In recent months, media headlines have brought almost daily information about increasingly brutal forms of peer violence among minors and the aggressiveness of young people in general. For a normal society and state, such phenomena would be a warning sign for a critical review of current policies, above all in education and culture. However, instead, public policy officials at all levels, including educational ones, try to put out the fire as soon as possible, cover up the matter with demagogic promises while they are in power, because they do not want to deal with the problems and face the harsh reality. Numerous analyzes of this problem surfaced from various actors of the social scene with the intention of establishing the causes and offering solutions. Because when the cause of a problem is found and a correct diagnosis is established, the easier part of the job remains - therapy. Most actors, including government officials, see the causes in parents and their responsibility for raising children, some see the causes in the church and its influence on young people (although the church should act ethically on society and the individual!), a part of the public believes that the police are the most responsible for discipline and order in the school, others point out that all institutions of the system are responsible, etc.
However, the reasons are much deeper. Education and culture were established as the two supporting pillars of a society, and with them, consequently, the school as an educational institution and all educational institutions, and then the family as the primary form of socialization of the individual. But this did not happen by accident or by some mistake, but by the conscious intention of the ruling ideology of the past decades. Let's remember that time that still lasts and persists in the form of a kind of violence against citizens when collective identities of all shapes and colors were ignited and when we returned to our roots, historical memory and tradition. All with the aim of easier and longer rule and turning citizens into objects of manipulation and subjects of the government. And so it was. For decades, the ruling ideological system in Montenegro has imposed collective identities as the most desirable and socially acceptable behavior and as a kind of state project, especially fueling and glorifying national/nationalist identities at all levels of society as a public policy strategy and means of manipulation, control and subjugation of citizens, so that our society has become a closed collectivity, impersonal, therefore, without subject, individual, citizen and civic consciousness. Remember the beginning of 2000, when the ruling ideology systematically forced the formation of tribal associations throughout Montenegro as a socially desirable and patriotic project, so an atmosphere of lynching was quickly created, so that anyone who did not want to join their tribal association was declared an apostate of their race, tribe and country. Unfortunately, our society, which considers itself civil, still stubbornly and proudly persists on such foundations, characteristics and feelings of collective recognition and belonging to brotherhood, tribe, ethnic, national or any other group with all the prejudices and stereotypes that every such collective identity.
Today's brutal forms of violence and aggressiveness in our society, especially among young people, are a direct consequence of such and such collective identities that have their origin in exclusive belonging to a "powerful" group. In professional terms, these are the "educational" outcomes of our collective paranoia and the so-called of historical memory. Thus, the development of an individual's personality was left to the elements and in the sphere of "working on yourself", provided that you had an adequate education on the basis of which you could critically resist the violence of national and other collective identities.
The collective identities of the ruling ideology destroyed and marginalized education and culture as systems for upbringing, cultivation and emancipation of the personality, so that education has long been left without upbringing, intended only for the labor market, therefore without personality development, and culture without influence on the cultivation/socialization of man /citizen, as a commodity for fun and leisure. Hence the origin of violence of all kinds, such brutal confrontations of young people in our schools and our society, because they are a direct consequence of the neglect of these two systems - education and culture, which are most responsible for socially acceptable behavior, personality development, cultivation/civilization, or in simpler terms ( self) control, self-compulsion of behavior and instincts. All previous internal, external and international analyzes have shown that education in our schools is merely reproductive, non-functional factual knowledge, therefore without opinion and understanding, and as such does not contribute to personality development, humanization of society, the conquest of freedom, self-awareness and critical thinking. And the worst thing is that it does not worry anyone, least of all the government. The more education was reformed, each reform was worse than the previous one, and the educational function of the school became less and less, and education itself fell into greater and greater crises.
This inherited ignorant attitude towards education and culture and the new government manifests openly and to the point of banality, without any hesitation, and through its disastrous staffing in these systems, collapses the little healthy fabric and freedom. With the arrival of the new government, nothing fundamentally changed in the understanding of the values of a society, because there is no change in the value system. Universal values - truth, good, freedom, human dignity, justice, responsibility, solidarity, and especially the values of work and knowledge have been marginalized even more in favor of party loyalty and Machiavellian success at any cost. Better to say, now an even greater value/moral confusion and nihilism has been created, which are fertile ground for aggression, xenophobia, intolerance of the other and longer of all kinds. It has been clearly shown so far that the new government does not want to fundamentally change the value system, but only to replace old places and old masters with new ones, again using collective identities, primarily ethnic and national, to achieve its demagogic goals.
This brief consideration suggests that in the context of the various measures proposed in response to peer violence and in general the aggressiveness of young adolescents, it is necessary to urgently rehabilitate education and culture as reference frames for essential changes in society, for socialization and cultivation of the individual through the development and building of personality in socially acceptable behavior. Everything else that is now proposed (police supervision in schools, introduction of security guards, stricter educational measures, sanctions for parents...) is a bureaucratic-technical approach to this problem and only creating the illusion that the problem is being solved.
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