That uncle Damir and SD will honor you with a couple for five

I saw the movie "Conan" some 30 years ago in a cinema in Nikšić. I traveled from Podgorica by train, the speed and interior of which were the closest to what I had seen in westerns. After the screening, a new friend took me to a champita at a pastry shop, and then back to his parents' apartment.

I could choose where to sleep on the bunk bed. Out of politeness, I chose the first one, because I realized that choosing the second level would disturb the host's routine. We learned how to be both a polite guest and a polite host.

And I was an honored guest of that family. Contestant at the national level of 8th grade students in the subject of history, runner-up at the municipal level in Bijelo Polje.

Students from the school hosting the competition, who had the conditions for it, hosted us who came from other municipalities.

Back then, we didn't go to hotels with food of questionable shelf life and origin.

At that time, teachers, principals, and ministers did not promise diplomas and "thick" books with kitschy dedications for prizes, nor trips to competitions.

Nor did anyone back then offer us 1.000 euros for a prize and declare us talents, as the Ministry of Education and Minister Damir Šehović is doing now through the Quality and Talents Fund competition "For excellent five".

Simply, we liked some subjects, and participating in the competition was a matter of prestige in itself.

The decision of the Ministry of Education to motivate children to engage in science by rewarding them financially could only have been made by someone talentedly stupid or someone talentedly reckless and rude.

What is talent anyway?

Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Mark Zukeberg…. they would not be talents because they did not fit the molds of the educational systems.

Maybe they would get funds from Minister Damir's Fund, if they were members of the student parliament. Because that is also one of the criteria for awarding the award.

The more paperwork, confirmation of some school and extracurricular activities and alleged successes, the more chances for mud, for fulfilled and unfulfilled promises with hope left for the next year. And as many people as possible in the award committee.

And at the head of the committee is academician Ljubiša Stanković, who in the world of science might have achieved what Dejan Savićević did in the world of football if he had not been hindered by another fund - the housing fund.

However, he is not the only one from part of the materially insatiable community, which they call academic and educational, who is silent on the idea that children are rewarded financially.

Just as they are silent on the criteria according to which, for example, art schools are treated differently compared to others, so some lecturers whose students applied for prestigious international awards for last year's competition had zero points, and some of the students were not talents. According to Damir's competition.

Minister Damir likes to show off in this year's campaign "For excellent five" whose visual solution, with changed colors compared to last year, reminds of a national competition in some martial sport.

Perhaps the experience of the previous year, when there was not so much noise, tells Minister Damir that there will be low blows between ambitious parents and the teaching staff, which he will judge.

If Damir, by any chance, was a minister in Sweden, he would cast the Nobel committee in the shade.

When everything is going well.

Otherwise he would hide in the seven holes.

As he did after announcing that he would introduce identical t-shirts for all children, although he must have known that Dacian uniforms in schools in the West represent a sign of belonging to a group, not an act of equality.

Just as he hid after the scandal involving the plagiarism of part of Croatia's educational program. And when they were already rewriting, they could have taken the part where teachers are classified into salary classes, where those who attend specialist courses and whose students continuously win awards have consistently higher earnings than those who read the last book at university. Just as he hid after promising that school principals would not be elected on a party basis, schools became SD's voter base.

Or, as he hid from the question of how he, as a member of the Government's Commission for Housing Affairs, was to grant himself an apartment on preferential terms.

Finally, let's get back to the most important thing.

Has the minister consulted psychologists about the idea of ​​rewarding primary and secondary school students financially? Is there such an example in Europe or perhaps in the world and with how many (failures) did such an experiment go? How will those children look at the world tomorrow? Is that how new sinecures and appanagers are built?

Isn't it better to organize camps where children with the same interests can spread knowledge and exchange ideas through socializing? Or, to pay for those children and dedicated lecturers to study trips to, say, Slovenia or Austria, to see how they work in the schools there? Or allocate that money to furnishing cabinets in which teaching aids and equipment have long been for antique stores, and how children could acquire practical knowledge in adequate conditions? Or…

The relevant minister should know that it is not the same when a relative gives money to children for excellent results or an A, and when the Ministry of Education does it through a state project. According to the system, uncle Damir will give you a high five.

You should not see things with your own eyes.

If part of the teaching staff is interested, the children are certainly not interested in whether Minister Damir is trying to reserve a new mandate in the Government or the congress of the SD, where the president of the SD will be elected in January. This current one could go to the ambassadors, when the Prosecutor's Office is already preventing him from going to prison.

The media hype and noise surrounding this year's contest points to one thing - "For an excellent five" is not just stupidity, but serious insolence.

The memory of Konan and champita, the feeling of independence and prestige, I wouldn't trade for 1.000 euros, or for the position of head of the SD.

Both parents and children who live in, as Minister Damir rightly noted, a time of a distorted value system, should be aware of such things.