Abstract:

The war in Ukraine has provoked a number of social problems that have significantly increased the risks for children and their families, who have suddenly found themselves in the middle of a crisis due to hostilities in their places of residence. The consequences of such conditions are high mortality among children and newborns, hunger, mental and physical exhaustion, limited access to basic services, inability to fully exercise the right to education. Thus, Ukraine is now faced with the urgent issue of choosing a model for organizing the social adaptation of children with a clear priority for the full development of future generations in the specific conditions of war. Education, as one of the basic institutions of Ukrainian society, can become a center for organizing and conducting activities to adapt children to new crisis living conditions and atypical childhood.

The aim of the article is to analyze the basic challenges and risks faced by Ukrainian education in wartime.

Ukrainian educational institutions have faced the following challenges to date:
1. Organizational - the public sector is unready to reorient the activities of educational institutions in wartime due to limited possibilities for state regulation resulting from decentralization and expanded autonomy.
2. Management - effective mechanisms for managing the education system in crisis situations and established models of management decisions on staff retention are absent.
3. Economic - large-scale losses of both movable and immovable property due to armed combat, the restoration of which will require large financial investments.
4. Personnel – wartime crisis situations clearly demonstrated the organizational confusion and administrative inability of a certain part of educational institutions’ authorities to perform their functions in difficult war conditions.

The crisis situations, that Ukrainians are experiencing during the armed conflict, have provoked a group of risks for both society as a whole and the educational institutions in particular, such as:
1. Atypical childhood – emerges under the conditions that the immediate environment cannot provide children with a normal course of socialization and adapt them to new conditions of social life, ensure the creation of opportunities for the age-appropriate development and proper satisfaction of needs. Therefore, educational institutions in wartime will face such forms of atypical childhood as rapid adulthood, asociality, social orphanhood, criminalization, etc.
2. Deprivation – deprivation of a child of the opportunity to communicate with the family, lack of parents’ attention, care and guardianship, which is accompanied with various forms of domestic violence, and it is one of the main causes of protest behavior, which provokes conflict increase and ignorance of the educational process.
3. Separation - the problem of child loneliness is caused by living separately from parents, through a spatial division based on physical and psychological separation (neglect, homelessness, social orphanhood). Educational institutions will be forced to respond and make efforts to integrate such children into the social space.
4. Sudden poverty - loss of available material and social resources by families in wartime and limitation/ impossibility to restore these resources in the postwar period. It causes difficulties in access to education and conflict interaction between participants in the educational process.

Keywords:

Hostilities, crisis situation, children, atypical childhood, education.