A newly established educational institution, the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, aims to form a generation of youth leaders by developing their intellectual and physical skills.
So far, the academy has recruited 39 students between the ages of 17 and 19 who have graduated from high school and finished their first year at university from all over Ukraine. They come from all over, including the Donbas and Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula.
In order to study at the academy, students have to put their education in schools and universities on hold for a year and move to the institution’s campus in Kyiv.
“We’re working on developing the body, spirit and intelligence,” Roman Tychkivskyy, an academy coordinator, said at the institution’s grand opening on Oct. 22. On campus, students study six days a week, getting up at 6 a.m. and start the day with yoga, running or the Chinese martial art – wushu. After training, they study until midnight.
The academy teaches Spanish, Polish, French, German and English, as well as Ukrainian. “We learn Harry Potter by heart, listening to audio books and reciting them,” student Marta Kasianova said about the Ukrainian phonetics lessons.
Students also discuss personal finances management and study math. In the evenings, they take lessons in the culture of thinking and take part in discussions about movies. Students also have to devote a half-day each week to a volunteer job in an animal shelter, raising money for sick children or working at a military hospital.
Students at the academy are overseen by mentors and tutors, who are only a few years older than the students. Drinking alcohol, using drugs, smoking or having a sexual relationship on campus is strictly forbidden. If they break a rule for a second time, students are suspended from the academy.
The idea for this type of educational institution is borrowed from Israel, which in turn combined ideas from the leading British universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The first academy in Israel was founded in 1996 by Erez Eshel, who is now in Ukraine as a consulting manager and mentor. In Israel only, the network of academies he started has expanded to 30 institutions and 30 leadership programs.
Eshel believes students shouldn’t rush their decision to apply for enrollment in universities. In Israel, young people have to perform national service, three to four years for men and two years for women. That is why when they apply to a university at the age of 22-23 they are “focused and mature,” Eshel says.
Besides having a high intellectual level, leadership potential and good character, students have to be committed. “When you develop leadership, you develop a commitment,” Eshel said. According to him, there are five necessary commitments: to personality, the family, professionalism, the community and the nation. Loyalty in these five spheres will generate young leaders in professions such as politics, business, medicine, science, education, the legal sphere, or journalism.
However, it’s important that all these budding professionals decide to stay in their country. “If you look at the diaspora – they are the most talented people in the world, but you export yourself,” Eshel said, adding that the academy’s students should stay and work in Ukraine.
Following the example of Israel, the Ukrainian team behind the academy plans to set up sister institutions in another four Ukrainian cities in 2016 – Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa, recruiting 300 students according to their academic performance.
“Forming the future leaders of the country is a difficult mission, but talking to these inspired children day by day, we believe in their success more and more,” said Yaroslava Johnson, the president and CEO of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, which funded the academy. “We’re seeing the first fruits.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliana Romanyshyn can be reached at romanyshyn@ kyivpost.com.
