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October 19, 2007
It is indicative that the OSCE, even though it is an international organisation, is one of the rare institutions that follows education and especially higher education and the problem of “two schools under one roof”. In your opinion what is the reason for the inertia of the local institutions, and what kind of cooperation can you expect and currently have with the local institutions?
Inertia in domestic institutions as opposed to international? Well I think the divisions in your schools reflect the decisions in your political life. And as far as I can tell within your domestic institutions with a few exceptions those divisions are reflected there. And the second problem – and as an American I can call it a problem – is the Dayton Constitution, because education is a local competency as opposed to a state competency. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that – it’s the same way in my country – but given the way everything is divided into three here with little in common, which is different to my country, it makes the situation more difficult to deal with for any institution. Partly I think this is a political problem; it seems to me that most of your political leaders, and there are exceptions here too, are satisfied with the state of affairs.
Which politicians are you thinking of?
I don’t think I should name names, but you could go to certain parts of this country and find out that the reason that schools are divided is that the political leadership in the canton or the entity is demanding that they be so. If you talk to professional educators here they say that we would do something about this if we could but they won’t let us. And the final thing is just, I think – I think, I don’t know for sure but I get the sense – that parents and students don’t care very much about this either and so in the end we care more than everybody else about the situation in education.
I agree that the problem is with the cantonal authorities because education is a cantonal competency, but what justifies the inertia from the Federation Ministry which should have been more involved in resolving, for example, the issue of “two schools under one roof”?
Well, I have to rise a little bit to the defence of the Federation since it has little power in this regard. It’s a similar situation in a way with the Ministry of Civil Affairs: it’s been told to coordinate but it has no power to coerce. So I know that if you look at the Federal Ministry they’d give you curricula that looked good, and lists of textbooks that look good, but as far as I know they have no power to enforce the use of either in schools in the cantons.
Of course they don’t have the authority but they can present their stance, they can lobby. At the beginning of the school year, for example, there were problems in Herzegovina-Neretva and Central Bosnia cantons where parents didn’t want to send their children to school. The Federation Ministry should have come in as a go-between to find a solution and actually act as an institution which would find a solution. And the Federation Minister Ms. Malikavic spoke only a month after the problems…
Let me ask you this – ask you a rhetorical question in a different way. If you go to, say, the United States and France, or Great Britain, you’ll find that presidents and prime ministers and lots of politicians are saying, “Education is an issue. How can we improve education and compete in the modern world?” And how many times do you hear anybody outside of an education ministry here say anything about education, except at the start of the school year when there are problems. Then they forget it…
How many times did it happen to you that some political leader actually expressed an initiative for these issues to be resolved through the OSCE?
In three years it’s happened to me twice.
Do you know who the persons were?
They were both presidents. And in both cases the burden was placed back on the OSCE to do something, not on your domestic political leaders. I’m being a little unfair; I’ve had more conversations about it, but the specific answer to your question is twice. The PIC in my three years has made more statements about education than many of your political leaders. And this to me is important not just because you have divided or segregated schools but more generally because the standards are slipping; you used to have a very, very good educational system, which by objective standards is getting worse. An increasing number of young girls are not going to schools, and if there’s one thing that helps countries develop it is having educated women. And yet by regional standards you’re devoting a relatively high percentage of your GDP to education, so there is something that is not working here. I think that a lot of the parents think, because I often hear this said, that Yugoslavia had the best education system in the world. Your educational system is basically the same system you had in Yugoslavia with divided schools thrown in, but the world has moved on in 15, 17 years. I just don’t think that parents and students and others recognise this part of the problem enough.
Could you say specifically who bears the most guilt when it comes to separate schools and ethnic segregation in them?
