Universities used to build well-rounded citizens, complete personalities and people who would be the basis of the social community. However, this is no longer the priority of social communities, who today want to have people they can deal with much more easily. This is how Aleksandar Jerkov, a literary critic and professor of literature at the University of Belgrade, sees the situation in education, but also in society.
"We used to be the main engine of social development, and today we are a hindrance to certain ambitions that dominate the modern world," he concludes.
Jerkov came to Montenegro as a guest of the International Podgorica Book and Education Fair and the "Đurđe Crnojević" National Library in Cetinje, where he gave a lecture on contemporary literature.
He also referred to the fact that students see him as one of the most difficult professors at the Faculty of Philology:
"Legends are created about many people, and I will not build myself too modest and restrained - that is not my lifestyle. However, I'm not sure that the most important characteristic is whether I'm strict... I'm strict, why shouldn't I be, that's the real question. My view of the matter is only that I did not consent to this general leniency. So, I am what the professors used to be. What students say and what colleagues say is already a matter of legend."
How are today's students different from those of the past?
Today, students, like all of us, are a bit confused. A new era has come, new changes and circumstances have come. The university has not so much transformed as it has been shaken, as much as it is, in a certain way, under the influence of the changes that surround us. In the past, universities were the meeting place of all kinds of knowledge, today many of these knowledge are available in various places, not only at the university, and this changes the structure of the educational process.
Are you ever surprised by a student's reaction, or lack of reaction, to certain questions?
People have entered into a kind of clientelistic mentality where you are constantly worried - what about the students... Now I am going to be very brutal and I hope that your viewers will not misunderstand this - I don't really care what they think. They are part of a process and I am not there to please the students.
There is a certain quantum of humanistic knowledge that needs to be transmitted, and it is offered to them in the best sense of the word and the best that I know how. And what they think about it, how they look at it, they can express when they graduate. When they have mastered that knowledge, then I am at their disposal to lead a discussion. But until that moment, this fake, paper, populist method where you have to please the students, I find in it one of the forms of destruction of student life and devastation of what we need to exchange. I'm not an entertainer, I'm not here to please students, but I'm here to show them what ancient literature is. Who cares, it's perfect. Anyone who doesn't care would do much better to go do something else.
The students lack nothing, they are perfect. They are biogenetically better than my generation, they are also smart, shake it off, whatever you want, but deeply demotivated, confused, disoriented, they wonder what their knowledge is for, especially knowledge about literature, who else in this world needs that... Tell me we, please, do you in modern Montenegro, let's not look beyond it, when you become an excellent student of literature, do you get the quality that modern Montenegro recognizes, and then admires the fact that it also has someone who knows literature well ? 'Come on, please, he seems like an idiot, as if he wasted years of his life because he was shaping himself to be a better, finer, more complete human being. And in such circumstances, they wonder what to do.
Is it "Graduate and burn!", as we read a few years ago that a university advertised itself in Belgrade. Now imagine that, if your main idea is for a person to get any degree and go anywhere and do anything. It is a sad consequence of our histories, but also of our social wills, not to mention political responsibilities. Therefore, the students are excellent, but we are not good.
And what happens to critical thinking?
So where else do you see it? (laughs)
Critical thinking is one of the basic mechanisms of self-regulation of society. When you think critically, you internally correct what is wrong in a society, among other people and in yourself. Critical thinking means first of all thinking about yourself and trying to be better.
There was even one important social project and process in Poland during, say, its partition - self-improvement. It was the task of every educated Pole to constantly be better in order to save Poland. I think that the smartest thing we could do for ourselves and for others was to dedicate each day to being less mean than we have to be.
Is this in some sense also the main task of every future professor of literature?
You know what, I went public because it's the last exam. When you study in Belgrade, when you study literature, your last exam is Serbian literature of the 20th century. When you pass it, you become a teacher and go to schools. I look at my students and I wish them all the best in the world, believe me, not because I'm a fan, but because that's the only relationship you can have if you're a humanist. I also look at them and wonder, what will it look like when that person enters a school tomorrow where he will teach your child or mine or someone else's, and if he doesn't sound like a professor, if he slipped and fumbled during his studies, and he didn't acquired the inner qualities of a professor, I am then in the mood to ask him for two years, three years, however many years it takes until he sounds like a professor of literature. And that's how legends are made...
