Additional Education for Adults

Ninety percent of the first-grade pupils from the center of Belgrade, before enrolling into school, have never been to a theater. Eighty-five percent of them have never been to a zoo. A third of them, prior to their enrollment into school, never owned a single book. Those are the facts as given by their parents. Teachers have noticed that the last two generations of first-grade pupils are different: they are suspiscious and selfish, anxious, displaying a lack of concentration and mobility, they tire easily and lack the usual prior knowledge. Doctors in charge of elementary school pupils have noticed that children are more often than not showing signs of under-nourishment and have more health problems - problems with their eye sight, speech, spine... Illustrating the state of affairs here, psychologist Vidosava Grahovac stresses that the children do not have lesser capabilities but that parents were not economically and phychologically competent for their upbringing. (And, how are we to explain to a child who gets chocolate rarely that he has to share?)

CHALLENGE: This upsetting story was heard on the Conference "Children's Rights - Whose Responsibility?", held last week at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, which was, as part of the Institute of Pedagogy and Andragogy's (IPA) research project and in collaboration with UNICEF on the project "Education for Developement, Peace and Tolerance", organized by IPA, Friends of the Children of Serbia and the Serbian Society of Pedagogy, with the help of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Serbia.

As a result, we found on the same spot, working at the same thing, representatives of the state - Margit Savovic, the Minister and President of the Yugoslav Committee for Collaboration with UNICEF ("Children are our constant challenge", she concluded), Petar Brkic from the Ministry of Education of Serbia, members of the educational, cultural, popular science and feature departments of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) and representatives of the more or less "infamous" international (UNICEF) and foreign (Soros), and often "suspicious" domestic non-state organizations (Most).

"We keep acting as though we were caught unprepared and believe that it shall pass", the school phychologist Vidosava Grahovac tells us. "We forget that two winters ago children only ate pancakes and what their mothers had baked for them. For example, children that are now being enrolled into school often do not know their date of birth - they never celebrated their birthdays. Their intelligence is average, but their drawing abilities are at a very low level - they never had a chance to hold a pencil. Often, prior to their starting school, they were left alone in the house - either pre-schools were full, or their parents could not afford them. Seven year old children should be capable of holding attention for 20-25 minutes, which is not the case. Normally, a school program should be based on the structure of the psycho-motor link which the child has already mastered, and should not start with an assumption that they had mastered it on account of their year of birth."

PARENTS AND TEACHERS: Vidosava Grahovac begs for these facts to be looked upon as an indication which needs much consideration. They cannot be solved by actual schools, nor should parents deduct from it that all guilt lies with them. Somewhere down the line they have "lost contact with themselves and the children". Unfortunately, "parents feel guilty, and even when they do realize that something is wrong, they either pretend not to notice, or they force their children to learn in advance and pay for additional tutoring". On the whole, judging by what has been noted in schools, parents are only interested in grades and even when, quite naturally, descriptive grades have been introduced in the first grade, they insist upon numbers so that they can boast about it to their relatives and neighbors.

At the same time, the position of the teachers is extremely difficult. Teachers, although desperately in need and asking for it, have not had any advanced training programs available to them. It is essential we mention that their salaries, they still have not been paid for August, are low. The Ministry of Education demands their advanced training, yet they do not enable them to do it. Also, they assign them programs which have been pre-programed, control is very strict, but formal to the point that what is written is essential, and there is a lot that needs to be written down. Which is why schools are now in desperate need of teachers, especially in mathematics and foreigns languages, since it is more profitable to give private tuition.

"WATER IS WET": The project of the Most group. "The Good Will Workshop", is a school program designed to develop tolerance and to teach constructive solutions for conflicts. Introducing it at the Conference, Professor Ruzica Rosandic explained that it began as an attempt to change what almost everyone has noticed, and what has been recorded by a survey towards the end of 1991: the increase of aggression and intolerance amongst children, the lack of perspectives and positive role models, fear of the unknown, of the different and of changes, as well as - the incompetence of adults to find a means to master children's psychological problems.