Why August 24 is a critical day in my life
Photo: With Mama at Saratoga Beach, August 24, 2026, before we drove up to stand at the 50th parallel marker. Thirty-five years of independence, and the person who taught me to ask questions long before the state allowed them.
Фото: З Мамою на пляжі Саратога, 24 серпня 2026 року, перед тим як ми поїхали стати біля знака 50-ї паралелі. Тридцять п’ять років незалежності, і людина, яка навчила мене ставити запитання задовго до того, як держава це дозволила.
Thirty-five years ago, Ukraine declared independence. That same autumn I went into grade 3.
I did not understand what had happened. Children rarely do. What I remember is not the declaration. What I remember is the classroom, and how it began to change around me while I was sitting in it.
I was fortunate in a way I could not name at the time. I went to school in a country that was learning to tell the truth about itself, at exactly the age when a person starts learning how to think. Those two things happened to me at the same time. That is the whole reason this day matters to me.
The history that was allowed
In grade 5 we started history. This is a small sentence with a large meaning behind it.
The history I was given was not the history the Soviet Union taught. I learned about the Indigenous peoples of Ukraine, about who was here, about whose land this was and whose story had been written over. Before independence, that content was not simply missing. It was replaced. A different story was installed in its place, and generations were taught to repeat it back.
I did not have to unlearn that story, because I was never made to learn it. I know now how rare that is. The people who came just before me carried something in their heads that had to be removed later, in adulthood, painfully, often alone.
Learning literature without a textbook
In Ukrainian language and literature we often had no textbooks. The old ones were unusable. The new ones did not exist yet.
So we talked.
We read what could be found, and then we discussed it out loud. We compared what one person heard at home with what another person heard at home. We asked what had been written before, who had written it, and why it had been written that way. That gap in the shelves turned out to be a gift. A textbook tells you the answer. An empty shelf makes you build one, together, and then defend it.
I learned to question a text from inside Ukrainian knowledge, not from outside it. Many people before me were never given that position to stand in.
“Finally I can speak the truth”
I had teachers who said this out loud in front of us. Finally I can speak the truth.
I was a child. I heard the words and moved on to the next thing, the way children do. I did not know I was watching someone exhale after years of holding their breath.
I understood it much later, when I learned how suppression actually works. It is not always a prison. Usually it is smaller and quieter than that. It is being cut off in the middle of a sentence. It is being told this is not the place. It is being made to feel embarrassed for having spoken at all. Do that to a person often enough and they stop before they start, and then no one has to silence them anymore, because they do it themselves.
My teachers had lived under that for their entire working lives. And then one day they stood in front of a room of nine and ten year olds and said, finally.
I carry that sentence with me. It is the reason I notice when someone in a meeting is not being allowed to finish.
What my family gave me
School was only half of it. The other half was at home.
My family passed critical thinking to me before the state was willing to allow it. The Soviet Union spent decades trying to erase that capacity in people, and thankfully it did not succeed, because families kept it alive at kitchen tables where no ministry could reach. Mine did. By the time my school was free to teach me to question things, I had already been taught to question things.
Not everyone is that fortunate. Most people get one or the other, if they get either. I had both.
What I do with it now
Photo: The flag on the crossing, August 2026. Carried across an ocean, flown on an ordinary working day.
Фото: Прапор на переправі, серпень 2026 року. Перенесений через океан, піднятий у звичайний робочий день.
I teach in Canada. I use my own examples: my family, my teachers, the empty shelf where the textbook should have been.
I tell my students that learning is only half the work, and unlearning is the harder half. Anyone can add information. Very few people can look at something they were given by an authority they trusted and ask whether it should stay.
I am sometimes more vocal than is comfortable. I know that about myself. I also know why. I know what it means to follow an authority that does not permit questions, and I know what it costs a room when everyone in it has agreed in advance not to ask any. Systems are not always willing to learn. They are almost never willing to unlearn. That does not make the asking wrong. It makes it necessary.
The thing I am most glad about is that my students are becoming vocal too. They are learning to speak inside systems that would prefer they did not, and they are learning to do it in a way that holds.
Why this day
Independence did not give me a flag. It gave me a classroom where a teacher could say the true thing, a history that included the people who were here, a subject taught through discussion because there was nothing else to teach it with, and a family that had kept the habit of questioning safe until the doors opened.
That is what August 24 gave me. It gave me the conditions to become someone who thinks, and then to spend a career passing those conditions on.
That is why it is a critical day in my life, and why I mark it every year.
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