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Stereotypes in New Serbian History Textbooks

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worfdi' where all the great shocks in the world start and end. This creates a distorted picture about our position and role in the world, which may lead tó eironeous political conclusions. In the textbooks for the lowest grades of primary school that picture is even explicitly suggested, at the expense of historie facts. I will mention only one example. Writing about the Koluba-ra and Cer battles between the Serbian and Austrian-Hungarian armies, the author of the 3rd grade primary-school textbook wrote: “These battles bet-ween ihe Austria-Hungary and Serbia marked the beginning of World War I”. T-his is an obvious factorgraphic mistake, because the First World War started in the first days in August 1914, while the Cer battle took place bet-ween 12 and 20 August, and Kolubara battle not until December 1914. But whatr is morę important than the actual mistake is creation of an impres-sion that the Bałkan area is fatal and largely decisive for the course of world evente*

Ethnocentric images about one's own people become a particular problem when their history in the textbooks has to be incorporated in the history of peoples with whom we share the common ground, in particular the former Yugoslav peoples. Out of the common past, where Yugoslav continui-ty used to be overemphasized, even where it did not exist, the new, so-called war textbooks (particularly for the finał, 8th grade of primary school, publi-shed in 1993) have taken stereotypes which speak about historie antagonism between the Yugoslav peoples. At the same time, they are not incorporated into the always complex historie context and time, so that they remain witlicfut necessary historie relativization. This creates a false and stereotype understanding that what determines the history of the Serbian people are itscónflict* with the neighboring peoples. In this way, education also helps to support the prevalent political thesis that these peoples cannot live toge-ther. In addition to absence of broader historie knowledge, which would place these conflicts (which indeed are a historie fact, but in no way sole and deci-sive) in the balanced environment of the historie totality, such presentation of the past conceals all those profound integrating processes that connected these peoples and unfolded parallel with disintegrating processes. Conseąuent-ly, thtse textbooks fail to mention those historie personalities that in the Serbian political thought adrocated the theses about necessity of closer linking of the Yugoslav peoples sińce the 19th century, or any of the institutionalized movements which aimed at such cooperation.

History indeed confirms that relations between the Yugoslav peoples, particularly Serbs and Croats, in the past were manifold, contradictory, abounding in integrating and disintegrating processes. That is the way they should be presented to the students. But our new textbooks lack the necessary balance. History of the Yugoslav peoples is reduced only to disintegrating dimension. One should also mention that the methodological pattem of the textbooks is deeply positivistic and traditional, so that with such facto-graphic approach the entirety of the social life is limited to a seąuence of a frightening number of events, which inevitably fali in the political sphere. The entire past became political past. Such methodological procedurę ad-ditionally hampers students from realizing some morę profound processes, social, cultural and other connections that existed between the peoples in the past. Thus the picture that our students will take from the school is limited, reduced to the stereotype image of their own nation which, levitating