Who do you think are the teachers working in schools today? Is it an adequate staff?
Unfortunately not, in many cases, and we know it. It is enough to enter the assembly hall of a school, to visit some gymnasiums that used to be small universities, and which most often are no longer. Our education systems throughout the region are visibly declining, partly because they are insufficiently protected, and partly because they do not treat themselves intelligently enough. If you look at the changes experienced by top universities around the world, they are minimal.
Harvard, which is the best university in the world, has indignantly rejected the idea of anyone making any kind of reform at Harvard, period. The École, the best part of the French educational system, has undergone absolutely no changes. Selected German universities, i.e. those fifteen universities that are on the top list - no changes. Why? Because there is no need for it. Change, it's a populist coup that we experienced and in which you don't have to know everything, but stick a little here, stick a little there, and you'll be something. All of them are managers, I'm just waiting for us to create managers of philological disciplines as well. It will be the pinnacle of my profession.
People need to be thoroughly educated, they need to get to know themselves in a basic way, to get to know history, possibilities and the future. They should look at what the world was like exactly a hundred years ago, and you will see how much the world will change in the next hundred years at least. So, to be able to think about the future, you need to know how to think about the future. And you must be aware that the education offered today will not solve any of your problems. Education for one function, that obviously won't work in the 21st century. Every five years jobs die off, meaning half of the jobs you train for disappear. And if you have not been educated as a whole person, who is flexible and capable of acquiring different knowledge, you will be left without the profession you supposedly acquired in five years. And what will you do then?
We should educate citizens to be complete and educated individuals, and not teach students to be able to perform a certain function. This is a big difference in the concept of education.
What are the values on which our education system should rest?
I did not invent them, nor am I going to declare to you what those values are, but as far as I am concerned, the models of ancient, Greco-Roman education, on the one hand, and the models of education in France and Germany during and after the French Revolution gave a kind of foundations for the Humboldt ideal of an educated and versatile citizen. I don't see that we have found anything better.
Only one type of dynamism, the ability to communicate, and the idea of constant transformation of knowledge, i.e. continuous learning, should be brought into it. That you can't relax, become an expert, and then be an expert for forty years. No, you have to conquer a new field every three to five years, and if you add that to this base of classical education, you then have a model of how you can act in the modern world.
What do you think we are reading today?
We read all sorts of things. You know, people think it's read, but it's never been read more. Today you read non-stop, you cannot, if you allow me to be colloquial, buy underpants without something written on them. Text is everywhere around us, but the problem is what kind of text and what it is for. People read their phones day and night, messages on social networks, they read something, and they read a lot, but they don't read enough content and enough quality.
You can't change people. Don't get carried away. Five or ten percent of humanity will listen to the opera, Andrić and Crnjanski will be read by five or ten percent of readers, that's the way it is and it has to be. But you have to protect some kind of order of values. It cannot be the same if you read some bofl, thrash, chick-lit, and if you read the classics of world and our literature. And you will read the classics, even if you don't read them very well, if society creates some kind of pressure that it's important to read those things.
Look at the people in the public discourse of Montenegro, Serbia, and the region, and tell me when was the last time you saw real knowledge diminishing in that public discourse? That's a rarity. Even when someone tries to throw out a quote or a reference, you can see how clumsy and unskilled he is, how artificial his references are, and how someone from the cabinet slipped him a piece of paper with one sentence on it, and that he doesn't know what actually said. You can't build the world like that. The people who changed the world, who shaped the nations, were people of a lived knowledge who in that way realized something that that nation or that social community carries within itself. This kind of hackneyed cleverness and political skill, which I do not dispute, does not produce results in the long run.
What do your students read, apart from the required works?
The Faculty of Philology is one of the difficult, old faculties and they have to read a lot. I would like them to read much more freely... I am an unconventional person and very free, and regardless of the fact that I appear to you here as a creepy, totalitarian, professorial spirit, on the contrary, very few people are so inclined to the idea of freedom and free self-development as me.