Well I think that everybody is guilty, but some are more guilty than others. I would certainly say that if you went to areas where populations are mixed or denominations are mixed – of which there are not many in this country – you can go and see these two-in-one schools, which are a visible symbol of a wider problem here. And just as you can look at three different political visions which are essentially based on whatever nationality you have, you can see three different visions of how their children should be taught in schools. What’s lacking here across the board is some vision of what, if I were in the United States, I would call the ‘common good’. Everybody wants to educate their children in the language and customs and traditions of their own nation, but I rarely hear anybody say, ‘What is it that we need to educate our children for so that they can live together in Bosnia and Herzegovina?’ I think you can go to Croat-dominated areas, Bosniak-dominated areas and Serb-dominated areas and point to the same problems.
The OSCE is almost the only one who analyses education in the RS. Because of the two ethnic groups we have in the Federation, the situation in the RS is different, given its monolithic landscape there. What are the problems of education in the RS?
They are exactly the same as in the RS. I will tell you a story I often tell, so you have probably heard it before. About a year and a half ago I went to visit Visegrad, and I specifically asked to see a school for returnees. I was taken to a school about 10 kilometers outside of the city. It was freezing cold. It had just snowed. I wasn’t properly dressed and my feet quickly turned to blocks of ice. There were thirteen children in the class, one teacher, three different grades, no heat, nothing. Now it would have been a lot cheaper, I expect, because this was one of seven schools – and I was later told that this was one of the largest one, because there were some schools with only two children in them. Now there were a bunch of parents waiting for me outside, so I asked them, are you happy with this? And they said ‘Yes’. And then one said to me, he put his finger in the air and he said, “It was much better, it was much more democratic under Tito. We had jobs.” So these parents are very happy that their Bosniak children are getting Bosniak educations in cold, ill-equipped schools;instead of getting bussed the 10 kilometers to join the main school in Visegrad, where everybody, I suspect, or almost everybody, is Serb. These were not two schools under one roof, but two schools under two roofs – and a very expensive way to make sure that students of different nationalities got educations in their own language culture and so on. These poor returnees were probably not getting a very good education. But the teacher was very good. I watched him, but he was laboring under very difficult circumstances.
I’ll tell you a true story and I’d like to hear your opinion. I have worked on this story and I’m sure that you are familiar with it, that Bosniak children do not have their own school. There is a joint school, but they have their own curriculum. So, for a month parents boycotted the school where a lot of Serb parents actually chose not to send their children to school in accordance with the Croat curricula but in accordance with the Bosniak one. What is your opinion on that?
Well, I’ll tell you two things. We have done a study which surprised me because it showed the extent to which parents whose children were in a minority in a community would go to get their children out of the school in that community and into one where they are in the majority. This goes for Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. That’s probably the first problem. The second counter-story is one I heard when I was talking to students in Mostar last week. And this I want to be careful about, because I’ll get the facts wrong and get lots of letters protesting this. So, so in general terms, it is well known that Mostar has two universities. The students in one faculty in one got upset with what was happening to them in their faculty one day and they all defected to the same faculty in the other school, regardless of ethnicity. They returned when the faculty responded and corrected the problems, but for a moment it was less important what nationality you were and what language you were learning in than what education you were getting. I wish that were the case more commonly here. This is where students took action. This something else I’ve always encouraged.
Actually, the point I’ve been coming to believe is that some of these outward problems are less important than those that we don’t talk about that much. Let us grant that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are three different languages, with different literatures and music. As the story from Mostar shows, they are similar enough that students can adjust to the language that is not their native language and can still be educated if they have to. To me it’s more important to know what they are being taught in these schools, because I think that is the most important part: if they are being taught that you are good and everyone else is bad, or that your capital is not even in this country, that’s a very bad way to raise future citizens of this country. I will tell you another story that I often repeat, so please forgive me if I’ve told you before. When I go places I like to speak to students when I can. I once had a meeting with the student leaders of Banja Luka University. They all told me that they don’t feel attached to Bosnia and Herzegovina; they are Serbs, they feel like Serbs. There were three of them, and each of them shared the dream of studying in Novi Sad. So I asked them what happens when you go to Serbia. They said, “Oh, they call us Bosnians.” The fact is that whether you are Bosnian, Croat or Serb, if you grow up here, you come from Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think an education system ought to reflect that basic fact.
