Slobodna Vojvodina

Autor: Dusan Sakic

I will say nothing new if I say that our future depends on education and culture, but it is definitely new if I say that future hangs on it and nothing else. That is why it is too easy to promise the first part of the statement and everyone does so. But genealogy of the second part of the statement is a huge problem for great many of those who try to reform the schools today looking from the positions of the past. The consequences have been very painful and visible over the past twenty years, because the only thing you can get from the past is unfinished nationalism as the essence of the education system in Serbia.
It will never attain its finite form and meaning in Serbia, because in minds of different Cosics, Beckovics, Antonics there are too few graves in this country for such an idea to be contained in a finite form - the unfinished nationalism is for them the final solution to any problem Serbia may have. It may claim lives of the entire young population, unless they manage to flee the country.

This system takes young people and turns them into future warriors, future victims and future criminals that will sustain and defend a mythical and historical consciousness for a single reason - because the concept of future must never exist in Serbia, because future is always connected with the notion of freedom, while past is related with authority, politics, obedience and subservience. Maybe this does not make any sense for some people, but it still does not mean that I am not right to talk about what I believe is the key problem. And not only talk, but shout for all these years, because it was the reasons human lives were stopped before they had even started, while the culprits still publish books (instead of sitting in jails) for some future Mladic, Milosevic, Arkan, Legija, Kostunica, Tadic, and organize promotions at book fairs, in schools, culture centers, theaters.
Maybe it would not be bad if the concept of education in Serbia changed both in terminology and value, because here it lacks a free individual for which it needs to exist. Here it can only find a minion who is expected to live his life through myth and history - a life that is not life but a history that lives itself through him. Or maybe he can go to the war, to gain experience, as prescribed by the authors of the books from which they study, because history in Serbia is confirmed through fighting, and not through knowledge and education, because it is confirmed by the number
of its victims, and not by the number of persons who changed the course of science and society (those were either exiled or murdered). Should anyone live in a country that is notorious for its criminals and murders, who now may become new educators and saints in Serbia?
Can you imagine a country where books written by murderers are sold in bookstores? Can you imagine a country in which the most important cultural and educational institutions house persons who wrote a document on the final solution for the unfinished nationalism? Can you imagine a country in which negative selection is a principle, while obedience and subservience are the valued virtues and qualities? Can you imagine a country where life has no value if it contains freedom and future, while graves are realization of the essence of history and mythology, without understanding that history and mythology has no essence, that they are not principles, do not contain life, do not have any value, that nothing can be learned from them, nothing can be created from them, except for the lamentable infinity of crimes that repeats itself through generations.
I do not have to imagine a country like that, because I live in it and its name is SERBIA…

(Republika)