At the session on December 2, the members of the Serbian Parliament voted on the Amendments to the Law on Textbooks, without anyone informing them that the text they were voting for had been amended - that they should not vote for the six national textbooks as it was written in the Proposal for these Amendments already, as it has been changed in the meantime, only for two.
How did it come about?
On July 17, the Government of Serbia adopted Proposal for the Law on Amendments to the Law on Textbooks, which introduces mandatory and unison national textbooks for all elementary schools for Serbian, history, geography, the world around us, nature and society, art and music.
The amended Law is "aimed at preserving national identity, developing a sense of belonging, respecting the mother tongue and nurturing traditions, while at the same time encouraging interculturalism and preserving cultural heritage."
At the aforementioned session of the Assembly this month, Minister of Education Dejan Vuk Stanković spoke about the need to amend the law in order to "create patriotic virtue". He also said that "we don't want to be value-neutral to the end, we don't want our system to be completely insensitive when it comes to identity, that's why you have an awareness of the identity of the dominant people, but also an awareness of the identities of other peoples. And to that extent, the Law summed up the national and democratic on the one hand, because it included both the majority and minority population". He did not mention which textbooks he was talking about.
What was adopted
Deputies adopted the Amendments to the Law on Textbooks, almost without any parliamentary debate, along with 57 other legislative proposals.
It was not noticed that the amended Law deviates significantly from the Proposal for Amendments, that there are only two textbooks in it. This change was added through the Government's amendments, which nobody noticed at the Assembly session because they were not read.
Namely, Article 14 of the new Law stipulates that the public publisher publishes textbooks for history and geography, while for Serbian language and literature there will be an addition to the existing textbooks for primary school called Serbian language and national culture in the status of mandatory teaching aids.
Therefore, the country has given up all those national textbooks, it is only interested in history and geography.
The Institute does not have a monopoly on all textbooks
The new law foresees the successive introduction of national textbooks, so the first ones will appear from the 2027/28 school year. year, for students of the first and fifth grade of elementary and first grade of secondary school.
Textbook publishers are satisfied with this change, because it allows them to print textbooks in all other subjects except history and geography, on which the Institute for Textbooks will have a monopoly. According to the Proposal adopted by the Government, the Institute was supposed to print all textbooks.
