A Phenomenon of "two schools under one roof" when pupils cannot be together because of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Beatričė Bankauskaitė & Tereza Dorňáková
The system that "suits" everyone
except for the children
Dec. 12, 2018
Early morning. An inconspicuous grey building greets a group of pupils in the small town of Bosovača in the heart of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A seventeen-year-old Melisa and her friends enter the building much later, in the afternoon, when the first group has already left the school.
These peers do not have much in common while coming at different times, and they share the building but not the process of education. The only difference that keeps these two groups separated is their ethnicity - part of them are Bosnian Croats, part of them Bosnian Bosniaks.
“Difference between two shifts is 15 minutes. Which means we don't really meet other students and we don't hang out that much,” Melisa Neslanović shares her experience of attending Mixed Secondary School (MSS) Busovača.
“In school, we use the same classrooms and equipment, but we have different assembly halls and administrative offices. We have one informatics cabinet that students of MSS can't use, it’s used only for Secondary School Busovača (SS) and nobody knows why.”
Melisa Neslanović, a student of Mixed Secondary School Busovača. Photo from Melisa's archive.
That makes Busovača school an example of a phenomenon in BiH - “two schools under one roof” - where children attending SS Busovača are taught according to the Croatian curriculum, and pupils’ education from MSS Busovača is based on the Bosnian curriculum.
School building in Busovača, the town in Central Bosnia Canton, includes two administratively separated schools. Pupils go to the school in two shifts. Photo from Melisa's archive
“Breach of international conventions and domestic legislation”
Two secondary schools in Busovača sharing a building are just one case of segregation of the primary and secondary pupils in BiH. There are 56 divided schools in 28 locations around three cantons Zenica-Doboj, Central Bosnia and Herzegovina-Neretva, where a mixed population of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Bosniaks mostly live.
“The practice of ‘two schools under one roof’ is a breach of international conventions as well as domestic legislation,” stated in a recent report Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which had had a mission to BiH since 1995 when the Dayton Peace Agreement ordered a ceasefire.
Since establishing a new country of BiH in 1995, the phenomenon of “two schools under one roof” appeared as a solution to integrate refugees coming back to the ethnically mixed cities after the war meaning that children attending the classes are divided into two schools in the same building It should have been a temporary case, however, after 23 years these schools still exist what have a huge and negative impact on the current situation, new generation and the country's future.
Justifications that keep the system alive
Several reasons have been hampering the abolishment of these practices. One of them is the high number of people employed in the education sector.
“When we talk with teachers about that problem, they say that if we unite in one school, some teachers can stay out of business,” confirms Melisa.
Aside from that, “language justification” plays an important role in keeping the system of segregated schools alive. According to the OSCE, mainly politicians, along with some parents, claim that “each ethnic group has the right to be taught in their language,” which divides education into three official languages - Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The language is linked with preserving the “ethnonational identity.”
“The right to name your language and have your language is completely different from the use of the language in the teaching process,” argues Aleksandra Janković, a National Education Advisor at OSCE, and adds: “In the context of BiH, there is no obstacle to join classes of Math, English language, Chemistry and any other subject except the mother tongue classes.”
A similar view is shared by Nikolas Rimac, a 20-year-old student at the University of Sarajevo (UNSA) who wants to become a teacher. “The language is only different from another if not everybody understands you. So, if you have three languages in which every member of the language understands each other - it is not a foreign language.”
Altogether, “the issue is heavily politicized,” writes OSCE in the report. The lack of political will to solve the situation also sees Hatidža Jahić, a participant of FutureLab Europe, a program that supported young citizens from Europe in developing their own projects, whose main focus was on education issues in BiH: “The main problem is that politicians try to maintain the status quo because it perfectly suits them.”
“I think it is the worst example of segregation happening in the 21st century in the heart of Europe. It has been existing for years already, and the only initiative that happened in the last years was from students themselves, especially from Jajce,” explains Jahić the situation.
Youth topples new attempts at segregation
Recently new attempts to segregate schools appeared in Jajce, a town in Central Bosnia Canton. However, students’ disapproval of schools stopped the division and became a symbol of resistance and youth power in BiH.
Nikolas Rimac, a former student of Secondary Vocational School in Jajce, currently studying at UNSA, was one of the initiators of peaceful protests against his school division. He remembers that everything started at the end of the school year in 2016 when his teacher first time mentioned the possible school separation. The majority of the pupils, according to Nikolas, did not want to be separated from their peers.
