The past thirty-year free fall which we find ourselves flying in as a society has humiliated education and upbringing of young people the most.

Slobodan Savović

The disintegration of the SFRY brought about the disintegration of a system of social values by which the predecesors of today’s Region lived, and it has not been restored even after thirty years. The story of EU integration of the current political elites is an alibi for their inability to build new social values in the Balkans. Our own values that the European Union would accept as its own, with all its differences.

The past thirty-year free fall which we find ourselves flying in as a society has humiliated education and upbringing of young people (our futures) the most. This also makes sense because education is the architecture of every society. Marginalization of the educational vocation is an endemic phenomenon that manifests itself through the modest financial position of educators, inadequate curricula and trends of peer violence that are dangerous for society as a whole. All of this leads to the humiliation of the Teacher’s persona and profession. The final form of such an obstructed educational system are the so-called “ready-made professors”, who are there to enlighten the minds of new generations in the Balkans.

I was extremely lucky and honored to be invited to work with young people and provide them with the light of knowledge and virtues. Freeing young people from all shackles and weeds of ignorance and a lack of upbringing, teaching them to think for themselves, is a life’s reward worth the effort of an educator.

There are many obstacles in the way of the new generations growing up. The time in which our children are being raised demands that they be part of a crowd, a group. The system will only recognize them as such: individuals alienated in the multitude of the same.

As they grow up, cheap material values and role models are imposed on them. At the beginning in school, it’s good grades, then paper diplomas from schools and colleges, a job gotten through a connection, and finally bank loans so that in the future they would be trapped by cars, apartments… Function without content is imposed as a model. And as it was said a long time ago, a group of people has no face, no personality, no responsibility, no personal values. A group is unbearably easy to manipulate, it forgets what is its benefit and happiness. As soon as we become a statistic in a group, we have chosen to be branded and herded into pens, regardless of whether they are national, religious or any other. And that, unfortunately, has been our everyday life for almost thirty years.

In order not to be ready-made professors whose hearts are on the wrong side of the body, we must first recognize the responsibility we hold for the future of our societies. Education is the only shield and light we can have in life. Only with knowledge can we save ourselves as individuals and free other people, build our own values that will be our contribution to this society and the future of our children.

Knowledge deserves a smile, and ignorance deserves a sneer. There is no other way.

 

Slobodan Savović, General Director of the Directorate for General Secondary Education, Vocational Education and Lifelong Learning in the Ministry of Education of Montenegro