration-based laboratory expertise as outdated transmission pedagogy has not acquired a layer but been told that what they were good at no longer counts. Drawing on Peter Marris’s account of loss and change, and on research showing that what reformers read as resistance is frequently mourning, they suggest that friction is not only structural but biographical, and that its intensity is greatest where reform rhetoric is most emphatically discontinuous, as Ukrainian reform discourse has been in defining itself against the Soviet inheritance. The implications reach beyond Ukraine: if new policy settles onto durable inherited structures rather than replacing them, the resulting friction is better treated as a cost of reform than as an anomaly, a consideration relevant to the assumptions embedded in Sustainable Development Goal 4. The authors propose that reforms attuned to layering, working with rather than against existing structures and asking which features of the grammar are genuinely constitutive and which are contingent, should fare better than strategies premised on replacement, while acknowledging that testing this proposition requires the classroom-level evidence their documentary study cannot supply.

Subject of Research: Accumulation versus replacement of educational reforms in Ukrainian natural science education from 1950 to 2022

Article Title: Why educational change accumulates rather than replaces in Ukrainian natural science education from 1950 to 2022

Article References: Why educational change accumulates rather than replaces in Ukrainian natural science education from 1950 to 2022. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02247-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02247-6

Keywords: palimpsest model, grammar of schooling, Ukraine, post-Soviet education, educational change, science curriculum, implementation gap, Soviet legacy, competency-based education, TIMSS, wartime disruption, institutional theory