So, let us go back to issues of higher education. I would like to point out at what you had said about some invisible problems, one of those is that problems emerge in the Croat majority areas, in which Bosniak children do not have their schools, the physical buildings and in the 5th grade they have to leave the school, finding alternatives to their schooling.
No, it’s shameful in a way because it’s discriminatory. It’s a violation of the basic human right to treat people equally. It’s very petty sometimes, to the extent that Bosniak teachers aren’t allowed to use teachers’ rooms in schools and things like that. This has nothing to do with protecting one’s nationality, identity and culture. It’s discriminatory, it’s wrong – and it’s illegal for that matter. One of my problems now is that Bosniaks are beginning to react in the same way. Prozor-Rama is a perfect example of that. Two years ago the Bosniaks created a separate school there. I was in a divided secondary school not long ago – I won’t reveal where it is because I’ll get people in trouble again – and I asked the Croat director if the Bosniak students in this school wanted to study in the Croat curriculum in this school would you have a problem with it? And he said, “Oh no.” And then the Bosniak curriculum director pounded the table and said, “We need our own language, identity and curriculum.” Now I am going to reveal how much I’ve forgotten from my schooling, but there used to be a professor of physics many hundred of years ago who said for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are seeing that in divided schools right now.
Is our information true, it is my presumption, but is it true that the greatest number of little girls who don’t go to school is in Bosniak dominated areas?
I can’t say that it is Bosniak-dominated areas, but it’s certainly rural areas of the country; it’s not in the cities. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case, but I just don’t have the specific information. I will again tell you a story. I have been to places where the young people can’t get to school because they’re made to pay for buses; there’s no secondary school in their community and they can’t afford the cost. I don’t want to make oversimplified reasons for this, but it does seem to be more young girls than boys who aren’t in school.
This is part of a patriarchal society and poverty is a problem. But what if you have a family where they are maybe three boys and three girls, and the father of the family, who is also the head of the family, as it happens in rural areas, may decide that the girls will not continue their education when they finish their grade school.
Could be. I just don’t have any hard statistics.
Well, when it comes to the curricula with two ethnicities, it was established that this was the initiative of the international community when it seemed the only solution at the time. However, the OSCE is the only one that seems to have an analytical and systematic approach to it, the others only seem to have not be doing anything and the people expect them maybe to impose certain things, have new ways to try and find new curricula…
Yea, I think it’s the way a lot of people approach education here, as a technical matter, and that’s good. You should have people helping your ministries improve and improving curricula and teaching methods. Our view is a bit different because we’re essentially an organisation concerned with human rights and democracy.
The OSCE is a special case, but what about the OHR?
Well let me get to that, because as much as I’d like to take all the credit for ourselves I would suggest that you take a look at the case of education in Brcko as a good model for this country, where supervisors working the local authorities have gotten the students of three nationalities together and minorities too in the same classroom. As far as I know no one has become any less Serbian, Croat or Bosniak by virtue of sitting in the same classroom. Even in Brcko you have the national group of subjects. If you speak your own language in the classroom the teacher has to speak it back to you. But, I think, one of the examples of the success there is the fact that people actually cross the boundaries into the District of Brcko of all ethnicities to put their children in these schools rather than leaving them where they are. I think that’s an example where, as much as it pains me to do so, one has to give credit to the supervisors in Brcko.
Is there a resolution to education in BiH from the viewpoint of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Yes, I think from our viewpoint if you could achieve something like the Brcko model across the country. It some how manages to balance nationality with commonality. That’s a solution. There’s a second point I’d like to make also, though: most parts of this country for better or for worse are mainly now mono-ethnic, and that’s why I go back to my point about what students are being taught. Even if you’re in an area that’s all-Serb, all-Croat, all-Bosniak, there should I think be some part of your curriculum that tells you you’re living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, you’re growing up to be a citizen of this country, that even though you’re of three nationalities you share a history in common – that sort of thing. So the solution, I think, has to go beyond just getting students of different nationalities into the same classrooms also to approach certain parts of what they are being taught or else they’ll certainly grow up with little allegiance to the country as a whole.
