What can Bosnia and Hercegovina learn from the experience of others?

According to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, "Education is natural harmonious and progressive development of man's innate powers.” I started this article with this definition as it is crucial to understand where our education systems should aim and aspire to be. Pestalozzi is known in the educational world as the pedagogue of the heart. He would say that holistic education and nurturing come only when the pedagogy of heart, mind, and hand is in place. His philosophy can be easily seen today, just in the less romanticized narrative; when we talk about competencies, we aim to develop throughout strategies of education – we talk about values, knowledge, and practice which make out competencies in different areas. In this sense, societies and countries choose different pathways through which they try to fulfill the strategies aiming for a society of knowledge, in which some succeed and others do not. How public education is financed and delivered varies significantly throughout the world. In France, education is highly centralized at the level of the national government. In contrast, in Canada, the federal government does not even have an education ministry; in the United States, education is mainly the responsibility of local school districts . Different types of educational systems allow us to make compartments and evaluate the systems' functionality so we would know how to develop the best organization that will provide what it needs to provide to its beneficiaries.

Three premises of comparison education show us how we think about our educational systems and the underlying values that global countries try to reach. One of the premises says: We are social beings who are members of social systems – we have to think about how our interactions happen inside of our small communities, like schools, but also how big communities, like countries or even, for example, unions like European Union are affecting changes that are happening on the local level in our small communities. We live in a world of social engagement - we all need to engage so we can move from the point at which we all stand right now. Some movements won’t be good, and some will, but engagement needs to happen so that change can happen too. One nation cannot act in isolation from other nations, making global and international cooperation necessary. Trying to work together on things or understanding how and why someone works one way and someone the other way gives us the opportunity to learn. And in that sense, education is a shaping mechanism of society and public membership.

Having this in mind, we will discuss different points of centralized and decentralized education systems – what are the benefits, and what are the flaws in implementing one or the other? Decentralization as a form to organize the educational system is becoming more and more popular in the world. Giving autonomy and flexibility, space for individualization, and decentralized forms of educational systems have many advocates for implementing and integrating its ways of work on institutional levels. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country that offers a hybrid model of the education system, having a partially centralized and partially decentralized educational system, and it can give a great picture of how both ways work. But it has been proven that the way the Bosnia and Herzegovina educational system is implemented does not give functional results. PISA tests from 2018 showed that every second child in Bosnia and Herzegovina is functionally illiterate. Therefore, we must go deeper to understand why some systems work or don’t. We have to go beyond the form of a centralized or decentralized way of work – we have to look at the premises of the educational system, its basis, aims, and philosophy. “Rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our all too common tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? What is the relationship between this knowledge and how it is organized and taught and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and who does not? What are the overt and hidden effects of educational reforms on real people and real communities? What can we do as critical educators and activists to challenge existing educational and social inequalities and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just?”

Regarding the above, I would like to explore the area of values. Values are one of the basic premises of every society. They shape society, but also, they get nurtured by it. The Finnish educational system is perceived as one of the best educational systems in the world. Finnish students are on top of the international comparison tastings, well-being is valued in the system, teachers enjoy high societal rankings, and quality of teaching is out of great importance. This makes a decentralized type of system look easy to implement and one that gives excellent results. Finland is one of the countries that has a decentralized educational system to the point that each school creates its curriculum that the National Core Curriculum only guides. But for this to be possible, there is a strong sense of the importance of values in the system and society. Four underlying values make the Finnish educational system the way it is: Learning, Participation, Equity, and Efficiency. These four create a functional environment for children, youth, teachers, and other educational workers to implement the teaching and learning process in a way where everyone will benefit from it as much as that individual's capacity. How excellence is acquired by equity shows that equity is such a powerful tool that can be used to support the development of individuals but by that support development of the whole country and its merits. Finns’ way of looking at things like Holistic over Academic;

Personalization over Standardization; Community (cooperation, collaboration) over Competition; Equity over Choice sets unique goals for the whole global community to look upon and to try and adapt its own cultural and state setting so it could create an educational system that could have these values as underlying values and in that way change functionality of educational systems and create a mechanism that will provide in the future functional particles of society – individuals that will be capable and excellent to participate and contribute to their local communities and work on creating a prosperous society. In one of his lectures, Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and writer, says, “the Finnish story is not a story about education but about building a successful society.”

This little insight into the core of the Finnish educational system shows what critical factors in one educational system's functionality are and what we in Bosna and Herzegovina can learn and take from. “Government reforms of class size, exam structures or private financing don’t work because they leave in place the things that actually need reform: the classroom ethos and methods, and the assumptions that underpin them.” This is why we must continue questioning the space in which education moves. To begin to answer the questions that Apple has set itself in order to find the way we want to go as a society. To learn and teach values and try to make every child find joy in the classroom because the world’s future starts right there.

About Author

Adna Sokolović

I was born in Sarajevo, where I graduated at the Department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. I began my social engagement in the Association of secondary school students in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I worked on projects that aimed to improve secondary school students' status. In the 2016-2017 term, I also served as president of the organization. I was a long-time activist of the Schüler Helfen Leben Foundation, where I also worked externally in the Youth Education sector. I worked at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo as a museum guide and educator.

I am currently working at the Center for Educational Initiatives Step by Step to further develop and manage a Community of Innovative Teachers, as well as on the other programs of the Center. My interests are related to education, focusing on educational policies, educational innovation, social situations, and arrangements that affect the growth, development, and learning of all ages. I enjoy cycling, being in nature, and spending time with friends and family.