Nis High School Seniors Protest Education Law
Nis high school seniors are taking to the streets tonight over the draft Education Law, backed by two civic movements and criticized by professor Aleksandar Baucal.
High school seniors in Nis have announced a protest for tonight, August 31, with a gathering at 7 p.m. outside the Faculty of Law in Nis. Their reason is a draft of amendments to the Law on the Fundamentals of the Education System (ZSOV), which they say seriously narrows the rights of students, teachers and parents. After the gathering, the column will march toward First Nis Gymnasium, Stevan Sremac, where addresses are planned from a teacher, a high school student and a university student.
The rally carries the slogan “Students in prison, cronies free.” The organizers have won backing from the citizens’ group “Nis, My City” and the South Serbia Movement, and university students have also announced they will join. It is the first protest that high school students in the city have organized on their own since we reported that the ministry was planning tighter oversight of schools.
In their call to protest, the seniors said:
“An attack on education is an attack on the foundations of a society. A state that wants obedient schools, frightened teachers and silent students is not building a future, it is destroying one.”
They added that they will not accept what they called a “dictatorship in elementary and secondary schools.”
What organizers object to in the draft
The Law on the Fundamentals of the Education System is the umbrella statute governing the work of elementary and secondary schools in Serbia, so any amendment to it touches the daily operations of thousands of institutions, from enrollment to textbook selection. As the protest organizers read it, the draft brings three changes they consider problematic:
- it removes the explicit right of students to organize freely into student groups and other forms of informal organizing outside the Student Parliament, the body through which students are legally meant to voice organized opinions on how a school operates
- it opens the possibility of suspending the license of teachers, educators and professional associates if a school principal judges that they are not carrying out their educational work properly
- it strips parents’ councils, the advisory bodies that exist today in every elementary and secondary school, of the right to take part in drafting the annual work plan, the school program, the development plan and the choice of textbooks
Baucal: the minister is acting like a colonial administrator
The same day, Aleksandar Baucal, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, raised the same criticism of the draft in a statement to the newspaper Nova. He listed four changes the draft introduces, in his assessment: narrower possibilities for students to organize, less real participation by parents, greater power for principals over teachers, and new mechanisms for punishment.
Baucal told Nova:
“The draft amendments to the Law on the Fundamentals of Education fundamentally change the relationships inside a school.”
In the same piece, he described the education minister as increasingly acting “like a colonial administrator who does not ask what education needs, but waits for a political instruction.” His third assessment is that the amendments will “further increase existing problems that are already too big, because they bring more control, less autonomy, less negotiation and less participation.”
The education minister is Dejan Vuk Stankovic. In none of the reports we reviewed did the minister, or the ministry, respond to either the organizers’ claims or professor Baucal’s criticism.
This is a continuation of a story we have already reported on, when the ministry announced legal changes meant to tighten oversight of how schools operate. At the time, the debate stayed at the level of official statements and expert commentary. What is new is that, alongside professors like Baucal, high school students themselves have now joined in an organized way for the first time, with a clearly set date, location and route for the march. As of this morning, the education ministry had not announced any response to tonight’s protest in Nis, nor had it addressed the specific objections about the Student Parliament, teacher licenses and parents’ councils raised by both sides, the seniors and the Faculty of Philosophy professor.
