A framework for proving mythomania

Here is a table that shows that the University of Sarajevo has fallen by 951 places in the world ranking of universities. I would say, wave. We could do well. We don't know what predictions and odds were at the betting shops on that occasion, those that are obliged to be at least a kilometer away from educational institutions, but the statistics, obviously, are not in our favor. Someone would say, well, what is 951 places lower for the famous Bosnian stubbornness, or what do they know about our education. And the truth is, it's obvious that they don't know. If a single sum of our educational decline in the last two decades were measured, or more precisely if those researchers who rank could deal with our educational system in a little more detail, they would come up with much worse data than this current decline. So, it's good, the depth of decay is never final, it can always get worse. At the time of our transition, which showed all the impossibility of facing our own face in a broken mirror after a bloody war and crimes, to at least try to understand what happened to us and why, the ruination of the educational system, more precisely its full ethno-national ideologisation and clericalization , put a final stamp on all our processes and any spark of utopian desire for a different future.

Instead of our post-war education being, above all, aimed at educating young people who will think of a better, more humane and freer world around them, and manage to draw some conclusions from the mistakes of previous generations, it was turned into a mechanism of national parties through which they continue produce nationalist rhetoric and a homogeneous national electorate. All the postulates of science, of the university as a place from which comes serious criticism and correction of social and cultural anomalies, because the university is inseparable from the social and cultural reality in which it exists, have been betrayed, and higher education institutions, like all other institutions of education, have been reduced to laboratories where blood and soil ideology experiments are carried out. More precisely, science has become a safe framework for proving nationalist mythomania, knowledge has been turned not into a weapon of questioning, critical revaluation and doubt, i.e. building an individual who thinks with his own head and believes with his eyes, but into a blind follower in the service of the party and the great leader. Which is to say that aptitude has replaced ability and that the national has taken precedence over the rational. Everything that should have warned these young people about the misconceptions and horrors that were produced in the past and encouraged them to think of a better and more just existence today and here, was actually not done. Every effort was made within the framework of knowledge and science to concrete the rhetoric of war and prevent the opening of a space of self-awareness, freed from myths about the nation and lies of patriotism.

In his book "Academic Charlatanism", professor and writer Nenad Veličković showed recently, on the example of the Department of Literature of the Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo, what actually, viewed from the immediate internal, professorial, perspective, it means when a partitocratic nationalist cultural engineering takes over the management of knowledge and science. In addition to the fact that she elevated ethno-ideology to a pedestal as an inviolable university value, thereby striving to zealously fulfill orders to create a society and culture that does not generate excellence and knowledge, but rather party and national affiliation, she also made the university a place of non-science, bureaucratization of knowledge and its failure as a platform for building a different and more successful society. What Veličković shows in his book, although he only deals with one department, is easily applicable to all other departments of all our universities. This book, meticulously and consistently compiled, with an abundance of data and documents, clearly and unequivocally shows how low we have fallen in terms of education. And how much damage has already been done is immeasurable. Above all, we are deprived of knowledge, that which encourages man to think outside the narrow glasses of ideological consciousness.

Of course, Veličković's book, as well as the drop in the university's rating, which is only the tip of the iceberg of the overall state of education in our country, did not and will not cause any wider social and political alarm. No one, but no one really cares about that. The ethnic partitocracy is peaceful, it has installed its octopuses in the universities that manage all the processes and continues the educational indoctrination through them unhindered. The little civic consciousness is amused by its miseries, so there will not be any wider polemic about why it is, what it is, to be honest, education in Bosnia and Herzegovina. More important than that is what Kolinda had for breakfast this morning and whether, if her stomach is not digesting well, she will throw out some more of her political incitement on this earth. Yes, we need to defend ourselves from all our neighbors' feelings, but what about the internal ones that we encourage ourselves and that suffocate, drown and destroy us? Wait?

Liberation