Ukraine, Russia and China: An Evolving Academic Perspective for Early Learning Developments in Childhood.

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Op-ed by John E. Staff Editor.

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What a tragic and lethal mess! That would at present and currently describe early childhood development ideology and protocols in several subjects of early learning here in the West, all because of the Russia-Ukraine War. Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, and bombed civilian schools, hospitals, residence apartments and government buildings, killing thousands of non-combatant civilians in Ukraine, a serious question has to be asked: "How are teachers supposed to incorporate lesson planning along the lines of ethnic conflicts involving Russians and Ukrainans when most of the world knows that Russia is responsible for the invasion and Ukraine is not an easy culture or language to translate into the West?"

For as long as I can remember as a trained, educated and certified schoolteacher, Russian culture, language and systems of social and interpersonal developments involving Russian immigrants and ethnic peoples emigrating to and being educated in the West have been the main courses of academic study, opportunity and technical practice, and not Ukrainian, or for that matter, any other post-Soviet-bloc satellite nationality after 1991.  But, how were academic people in the recent past supposed to predict that someone like Putin would come along and start to imperialize Russian government perspectives, starting wars that could ultimately lead to more invasions past Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea-Ukraine anyway? Were we in the West ready for the wars, when previous to the invasions, Putin was recorded several times as stating publicly "...no invasion of Ukraine is being planned..." or words to that effect? Is more coming along the way? Is it even possible to predict Russia's next military moves in light of all of the above mentioned?

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His apparent lack of international and social as well as contemprary world political vision and apparently clear judgments about invading Ukraine were stymied and ultimately interfered with, in a deadly way, by the immediate armed responses by Ukrainian military and security forces and their arming by Western NATO nations, including billions of USD, high-value supply and humanitarian assistance. Russian leadership warned the West that they would judge the U.S. and NATO defense of Ukraine to be a proxy war conducted against Russia, but the Western world interprets that war supply as defense of a smaller nation that was invaded by Russia-simply that-and that Ukraine was in immediate need of adequate or better defensive armament and financial aid. To date, there have been only a few attacks militarily, ostensibly by Ukrainian forces but never admitted to, against Russian military targets just across the Ukrainian Russian borderlines. Most of the attacks have been critical in disabling Russia's ability to invade nearby Ukrainian defenses as a potentially pre-emptive move against Russian forces to prevent future armed and air attacks against Ukraine.

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In the meantime, critical decisions need to be made by experienced schoolteachers about what to prioritize in the cases of transformative education styles for early learning, involving notably Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian students under age 5 and also patterns of socialization involving those particular children. I opine that measures of personality and behavior must be assessed in these children and background checks to protect security, national and social identity and importantly, pre-existing and familial relationships and established friendships between the said groups involved, in order to not create a catastrophic world future filled with warlike themes of aggressions and subdivisions of the human race. As well as assumptions, guesses and unskilled non-trained formats of "new education," any new paradigm of early learning involving these nationalities may or would not only inhibit normal learning development in said young people, but sever familiar ways of cognitions and thought patterns that are natural for those/these children. The predictable and resulting educational vectors in multiple layers of social stigmatizations, bullying, stunting of natural emotional, cognitive and mental and also physical developments and personal and interpersonal capabilities in such children, would potentially create more childhood development problems and issues -and consequentially amongst more children from various backgrounds, as they grow. 

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I hope and pray that the future of this world can accommodate successfully any positive-if any-cease-fire and a complete ending to this current war. It is slowly becoming a war of attrition, meaning that the forces are trying to force each other to drop out and surrender to the other side, which would seem obviously impossible to any knowledgable observer. Ukraine isn't Russia and Russia isn't Ukraine, geo-poltically, in the year 2023, and hasn't been officially since 1991. 

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It is clear that war is hell. But for the sake of growing children all around the Earth, it is again my sincere hope and prayer that much, much more can be done to cease-fire and end this regional conflict in order to repair the civil and geopolitical damage as well as the international damage that has been done by Putin's war against and assumptions about Ukraine. His was, in the final analysis, a complete error of judgment and wholly flawed in his apparent assumptions not only of Ukrainian passivity, but mainly of Russian superiority in the practices of international law and clear decsion-making in the face of such a large population of Russian citizens and Ukrainian nationals and victims of Russian leadership's terrorism and war.

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