EDUCATION-SERBIA: Bringing Education System to European Standards

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jun 5 2001 (IPS) - The wave of reforms that is sweeping Serbia after the decade-long rule of former president Slobodan Milosevic includes the country’s education system, which is being reviewed so as to bring it to the European standards.

Serbian Education Minister Gaso Knezevic blamed Milesovic’s regime for the collapse of the country’s education system. “A country that used to have excellent schooling was turned into one where old fashioned models of teaching prevailed, accompanied with enormous amounts of unnecessary facts and even lies,” he said in Belgrade last week.

Milosevic, who is in detention, fell from power last October.

Knezevic spoke at the first international conference on education reform in Serbia, held under the auspices of the European Council, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Organisation for European Co-operation and Development (OECD).

According to the plans put forward by the Serbian ministry of education, the first targets of the reform will be elementary and secondary schools attended by some 1.5 million students aged 7-19. The first step for the next school year, starting in September, will be a cut in curriculum by 30 per cent.

Specialised commissions will review the history textbooks that have been turned into the propaganda pamphlets of Milosevic’s regime in the past ten years.

“It’s totally unacceptable in the modern world to have history textbooks that are subject to daily political influence and forgeries,” deputy education minister Vigor Majic told IPS. “And that is exactly what happened in the past decade, due to the wars and influence of ideology on education”.

For example, history textbooks for nine-year olds speak only about wars.

Besides the 14th century battle of Kosovo, when medieval Serb kingdom lost its independence to Turks, children learn about WWI and WWII, with special emphasis on the Croat atrocities against Serbs, in 1941-45. The Nazi regime in Croatia exterminated some 700,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

Additional lesson on the atrocities says, “Watch the films on the genocide and talk with your parents about them”.

“Children describe the textbooks as frightening,” says Dr. Nenad Havelka of Belgrade University.

Other experts say that history textbooks often turn nasty in higher levels. A recent analysis by the Belgrade-based Centre for Anti-War Actions, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), shows that 73 per cent of the textbooks it reviewed are related to Serbian history.

“There is no comparison of any historical background. A student might get an idea that, for example, WWII started in Serbia and ended here,” the authors say.

“Hate speech against all non-Serbs prevails in history textbooks,” says Dr. Dubravka Stojanovic of Belgrade University. “It goes to the point of painting Serbs as the best nation among others, mere victims of world conspiracy where the developments of the last decade are concerned”.

In the 1990s, the former Yugoslav federation, made up of six- republics, fell apart, and degenerated in bloody wars fought in Croatia and Bosnia. Belgrade-backed large Serb minorities in both republics fought Croats and Bosnian Muslims, seeking independence.

Belgrade’s involvement brought two rounds of crippling international sanctions against Milosevic’s regime in Serbia.

Milosevic’s repressive politics against the two million Albanian minority in Kosovo province resulted in 11 weeks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) air campaign against Serbia in 1999.

Official stand of Milosevic’s propaganda was that the international sanctions were a result of foreign conspiracy against Serbs.

Experts have warned that history books are equally biased in Croatia and Bosnia. Each side painted itself as a victim of wars in the 1990s. All the others were “aggressors”.

“In Bosnia, students face a broken, schizophrenic picture of history. It distorts the views of young generations and makes all the efforts to turn to normal life very hard,” Stojanovic says.

Bosnian population is made up of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Muslims have their history textbooks, while Serbs and Croats use textbooks from either neighbouring Serbia or Croatia.

But, Stojanovic says, “the approach to certain historical developments is so biased, that, judging by what is presented in the textbooks, a neutral expert could hardly guess that the authors were describing the same event. A national hero of one side is often described as a criminal in the other”.

International community’s Representative in Bosnia, Wolfgang Petritch, had to intervene at one point last year, ordering all the hate speech and insulting material on all three sides — Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia — to be bloated out from the history textbooks.

“History textbooks remain the mere replica of a certain political moment where the description or the analysis of wars of the 1990s reflected the ruling ideology,” Stojanovic explains.

“Without proper, objective approach to recent history in all the countries in the region, there will never be reconciliation among the nations that fought bloody wars in the past decade,” she warns.