Education

The Pioneer Alliance of Yugoslavia and the Making of Socialist Citizens

Igor Duda
Yugoslav pioneers

The common denominator – sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden or self-evident – of all the pioneers’ activities was patriotism and the basic values of socialist Yugoslavia, such as its history in the National Liberation War, the ideology of brotherhood and unity and the cult of Josip Broz Tito. 

During the Second World War but especially after 1945, the Yugoslav Communist Party was keen on developing a ‘new man’ for a new society, at first by following the Soviet model and later by developing a special Yugoslav kind of socialist and self-managed citizen.

Updated on: 7 September 2014

Learning to be a citizen through policy analysis and protest

Karin Doolan
student protests Zagreb

The legacy of the student protests in Croatia is multi-faceted. On a societal level, they were the first protests to bring into question the country’s contemporary economic and political order from a radical Left perspective, invoking Marxist vocabulary in the process. In the educational field, they were the first to exercise a critical reading of educational policies by locating them in the broader neoliberal context and critiquing them from a human rights and social justice standpoint. They were successful in terms of influencing tuition fee policy, innovative in terms of their organisational creativity, which included gathering in assemblies and exercising direct democracy principles, and using social network websites for mobilising. They provided a spontaneous site for citizenship education and they had a biographical impact on certain student protesters who became committed to activism. 

 “We are students not customers”, “This is not a production line”, “Education is not for sale”, “Education is a right not a privilege” and “Save schools not banks” are some of the slogans expressed in the wave of student protests that swept across the globe from California and Austria in 2009 to Chile and Canada in 2012.

Updated on: 8 August 2014

Citizenship and education policies in post-Yugoslav States

Nataša Pantić
School education and citizenship

Although the language policies in the six states are broadly consistent with the multicultural conception of citizenship granting cultural and linguistic group rights in education, the promotion of the mutual respect principle and interethnic contact are limited, as are individual choices for the language of instruction by both majorities and minorities. The problem with homogenising groups for policy purposes – even where there is a degree of interaction between the groups – is that interactions take place between individuals who classify each other exclusively in terms of belonging to specific ethnic or cultural communities. 

“All you need to know about the ways in which a polity imagines and defines its members could be found in its education” (Hemon, 2012).

Updated on: 1 November 2012
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