The following reading materials were recommended |
in Balkan Horizons Magazine The Southeast European Joint History Project (or JHP) is the first and largest initiative of the Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe, a non-governmental organisation headquartered in Thessaloniki. The JHP continues to expand, developing into new activities based on the experiences and knowledge already gained, and involving more and more history teachers, university professors and graduate students. This issue of Balkan Horizons provides a sample of ideas and experiences from the many and varied activities that have been undertaken to date. [... read more ... ]
by Panayote Elias Dimitras Churchill’s famous quote - “The Balkan peoples are loaded with more history than they can bear” - needs to be amended to “the Balkan peoples have loaded themselves with more history than they can bear.” Indeed, history as we know it today, just like nationalisms and nations, is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To mold national consciousness, historians and other intellectuals in each modern European nation-state have composed an official history that insisted on the historical continuity of the corresponding nation since ‘time immemorial’, meaning at least the Middle Ages if not antiquity. [... read more ... ]
by Prof. Florian Bieber In the whole of South East Europe, curriculum and textbook development has been on the rise over the last decade. The different South East European states have thereby undergone specific, but at the same time comparable processes. With regard to the textbook development today, differences exist especially in the field of textbook regulation, where more state-regulated textbook markets as for example in Albania or Macedonia could be compared to more liberal markets in Slovenia or Rumania. Accordingly, there are also great differences in the number of textbooks: monistic textbook systems with only one approved textbook for each grade exist for example in Albania or in Montenegro, while alternative, or rather parallel textbooks are in use today in Croatia or Romania. [... read more ... ]
A Skills Exchange Workshop Public education is one of the most sensitive and important issues in minority-majority relations in Central and Eastern Europe. Schools are a primary site for the transmission of cultural knowledge and development of attitudes towards one’s own and other groups, as well as towards civil society and public life in general. Historically, this sector has been used to promote dominant ideologies. Now it is frequently marked by competing claims over who will control the education system, and specific means for implementing education rights are contested in every country. These issues are often highly politicized and have, at times, become the spark for ethno-political conflict. [... read more ... ]
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