SAFER learning in Sarajevo schools: Mad, confused, postnormal

By: Nenad Veličković/Školegijum

At the beginning of the last week of 2023, a strange, confusing, and disturbing publication of about seventy pages titled Towards SAFER Learning: Reforming Kindergarten, Primary and Secondary Education in Sarajevo Canton appeared on the website of the Ministry of Education of Sarajevo Canton.

Citizens should be concerned due to the lack of transparency and the quality of the content, and the University of Sarajevo should question why it has been humiliated in this way.

The publication is the product of group violence against language and transparency, involving three wise men from the West, the Mulalić Foundation, whose role and motives are unclear, and NIP minister Naida Hota-Muminović. (This about the three wise men is a convenient remark, as the publication coincided with Christmas. The citizens of Sarajevo will better understand what this is about if they imagine three Mickey Torabis claiming to cure our terminally ill education.)

The publication, published by the Ministry in Bosnian, is an unsigned translation of the document Toward SAFER Learning: Reforming Kindergarten, Primary and Secondary education in Sarajevo Canton, by Christopher Jones, Ziauddin Sardar, and Scott Jordan. The editor is also not signed, so the responsibility for the content and presentation cannot be determined for now.

The publishers of the English version are the Mulalić Foundation for Excellence in Education, Entrepreneurship and Social Activism, founded in 2022, and the Center for Postnormal and Future Studies, about which there is not a single word in the publication.

The public is not aware of why and how this cooperation came about. Why did the NIP minister decide to entrust the education strategy to the foundation of a domestic construction company, and not to the University of Sarajevo, how that decision and cooperation came about, who decided that the cure for the abnormal is postnormal, we might hear during the aggressive campaign that the minister announces. (By the way, watch out, teachers and media, you will be responsible if something goes wrong!)

In short, the authors are renowned futurists, proponents of so-called future studies, which have emerged from the solid and healthy tree of postmodern relativism. Therefore, they think about science in a charlatan way, sometimes with respect, and sometimes with suspicion, grinding concepts of (non)linearity, chaos, center... into their safer-stew. The style of the entire publication is saturated with phraseology that impresses mediocrities. To be fair, the discussion with professors Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar (hereinafter MGB), based solely on this translation, is not fair. It is difficult to distinguish what is original fog and what is translation smoke. When you read "upkos sve većim neznanjem" (despite growing ignorance) instead of "upkos sve većem neznanju" (despite the growing ignorance), you suspect that Srećko Šojić did the proofreading. Is "education" really written with a lowercase "e" in the title of the English original, or did God's hand intervene here, to show on a symbolic level how much the Ministry of Education values education.

Be that as it may, the main theses can be reconstructed.

The publication begins by sowing fear and panic. The future is uncertain, the world is a threat, it is necessary to secure oneself, and this can only be done through SAFER education. We are threatened by gray slime, chaos is multiplying, and contradictions are abundant, sophisticated bullying is the cause of the increasing number of teenage suicides, and the current education system does not adequately serve our students, leaving them unprepared for the challenges of the twenty-first century. Let it be noted for now that examples of threats are used only from the so-called Western world (USA, EU), where ethics is a victim of industrialization, while the feudal side of the world is not mentioned.

The authors then describe the educational strategy for the 21st century developed by UNESCO, which is beyond reproach. But then, with a magic trick (it is not said for nothing in the publication – the magic of SAFER learning!), they summarize and unify UNESCO's serious and complex content into five words that form the acronym SAFER: Sustainability, Awareness, Future literacy, Ethics, and Resilience. Whether UNESCO representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina will react to this summarization and appropriation, which in all likelihood resembles leaving a cuckoo's egg in someone else's nest, when they return from vacation, remains to be seen.

Well, since this postnormal situation continues, while the present extends into the future, and the waves of change are washing over us, without an adequate replacement for what follows, and tsunamis, storms, and earthquakes are coming, we have no choice but to adopt SAFER, with whose help we will navigate to the desired future.

One would expect to read somewhere in the publication where SAFER has been accepted and incorporated into law worldwide (as is expected here!) and with what results it is recommended to us. But this cannot be known, because futures are numerous. In other words, whether SAFER works or not, we can only know in the future.

For Torabi, a few years after he left with a profit of 100,000 marks from ticket sales (we don't know what his success was in selling water), we could determine how many terminally ill people he actually cured. But this future with tsunamis and gray slime and the COVID virus that still inhabits animal reservoirs is a bit further away than a few years. In a word: there are no guarantees. But on the other hand, we read in the publication:

To overcome the difficult-to-reconcile aspects of action and perception, the education system of Sarajevo Canton may have to take a step into the unknown as a path to desired transformation.

What do we need futurists and magic for, for a step into the unknown?!

But the matter, it seems, is settled.

For preschool, primary, and secondary education in Sarajevo Canton, the way forward is to embrace the vision and policy framework of SAFER learning.

Who claims this? MGB, or the NIP trio, or Minister Hota-Muminović on behalf of the Mulalić Foundation?

We invite all stakeholders to join us in implementing the elements and values of SAFER learning in society.

Can we not join?

Can we instead seek answers to the question of how and from where this scam appeared in the first place?

Why should the discussion about the future be more important than the discussion about the present, in which it is possible for a year-old foundation of a construction company to design educational reform instead of the seventy-year-old university doing it?

Why should final-year students in Sarajevo naturally care about taiga and rainforests, but not about Bjelašnica, from which apartment sewage drains into the increasingly shrinking water protection zone of the city? Why should they compost beds in the schoolyard while hectares of arable land around them are being converted into construction sites, and city lawns and parks into P+100 office and residential buildings?

How does Minister Hota-Muminović envision education on the SAFER principle of polylogue (i.e., with multiple equal participants, multicultural, etc.) if she favors only one nation, one language, one religion? What kind of inclusion is being discussed when everyone except a dozen chosen ones, who are thanked at the end of the publication (by the Mulalić Foundation?), were excluded from the enthronement of SAFER?

Will the cantonal government's prime minister publicly ask his education minister how strategic documents are adopted without public debate, or will securing the future of party seats continue to be the priority of the duo in educational policy?

Who will explain to the dozens of teachers involved in the current so-called curriculum reform for whose benefit they have been working for the past few years?

Will the rector and the Senate of the University of Sarajevo comment on this, and how many of at least fifty full-time professors expert in the field of education will publicly question what they receive over 2 million marks net annually for, while the quality of life and future of the city and its citizens are decided by a small group gathered around a crystal ball?