SerbiaToday Interview Svetlana Marojevic

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INTERVIEW OF THE WEEK
Interview July 14, 2009
Svetlana Marojevic
UNICEF Program Specialist, Belgrade

School is not a Mold a Child Should Fit In - Svetlana Marojevic

By Ljiljana Cvekic

BELGRADE, July 14 (Serbia Today) – Aggressive behavior among children in Serbia is at an alarming level, with numerous reports on injuries, mistreatment and bulling at schools, in a society where violence is accepted as normal and punishment still used by parents as the main correctional tool.

A survey conducted by Belgrade’s Institute for Psychology and the United Nations children’s agency has shown that 65 percent of primary school children in Serbia have experienced at least one violent attack and 24 percent repeated violence or systematic mistreatment by their peers within three months.

“Violence in our schools is the consequence of violence in the society, but also of the fact that the school is stubbornly trying to keep its rigid attitude and boring lessons and failing to offer interesting content to children,” Svetlana Marojevic, UNICEF Belgrade Program Specialist, told Serbia Today in an interview on Monday.

“The whole system of values has changed as well as education patterns. A child in Serbia gets today much less limits and directions than before, but children’s freedom is an illusion – they just have less attention by adults.”

Wars on the territories of the former Yugoslavia in 1990’s, deep economic and social crises, poverty and rising crime and violence have torn down the entire system of values the society has leaned on. Parents and teachers, stressed and consumed with an everyday effort to survive and provide for their families, have less time and patience to devote themselves to children.

“It is striking that 76 percent of parents still use physical or psychological punishment as an upbringing method,” Marojevic says.

To help the country in creating a non-violent environment, UNICEF has developed a project “A School Without Violence” covering 165 schools throughout Serbia, where teachers have been trained to recognize the violence among or against children and to react. The idea is to make the system of timely reaction functioning, by linking the schools, parents, social centers and police.

The UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors Ana Ivanovic, tennis star, and Sasa Djordjevic, famous basketball player, have helped very much in promotion and funding of the project. The aim is to encourage local communities to take over and the local companies or celebrities to ‘adopt’ a certain school.

“We are helping now towns in Serbia to develop their local plans of action for children, which will include all specific problems and possibilities of each community.”

She explains that local teams of health and social workers, teachers, and children have a task to identify main problems and the most neglected groups and to create their data basis on the state of children in their municipality. “Once trained in producing projects based on facts and rationally developed plans, they have good chances of getting grants.”

The U.N. Children’s Fund has been present for over 60 years in the ex-Yugoslavia, where it sent in 1947 its very first supply shipment. After being a donor country for four decades, Yugoslavia was in need of help again when wars started in 1990’s and UNICEF opened its offices.

“In this 15 years of working with UNICEF, dealing with the education program, I personally consider the Active Learning project the most appealing one. We suddenly managed to turn the teaching process the other way, we have influenced the stands and believes and working methods. And it is really starting to change.”

Unlike the traditional educational system, in which students are just passive receivers and repeaters of memorized facts, the active learning method implies discussion, creativity and full engagement of pupils and teachers, putting an end to the so called culture of monologue.

“A school is not a mold children should fit in and become all the same; it should recognize and respect differences of each child, teach them to see the wider picture and to have their own opinion.”