They read all kinds of things, they have a lot of obligations, and sometimes they read nonsense. Once they scattered when they made me read Paolo Coelho, a few of his books that I hadn't read before. There are those, I mean. But apart from that, they read excellent literature, in Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, all these languages that we all speak or have spoken, but also translated literature.
What they read very little, partly because of obligations and partly because of these problems we have discussed, is world literature in some of the languages in which it is written.
And what about the readings, what is their purpose? A few years ago works like "The Lord of the Rings", "Harry Potter" became reading material... What do you think about that, is it good for children to read it?
I participated in that, I was in those commissions for several years. I didn't really stand out too much, I fought more as a temporary professor so that my former students, who are now professors at the Faculty of Education and other faculties, get the opportunity to say what their sensibility.
I am almost sixty years old and it would be foolish to believe that I will best understand what a child wants to read today. But my daughter devoured "Harry Potter", and I trust the child's soul more than myself, and if she devoured those books, if I had to get the book for her on the same day it came out anywhere in the world, then that's a sign at one time. To me, "Harry Potter" is meaningless, it seems to me like a kind of papacy of all possible mythical echoes, and like a kind of mythologizing of Hogsworth, which is actually compensation for everything that a person should achieve in life. You are born as Harry Potter and you just need to realize your innate, aristocratic, magical streak. But it strikes something in the human imagination. "The Lord of the Rings" is a better kind of literature, in my opinion, although it is not my literature in the true sense of the word either.
But you must not be orthodox, you must not be rigid, you must accept the point of view of the time in which you live. So there is a place where you are flexible and where you go to meet the times, but there is also a clearly drawn line that you must not cross, because once you do that, then there is nothing left for you.
Reading, therefore, should be open, should be changeable, and should correspond to one of the two world-tested models. For small nations, small states, it is often necessary to preserve a type of literary history, cultural history in reading, to shape your nation. Great nations can allow themselves not to worry about it, because through other forms of culture, people will already know it. So in Germany or France you can have a very wide reading of contemporary books, where they say it is only important that the child starts reading and loves to read. But to smaller nations, in Finland, Hungary, Poland and some other countries, it is important that you present the history of your culture, and I have researched both models and tried to introduce them into our practice.
So how can we bring reading closer to children, but also to the elderly?
I don't know, but I'm trying. You have to fight every day, it's not something you have a recipe for. Vladeta Jerotić told me once when I spoke with him that the two most difficult things in the world are managing a country and raising a child.
Elite education, attitude and moral qualities must be preserved
In recent days, a lot has been written and talked about in Serbia about the fact that the lyrics of a folk singer were also found in reading books for elementary school. How do you comment on that?
My friends who wrote those textbooks defend themselves very skillfully and elegantly. Some of those linguistic examples really stand up purely from the point of view of expert analysis. But I view with the deepest indignation any form of appearance of the cheapest layers of pop culture in anything that constitutes the educational system. There is enough stupidity around us and there is no reason for stupidity and nonsense to be tolerated here.
I am an absolute staunch elitist and am convinced that elite education, elite attitude and elite moral qualities must be developed and preserved, and no one in the world will ever convince me that we should now have a dialogue with singers and pop writers, because there are also pop writers as much as pop musicians.
Goran Petrović is a classic of Serbian literature
Is it ungrateful if I ask you to single out a writer?
It's not ungrateful, of course, I've been doing it all my life because first and foremost I've always been a literary critic and I've never hesitated to single out a writer. If necessary, I can single out two at this point. One who for me is already a classic of contemporary Serbian literature, and that is Goran Petrović, whose "Siege of the Church of the Holy Saviour" is the most significant book written in my literary and critical life.
And if I have to single out someone who for me today represents the greatest challenge and difficulty in deciding, and I think that the future could belong, if not to him, then to what is trying to happen here, it is Vladimir Tabašević and his novel "Pa kao ”, which breaks my ears, but I see in it an attempt, and even a possibility, to reverse poetics and discourse. We'll see what people younger than me say, but I think it's a serious challenge.
Bonus video:
