Youth Associations as Mechanisms of Creating the Educational Ideal of Ukrainians (Xix – First Quarter of Xx Century)

The article analyzes the forms of public communication of Ukrainian rural youth in the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th centuries, which had an established structure, internal mechanisms of self-organization, provided protection against destructive processes, in particular assimilation, since the systematic direct assimilation of customary and ceremonial culture, etiquette norms and rules contributed to the formation in youth stereotypes of behavior that were a determining vector of upbringing and socialization. The article examines such forms of communication among Ukrainian peasant youth as fairs, village church, brotherhood, sisterhood, neighborhood, community, evening parties. Fairs performed economic functions, boys and girls met at fairs, concluded marriage agreements. At the same time, fairs served as a permanent means of various information and knowledge. The village church has always been one of the main centers of community consolidation, a place for intensive communication of rural youth. Brotherhood and sisterhood were peculiar forms of individual mutual assistance, based on the spiritual kinship that arose between boys and girls as a result of the joint performance of certain ritual actions of a religious and moral content. By the custom of brotherhood, sisterhood, relations of friendship and mutual assistance were cemented for life and became morally binding and sacred, just like family ties. Brothers and sisters took part in economic and family affairs: they decided the matchmaking and marriage of their children, helped in case of illness and material shortages, etc. Folk pedagogy interpreted such relations as ideally demonstrative, opposed to selfishness and malice. Neighborhood and fellow countrymen, which belonged to the kind of kinship that characterized connections by place of birth and residence. The institute of veschernits testified to the acquisition by socialization of qualitatively new features, dimensions, and a change in its general orientation. Along with other aspects of socialization (economic, social, ceremonial), the communicative aspect comes to the fore, the defining moments of which are love and marriage, as well as the process of formation and regulation of gender behavior in the youth community; youth received a certain freedom of action, no longer being constantly under the control of their parents. The author come to the conclusion that youth associations, as a form of public communication, occupied an important place in the education of young people. Boys and girls formed aesthetic preferences, the basics of joint and personal behavior, emotional and intellectual experience, learned folklore heritage. Girls and boys got to know the opposite sex better, mastered the style and forms of behavior characteristic of adults, gained certain knowledge and experience in the field of personal relationships.