Religious and civic education: A critique of elements of educational reform in Serbia 2000-2003.

Abstract

This paper attempts to re-interpret an element of the educational reform carried out since the end of 2000 by the Serbian Government and its Ministry of Education and Sports, namely, the introduction of two new subjects: Religious Education and Civic Education, to primary and secondary schools curricula. Based on similar analyses in educational and political anthropology, this element is viewed as a strategy of political legitimating of the regime that came to power in Serbia after Slobodan Milošević. In this context, the introduction of Religious Education appears as, on the one hand, an act of symbolical gratitude to the Serbian Orthodox Church for the support it has provided in the second half of the 1990s for then-oppositional parties that came to power in Serbia in 2000; while on the other, it appears as a strategy of justifying political decisions by appeal to the set of "traditional" values embodied in religion and the Church. Likewise, the introduction of Civic Education as a "structural opposite" to Religious Education can be viewed as an attempt to balance between the traditional, nationalist and modern, pro-European sentiments, but in a way that perpetuates the artificial dichotomy between these two types of political orientation. Finally, I discuss some implications of the above analysis for the question of possibility of introduction of ethnology and anthropology to schools. In this context, I claim that the perpetuation of the "traditional/modern" dichotomy in political rhetoric and the educational reform, provides a chance for ethnology and anthropology to find its place in Serbian school curricula through simultaneously relying on the past, acknowledging the present, and planning the future of the discipline.