Educators Share Ideas at Bosnia Conference

Two local educators last week attended a three-day conference in Bosnia aimed at preparing high school teachers for the upcoming elections in the war-torn republic.

Charles Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civic Education, and Jack Hoar, the Calabasas center’s director of Justice Education Programs, joined more than 60 international educators who met with Bosnia’s ministry of education and people in the University of Sarajevo’s departments of education and political science to discuss the importance of education in building a stable democracy.

Quigley said schools are key to stability because they are among the few institutions that remained open throughout the war. Because Bosnia lacks traditional civic education programs and schools are largely vocational or technical training centers, the Quigley’s center advocates a grass-roots approach to teaching democracy in the classroom.

But, Quigley said, conversations with the teachers showed the foundations are already in place.

“When we asked Bosnian teachers what rights were important to them, they echoed concepts from the U.S. Bill of Rights like freedom of press, freedom of expression, due process. They were very receptive and knowledgeable,” Quigley said.

Bosnian schools will be using educational programs developed by the center to demonstrate how constitutional democracy works.

One classroom model, called Project Citizen, is an academic competition in which students divide into groups and try to solve a government problem. When Project Citizen was used in U.S. schools, Quigley said, kids became more tolerant of people with different backgrounds.

The delegation will return to the former Yugoslavia in early May to train teachers to implement the programs in their classrooms.

“We have a real stake in securing democracy in Bosnia and getting a populace that supports it,” said Quigley. “And in Bosnia, people are desperate for peace.”