Explosion of Education

At 12:25 PM on Wednesday February 4th, at the beginning of a bookkeeping class in the classroom of the I-3 class at the Second Economics High School in Belgrade, an M-75 hand bomb (known as "kasikara") exploded. After the explosion, 20 out of the 37 fifteen-year-olds who were in the class sought medical help at the Emergency Care Center. Five of the severely wounded were kept there, and the rest of them were dismissed for home treatment, after being examined and their wounds dressed. The most severely wounded student, Nemanja Savic, who had absolutely nothing to do with the explosion, only happened to be sitting in the wrong place. Shell fragments damaged his lungs, stomach and head, and his life is still in danger. His friend Aleksandar Popovic, who activated the bomb, lost his right hand. Three other students who were kept in the hospital after this tragedy, among them also Milos Lalic, the boy who brought the bomb to school, were wounded in the legs and arms, but not so severely. One of them has already been dismissed from the hospital.

Popovic found the bomb on his chair (he shared the last bench by the windows with Lalic) when he returned from the lunch break. He didn't believe that it was a real bomb, so to prove his doubts and having no fear, he pulled the safety device. He held the bomb in his right hand, and his nearest neighbor to the right, in the middle row of the benches, was Nemanja Savic.

It turned out that Milos Lalic had brought the bomb from home. Therefore his father Dusan and older brother Milan were arrested. The police found one gun in their apartment in Novi Beograd, for which they didn't have a license. They said that they got the bomb from a relative from Banjaluka, back in 1993. This is the third explosion of a hand grenade in the Serbian schools. The first one exploded in 1993, on the playground of a high school in Zajecar. One sixteen old boy was killed, who pulled the safety device while playing. In September 1994, a student at the mechanics high school in Novi Beograd also threw a hand grenade. There were no victims. Over the last few years there have been guns, knives and axes in schools, even in elementary schools. One of a number of fights also took place at the Second Economics High School in February last year. That time it was a fight over a girl, and one boy was injured during the lunch break.

In its statement on the occasion, the Ministry of Education revealed to the public that bringing weapons to school is a "serious violation of order and discipline" and that school directors are responsible for everything. The Ministry of Internal Affairs has pressed charges against the under-aged culprits of the tragedy. They have "committed a serious crime against safety, related to provoking general danger", says the statement of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Vojislav Saric, director of the Second Economics High School, dismissed the I-3 class for the next two days. Journalists were told that the school is thinking about installing a metal detector in the school entrance. If parents agree. Some of them disagreed when the bags of their children were searched, lamented Saric. A detector has already been installed at the First Belgrade General High School. This school also has a camera installed in the schoolyard and an interphone at the locked entrance door. Soon a camera will be installed at the door, and the school will get "professional security". The First Belgrade General High School has a tendency to introduce security as if it were Fort Knox, because the local gangs from Dorcol reckett their students. All the equipment is paid for by the parents, because the Ministry of Education is broke. Other Belgrade high schools also have similar problems, so most of them have had locked doors for years, and some, like Second Economics High, have engaged former policemen to control the entrance of the school and intervene in case of incidents. Neither of these measures helps the students in the streets, where they are most endangered. The example of Second Economics High shows also that the guard at the entrance is no guarantee that one out of several thousand students will not bring in a dangerous weapon, nor can it cover each and every incident in the halls and classrooms.

Those who are in favor of detailed searching of students should be understood. The highest goal of today's pedagogues can only be that, at the end of the school day, students leave school in good health and alive. The ideal that all the students are in number has been abandoned long ago, except in the nurseries and kindergartens. Nevertheless, disturbing one's intimacy from day to day at an age when it is just emerging may lead to an even greater concealing of forbidden things.

The public is mostly obsessed with the question of who is guilty for this and similar tragedies. Parents, school and the state are mentioned. Milos Lalic was carrying the hand grenade with him for days. He wanted to "defend" himself from some boys from Novi Beograd who had molested him. School, which means teachers and professors, certainly carry their part of blame since the boys who harass children in the street have obviously abandoned school. But this only proves how powerless this institution is, in every respect. It particularly cannot influence the events outside school buildings. In this case, parents have taught the child the only remedy against fear they knew - violence. Probably they have learned from their own experience that it is the only thing that bullies respect. And what about the state? Isn't it true that the ruling family boasts all over all possible media that the Father, the Brother, and the Sister don't part from their guns, even when they sleep?

We are, therefore, in the midst of a cursed circle of violence which produces fear, which produces violence. Some see a solution in introducing anew the subject "Defense and Protection" in the school curriculum. This subject was abandoned in 1993. The supporters of its re-introduction believe that the greatest problem is that children have no knowledge about arms, but they seem to overlook the fact that its the bad students who play with bombs and guns, those who haven't the slightest intention to listen to teachers while they explain decontamination of bread with lime milk, for example. If anything in the curriculum can help resolve this problem, its the teaching of foreign languages. That is, they are useful for emigration.