“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”, said once Nelson Mandela. It is no coincidence that all dictatorial regimes first infuse their ideology in the primary and secondary education, and then conquer the rest of the spheres in society and the state.
Nazification and mobilization of the teaching staff
If the members of the National Socialist Teachers League in 1929 in Germany were in a single-digit percentage, their percentage ten years later, in 1939, was 97% of all the teachers in Germany. Mussolini carried out a similar mobilization in Italy also, and partisanship was no less massive in the Soviet Union and other dictatorial regimes around the world.
How many members of VMRO-DPMNE were there among the teachers in 2006, and how many in 2016 is a good question, and can serve for interesting comparisons. Certainly, at one point, maybe we should ask ourselves how many new members the parties that are now in power receive. And what their strategy is for party mobilization. And how all of that looks like in the party that has been the longest in power as a coalition partner both of VMRO-DPMNE and of SDSM…DUI are almost equally responsible for the entire degradation of the democratic cells of the Macedonian society as are the other parties of the community with “greatest majority”.
Social and political engineering
The Macedonian situation with the teaching staff in terms of membership in a political party are far more complicated that the German one during the time of Nazism. VMRO-DPMNE was already in power in the period 1998-2002, when the education was also part of the strategies for social and political engineering, though to a much lesser degree that the one we experienced in the Gruevski decade.
The bad moves in the education system when government coalitions in the time of SDSM ruled were no better. The education policies of the political parties of the Albanians are an enigma. If they exist at all. Higher education is where there was most confrontation, which made higher education a huge, tangled blend of corruption and stupidity. But the real poison is served, in enormous portions, precisely in primary and secondary education.
The ideological indoctrination in all the previous periods was nothing compared to the period of the 11-year ruling of Gruevski’s Family. Gruevski and his ideological engineers carried out fierce pogrom on education, as they did on culture, economy and the rule of law. But first they started with the primary and secondary education, like Lenin and Stalin did, and now Putin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, Mao Zedong in China, Hitler in Germany, Enver Hoxha in Albania, Milosevic in Serbia…
Parallel histories
What did we get? Children learning notorious nonsense at school. What the public doesn’t know is that children learn different, parallel histories, depending on their ethnic affiliation, something from the textbooks, something from “unwritten narratives”. History classes are an everyday ruthless ideological and ethnic settling of scores. Without any conscience and consciousness, those who have conceptualised such an education, don’t care about the fact that hatred, divisions, violence and crimes have been preceded first by thoughts and words.
Textbooks, not only for history, are filled with (just partially) hidden ideological – nationalist contents based on fabrications and manipulated facts. Not to mention the errors, from printed ones to real ones, in all the other textbooks, for all the grades. And about the free education that is not by far free, there’s no need to talk about that, so that we don’t expand the story that is already too broad.
What has the new government done?
And my points of view for today will have to end here, before I go any deeper into the topic. Not all of the important aspects are covered here in terms of the alarming situation with the Macedonian education system, just a couple of quick notes, for initiating the alarm. Of course, we are living days of mass hysteria regarding Gruevski’s escape, the arrest of Mijalkov, Kamcev and “other fraternities”, blockades in Skopje with two-three “protestors” and five-six “patriotic” benches from the park, and so this alarm too risks being unheard, but I just need to say.
Political parties and government coalitions that came and left the government thrones created an ocean of poisons. Those ugly, arrogant and violent moves are destroying this country in its core.
Prime Minister Zoran Zaev’s “One Society” concept will not succeed if such education is not entirely removed. Not to have it fixed. It’s unfixable! To have it removed and have a new system built. That’s the solution. For starters, it would be good to answer the question what has and what is the Ministry of Education doing after the fall of Gruevski’s regime. Good question, right?
