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Exactly five years ago today, this Mission released a statement warmly welcoming the “adoption of an agreement on a country-wide common core curriculum.” On August 8, 2003 entity and cantonal ministers of education had signed an agreement to, as the OSCE Mission statement put it, “Introduce a framework within which all students in BiH will be taught and which will be incorporated in to the curricula of all entities and cantons.”
The adoption of this agreement followed soon after the passage by the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina of the Framework Law on Primary and Secondary Education. Article 42 of that law states: “There shall be a common core curriculum for all public and private schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Article 33 of this same Framework Law states: “In view of organizing supplementary education with regard to the ‘National Group of Subjects’ for primary and secondary school students, the relevant ministries of the state of BiH will initiate the signing of special bilateral agreements with all countries where there is such an interest for BiH.”
Five years later, the provisions of both this law and this agreement remain unmet. The common core curriculum, despite an implementation plan that was to begin in the autumn of 2003, appears to have been incorporated into few, if any, of this country’s schools. Instead, educational debates have increasingly centred on the establishment of separate schools – or even of administratively and legally unified schools – with entirely separate curricula.
This is a big step backwards. If, however, the political leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with the courts of law, were to insist that the law they adopted and the agreement their educational representatives signed were to be followed in full, many of the educational problems that have plagued this country since the end of the war would begin to be solved. This applies as much to schools in Sarajevo, Novi Seher, and Srebrenica as it does to those in Stolac.
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