I've Forgotten My Glasses

They can often be found in banks and post offices where they wait for hours for someone to fill out their cheque or payment slips, because they "were in a hurry and forgot their glasses, and can't see well." According to a freehand estimate, at least 15 %-odd Belgraders have "similar problems with their eyesight," so that they usually ask someone at a tram stop to tell them when a No. 2 tram is coming, in order that they might not get into a No. 10.

Stories about illiteracy are rather common and crop up from time to time, after which they are forgotten for several years. They become topical ahead of, and after elections. A cursory glance at voting lists, shows that the educational structure in Serbia, is completely different from the long-held stereotype of Serbia, as a country of educated people. A little less than half the electorate in Serbia (around 45%) consists of those who have no education, or perhaps a few grades: 15% have no education, 3.7% have completed 1-3 grades of primary school, 26.1% have completed 4-7 grades of primary school. About 25% of the voters have completed their primary school education, while at the same time, only 5.7 % of the electorate have completed secondary or university levels of education.

In some election units, the number of those without any education at all reaches 90%.

Immediately after the elections, some members of the opposition said that because of illiteracy in Serbia and its educational structures, the election results could not have been different. According to such interpretations, uneducated and semi-educated persons, in fact, the majority of the electorate, fall into a category of people who make decisions quickly and believe completely all they hear, above all on television; because they read newspapers rarely and they read with difficulty. It is a fact that television is in the hands of the Socialists and the Radicals.

"All this data on the educational structure of the population and the large number of illiterate people is no great surprise, and were well known to all before the elections," said Aleksandra Pejatovic from the Institute of Pedagogy and Adult Education at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, speaking to VREME. "The issue is always treated and discussed on an on and off basis, mostly after a census or elections. Then it is quickly forgotten, and the problem remains."

"Test results from the last few years, show that practically none of the examinees managed to win a maximum number of points," said Pejatovic. "This means that among persons who have completed an elementary education, there are many whose basic literacy is at third grade level, and their objective knowledge is not concurrent with the number of grades they have completed. About 60% of those examined possess elementary literacy based on reading competency, while the situation with writing is much more difficult. Only 30% managed to get a pass mark in dictation. As everywhere in the world, the degree of illiteracy is higher among women than among men. The majority of illiterate persons come from families where both parents are illiterate, or have finished a grade or two of primary school. Older age groups show worse results which means that the tendency to forget once acquired elementary knowledge is rather high."

Director of the Federal Institute of Statistics Srdjan Bogosavljevic believes that one of the reasons for such a great number of illiterate and uneducated people here, is due to a bad agrarian policy. "We are a country with a considerable peasant population and exceptionally fragmented property. Whereas the Dutch have introduced scientific methods in agriculture, we have remained with our small properties, outside all developments in this field, encouraging the belief that peasants do not have to be educated or follow technological developments. Education and expertise have never been much esteemed here, nor have they determined the way of life. This is why a lot of people just scrape through school and never find the inspiration to reach the top in their profession, or simply to become educated," said Bogosavljevic.

In a country whose leader says in public that the will of the University and academic citizens do not mean anything (something which can be seen at work today), one in which television stultifies the people more than it informs and educates them, where the Minister of Education has problems with cases and syntax, and many politicians and deputies hurt themselves as soon as they start to speak, while opposition leaders who wish to become the new political elite admit that they have entered the battle without really knowing their people well - it is not at all unusual that the literally illiterate think themselves politically literate. Cynics say that this is not an unusual state of affairs in a country where more people have finished political schools than they have elementary ones.