The word “consumer” has a nice ring to it

A new teaching aid called Basic Consumer Knowledge , part of a new subject for grades 1 to 12, will be introduced next year by the Ministry of Ukraine for Education and Science in collaboration with the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme. This course is supposed to make our children aware of their consumer rights, give them indispensable information on the economy, food production technologies, jurisprudence, and banking, and teach them how to apply this knowledge to everyday life.

Such courses have been mandatory in schools in the United Kingdom for a long time. In the schools of other EU member states they are either compulsory or optional, or integrated with other disciplines. In the view of Klavdia Maksymenko, manager of the Consumer Community and Civic Associations project, the textbook Basic Consumer Knowledge , which will soon be published in Ukraine in a print run of 7,000 copies, will enable our children to take another step towards what we call European values, one of which is self-esteem.

“The greatest difference between us, Ukrainian consumers of goods and services, and Europeans is that we are not comfortable protecting our rights. For European consumers it is a point of honor to prove to a producer or a seller that a certain product or service is of poor quality. So, the producer respects the consumer,” Maksymenko said.

“Unfortunately, a large number of problems in Ukraine stem from the gap between businesses and people. When we decided to conduct a survey of the attitude of big Ukrainian producers to consumers, only 38 out of the 300 businesses that we approached agreed to deal with us. The foreign experts came to the sad conclusion that Ukrainian businesses do not care about their customers’ opinions. This situation will continue as long as consumers are not aware of their rights or are too timid to defend them.”

Now that basic consumer knowledge is going to be introduced in Ukrainian schools, even first-graders will be able to force businesses to inscribe them on their “map of the world.” At the very least, they will be taught to take a cash memo in shops. Experts say that this course will have double the value because children will be coming home and teaching their parents. The course will consist of theory, practice, and homework because the main aim is to teach children to find their own way out of situations that happen to a lot of people; for example, buying a product past its sell-by date.

Since the school curriculum is already overloaded, the Basic Consumer Knowledge course will not be compulsory in schools. Everything will depend on the initiative of teachers and school principals. The most important thing is that this course can be easily taught as part of other subjects, such as chemistry, biology, geography, economics, and basic health. “In introducing this course, we will be going the way of Europe, where a specialist teacher takes on a certain number of topics and teaches them during his classes. For example, during chemistry lessons pupils can learn about the composition of various foods, additives, the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), etc. This will offer children an additional incentive to study subjects that until now seemed uninteresting to them,” said Oleh Yeresko, who heads the Department of Preschool and Secondary Education at the Ministry of Education.

“I will emphasize that this is not an experiment because some fragments of Basic Consumer Knowledge, integrated with other subjects, have already been taught in schools in Transcarpathia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Luhansk, and Kharkiv oblasts, as well as in other regions. We have received very positive comments not only from teachers but pupils as well. This course also teaches children to form critical attitudes to products that are advertised on television.”

The project organizers have already held a series of workshops for Ukrainian teachers, and about 1,000 schools have formally requested the Basic Consumer Knowledge course. According to Oksana Ovcharuk, coordinator of teacher training sessions, teachers are very keen on studying the course materials, if only to be able to learn how to protect their own rights. The course textbooks will be distributed by regional educational authorities, with priority given to schools that were the first to submit formal requests.

Assessing the paramount importance for our schoolchildren to study Basic Consumer Knowledge, the manager of the project Consumer Community and Civic Associations said that this is the way Ukraine is meeting the commitments it accepted as a country aspiring to join the European Union.