Diversity education is implicitly part of general school curricula in Croatia and is mainly administered by the educational policy making bodies at the national level. Intercultural education is taken as an important element of school curricula in those areas which were occupied during the Homeland war and where there is a special need to build an inclusive education system. However, there are still divisions in these territories and the implementation of the minority educational programmes result in divided classrooms and pupils of Croatian and Serbian nationalities in cities such as Vukovar. Although this is an implementation of the national minority rights regulations (see chapter 2.5.4), everyday life presents obstacles for developing diversity education programmes. Initiatives that put focus on building multicultural and intercultural educational models have not had much success. One example is the experimental Intercultural School that was built with the support of the Kingdom of Norway and which was supposed to start with its programme in the city of Vukovar in the school year 2018/2019, but has not open its doors to pupils not even in 2021 when it became the COVID infirmary. The government of Croatia had to return the money invested by the partners from Norway.
NGOs play an important part in developing programmes related to intercultural education, building awareness on the importance of diversity education and tolerance whether in the format of workshops, seminars, festivals of different types of educational programmes. One can mention organisations such as the Centre for Peace Studies and the GOOD initiative that have been raising these issues and especially advocating for the development of the civic education curricula that includes implementation of diversity education.
Comments are closed.