“It just takes some time and a little bit of nerves to burst out and to make a revolution. Kids now deserve to know that they can hang out with everybody. They all breathe the same air and speak with the same tongue. Bosniaks, Serbs and Croatians, mum, trust me, they all kiss the same.”
Nikolas Rimac, a former student of Secondary Vocational School Jajce and participant of protests against schools division in Jajce. Photo from Nikolas' archive
Later, students discovered that not only theirs but also the Gymnasium of Nikola Šop in Jajce was planned to be divided as well. The rumors were confirmed. Therefore, some individuals from both schools, including Nikolas, decided to form a group of the Student Council with 20 representatives from every class. They contacted the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport in Central Bosnia Canton by saying that “we don’t want to be involved in that kind of game of separation”. However, the answer never came.
Furthermore, with the help of journalists, students discovered that the Ministry stated having 500 people, mostly parents, signed a petition to divide the schools. “It sounds believable because families do not like each other. But we wanted to ask our parents why they signed it; however, they had no clue what we are talking about,” Nikolas explains. After sending a request to the Ministry to show the petition, the answer has not come until now.
Eventually, with the media pressure on the Ministry, suspicion was growing. With the support of the Association of Secondary School Students in BiH (ASuBiH), OSCE and local organizations, the Student Council held two protests against separation. After “incredible pressure,” it became official that Ministry stopped working on the school division even though the principal and teachers of the “new” school were hired.
“It takes just some time and a little bit of nerves to burst out and to make a revolution,” says Nikolas. “Kids deserve to know that they can hang out with everybody. They all breathe the same air and speak with the same tongue. They kiss the same way as everybody else.”
“Escape” from the judgemental environment
The “Jajce case” was an example of direct disagreement within the students’ community, which stopped further segregation; however, in most cases, the progress is going slowly, step by step, with the engagement of active students or NGOs.
Bilal Softić, a member of the Steering Board of ASuBiH, explains that the organization works as a platform for students to share their opinion even “if it's not accepted in their community.” However, due to the young age and the lack of authorities’ trust, “spreading awareness” about “two schools under one roof” remains the main contribution to problem-solving.
Bilal Softić, a member of ASuBiH, is today aware of the schools' segregation. Part of is work is to raise awareness about the phenomenon. By Tereza Dorňáková
In addition, Softić himself learned about this phenomenon only a couple of years ago, “ many people in Bosnia don’t know that it exists.”
Another way of providing a reconciliation between ethnicities in a new generation is peace education - one of the current strategies of the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC), an NGO whose aim is to restore a culture of peace and prevent violent conflict in the Western Balkans. According to Safet Šarić, a General Manager of PCRC, even though kids are not interested in the war topic, they are “constantly being fed” the negative stories about the war through some media channels that broaden division even more.
“We try to explain [for kids] that there are not only bad examples that people were killing each other in the war, but there are also positive stories, interethnic, interreligious cooperation,” Šarić describes the process of working in the schools.
Asides from providing positive content stories, the organization gives a possibility for children of different ethnicity children to meet each other without the “judgmental” environment that often remains in divided cities.
“We start our workshops with interactive games where they get a chance to touch hands, clap each other on the back. That basic physical contact for them is something that they would never do before, “ says Šarić. However, he regrets that they have no possibility to work with all the children because of the right of cantons’ ministries or principles of the schools to refuse any workshops.
When parents “don’t believe in the same God”
“Two schools under one roof” have existed for 23 years, and during that time, they have impeded peers from interacting among each other because of different ethnic and/or religious backgrounds. Moreover, the system might even deepen the stereotypes within the young generations by enhancing “ethnic prejudice and a notion of artificial difference,” as marked in the OSCE report.
“Education is a primary vehicle by which knowledge, including memories and legacies of conflict, cuts across generational boundaries,” stated the report. “‘Two schools under one roof’ should be seen as a direct threat to long-term stability in BiH.”
When the voice is given to youngsters, the face of the system is revealed: “how hard is to be separated from your best friends, from your love just because your and their parents don’t believe in the same God or don’t declare themselves in the same way,” shares Nikolas his thoughts.
Meanwhile, early in the evening, Melisa closes the door of her school. She says that neither in the school nor in the town cohesion between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Bosniaks is visible; the whole city “is divided, shops, schools, streets.”
“I would like to attend a school that is not two schools under one roof,” wishes Melisa.