jats:pIn comparison to a vast literature on Soviet education little is known about Ukrainian pedagogical sciences apart from a mounting critique about the issues of academic dishonesty and plagiarism, which relates to all higher education disciplines, the absence of an empirical tradition in education research, a poor record of publication in peer-reviewed journals, and the dominance of a positivist approach, which seeks to discover ‘laws’ rather than reach ‘understanding’. This paper offers a thematic analysis of four ‘Pedagogy’ textbooks – three textbooks for under-graduate studies and one textbook for post-graduate study. The textbook analysis demonstrates that Ukrainian pedagogical sciences as a research tradition is deeply rooted in its own conceptual apparatus with no apparent relation to the current debates about teaching and learning in a wider Europe. The key proposition of the paper is that Ukrainian pedagogical sciences represent a mixture of Herbatianism and dialectical materialism, with more recent developments that emphasise ‘acme’ or ‘perfectionism’ that could be compared to debates on virtue ethics in education. Alongside these narratives the discourse of ‘Kozak pedagogy’ contributes to the nation-building narrative in education. The paper calls for a review of the content of ‘pedagogy’ textbooks currently used in higher education institutions in Ukraine and envisages that the newly established Ukrainian Educational Research Association can provide a platform for this important undertaking.</jats:p>