Hybridity in the higher education of Ukraine: global logic or local idiosyncrasy?

Hybridity as a heuristic concept of the globalization and post-colonialism discourses is used for 1) understanding the logic of the modernization of the higher education of Ukraine (HEU), and 2) for making a meaningful diagnosis of those educational pathologies that restrain it. The educational pathologies are considered as the conditioned by post-coloniality and post-totalitarianism departure or deviation from the undertaking of the original missions of higher education (HE): “to educate, to train and to undertake research” (World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action, 1998). Modernity as a philosophical concept and normative ideal that focus on increasing rational components in a human life is exploited for showing the ways of carrying out the missions of HE by adjusting particular patterns of rationality to the needs and wants of society. However, globalization puts modernity under challenges due to its bent toward de/or non-modern cultural practices. That’s why the logic of modernization in HEU acquires hybrid characteristics by fitting together different, multiple, opposing educational models and standards — post-colonial, post-totalitarian, modern, de/non-modern and global through the local acceptance. Therefore, the locality turns into a focal point of the modernization of HEU in a global context. The modernization of HEU reveals the ambivalent meaning of hybridity in its producing and destructive potential, i.e. as a global logic or a local idiosyncrasy.