There is a problem for students when it comes to the multidisciplinary approach because the students interpret in various ways what happens – Dani had a series of texts about textbooks and how in the Bosnian curricula they approach that issue. For example, Gavrilo Princip – in one school in Sarajevo children are being taught that he was a terrorist, in others that he was a hero…
Yes, you’ve exactly touched on the problem in this country.
That’s what we are trying to ask: what is the best way to reach a solution?
Well, my colleagues who are more expert than I advocate what they call, multi-perspectivity – you know, you’re going to get me in trouble with so many people with this interview – because that is what is being advocated by the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and the Georg Eckert Institute for Textbook Research. But I sometimes wonder why do you have to characterize him at all? Why can’t you describe what he did and let students make their own choices? Kids are smart here. You give them the facts in a well-written narrative history and tell them what happened and they can make up their own mind. There is so much labelling that goes on here I’ve been to a school, a divided school, where all the graffiti said, “Gotovina Heroj!” That’s bad enough on the wall of the school. You may not want your textbooks to make those characterisations. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but why not let the facts speak for themselves?
So the problem is that the politicians are influencing the publishing houses- the altars of the textbooks – and the review from Dani has established that the essence of the problem is corruption.
Well, again, I go back to the point I tried to make, that when the parents don’t see this as a problem then it makes it very difficult to deal with, because at some point the most influential actors in all of this are the people who vote. I mean, if I were a parent of a child in this country and I was looking at what was happening in the schools here, I would be very upset and I’d want to ask who is responsible. No one seems to be asking that question. You have some excellent schools in this country and you have some without windows and heat and running water. You’ve got something like 2,000 schools including all the branch schools. You have a lot of things that could be done to improve education, and no one even seems to be talking about it – except the OSCE in many cases. Until politicians feel some pressure to change the way things are done, then they are probably not going to do it, because the system seems to work in their interest at the moment.
So the OSCE worked a lot on the Higher Education Draft law, and it seems that after one of these was rejected two years ago, that the OSCE somewhat stepped aside and everything was left in the hands of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and political pressures. A solution was tried to be found by the SNSD from the RS side and both of the HDZs, and finally they reached a solution, a draft which they adopted. How satisfied are you with this?
Well, that’s not fair to my colleagues, who continued to work all the way through, but it is a pretty good characterisation of me, though. I agree with those who said that the law is a start; it is better than nothing. I think it’s far from ideal. One reason that we appear to be a little bit marginalized is that the debate moved from the educational aspects to the political aspects, and for the past years it’s been not about things that have to do with universities but about who gets to control what, where. Almost two years ago some of my colleagues in the international community went to the government of the time and said, “Look this is ridiculous, why don’t you, Mr Prime Minister, do something about this?” So Prime Minister Terzic to his credit took it out of the education realm and got political leaders around the table. They were about 98 per cent done when two things stopped the final agreement, the same things that had to be resolved last time: who gets to accredit universities; who gets to control the money that goes into them. That’s what the discussions were about. I know what our position was; the law doesn’t reflect it. I was also startled to find that after it had been passed that it turned from a state law into a framework law. I was told the only way to get the law passed was to do that. But I fear it’s going to lead to the same problem that you have with the primary and secondary education law, in which the harmonisation of the entity and cantonal laws allowed people to get around provisions of the framework law. But what has happed has happened, and now the burden is on the government to form the two higher education agencies which have to be formed – to assess standards and exchange information – which are the requirements of the Bologna Process. If that happens they will have at least done something good, because students will be able to move around within Europe and have their diplomas recognised and have foreign diplomas recognised here. So in that sense, if that part of the law is carried out, then it is a good thing. But part of the unspoken agreement that goes back some three years is that you also have to address financing. The two aspects were separated, I think, in these discussions in order to get a law that is compliant with Bologna but I don’t think that financing should be forgotten. Anyway, I would ask you, as a student, has it made any difference in your university education?
I’m very happy that this has been adopted, for these agencies and for the fact that we have something.
The deadlines of this law were pretty stringent and one of these things has to be up and running at the start of the next academic year. The time is passing rather rapidly.
And, that is why they actually use the opportunity to legalise all these faculties in Central Bosnia canton which were established... But my question for you is that after all these battles you are waging on behalf of the OSCE, are you frustrated with the way the local authorities are not reacting?
Yes. I’ve been here three years, and do you know the movie Groundhog Day? Have you heard of it? It’s a movie starring Bill Murray. In the movie something happens, and everyday he wakes up and relives the same day. Particularly when it comes to education, I think I’m in that movie, because I’ve been having the same discussions for three years. In fact, higher education aside, most of the other problems, despite our best efforts, have only, in my view, got worse in three years. In a way, the higher education debate was a slight distraction, because that’s mainly what people have asked me about over the past three years when I have visited places. Higher education is very important, because one of the premiums that’s being been placed in the modern world for success is on education at a higher and higher level. But if your primary education collapses it’s not going to do you much good by the time you go to university. While not everybody anywhere goes to university, everybody who grows up here is presumably - who stays - going to be a voter and a citizen and should have a basic standard education to enable them to take their proper place in the political and economic life of the country. So I think these political battles over higher education have prevented what would also be a similarly lively debate over primary and secondary education. Maybe with the passage of the law there will not be time to start on that debate in a more visible fashion.
Unfortunately by the time this law was adopted, a lot has changed in the EU in terms of legislation, became this is a continuous process.
Well, that’s the thing, it’s very hard to generalise about education. Lots of countries do it differently. Even within countries, like my own, huge debates rage over the best way to educate children, what text-books to use. None of the debates you’re having here are unique to Bosnia and Herzegovina. But at the same time there are lots of lessons from others here that you could learn but that no one ever talks about. For instance, I recently learned from my colleague in Zagreb that Croatia is wrestling with the problem of two schools under one roof. If you go to eastern Slavonia, there are Serb-dominated schools. They would like to do away with them and have one school under one roof. What I think is that there are lots of lessons to be learned but whatever solution is to be found has to be unique to this country, because this country is not like every other place. But there are some elements that could be applied here that are universal principles of non-discrimination equality, fairness and that kind of thing – respect for the differences of others.
Thank you very much. My sources from the OSCE say that you wanted to say something about the judiciary, as well.
Well, I just wanted to re-emphasize the importance of coming up with a strategy to prosecute war criminals in this country, because I think that many of the problems that are problems with education are actually rule-of-law issues. You have a nice set of education laws here and there appears to be no penalty for violating them. So in general I want to emphasize the importance of the rule of law, of observing the law, of making the courts and your justice system better. You will have a lot of benefits to lots of parts of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To link this back to education, as I said earlier your educational professionals here by and large all agree with each other, whatever their nationality. But, I mean, if you’re going to pass laws as you have done which reflect these agreements, whether people like it or not, it is the law and people have to accept this. If I can just say one more word: A very interesting World Bank study was produced a while ago; it’s on what they call “intangibles.” An article I saw about this just the other day asked: ‘Why is the Mexican immigrant in the US five times more productive in his job in America than he is in Mexico, or she is?’ Two of the factors around this that produce wealth were education and the rule of law. On some scale that had zero to one hundred on the rule of law, Switzerland was at 99 per cent and the US was at 91. Places like Nigeria were at 15. (I don’t know where Bosnia is.) The second factor among many others was the better educated your population was, the more intangible wealth it has at its disposal – more creativity and productivity. So I’m coming to realise that these two things come together, which is why I wanted to say something.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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