THE PROBLEM

The educational policy of Bulgarian central and local authorities towards the ethnic and religious minorities has followed an assimilationist line from the early sixties to the late eighties (1989) of the XX-th century. Since 1990 some changes were introduced in favor of the cultural rights of the minorities. They were focused on the mother tongue training. In the new Constitution of the country (1991) the right of this training was proclaimed, and in the Law for national education from 1991 it was formulated more concretely. However, beside this right, no other normative changes were made in the direction of respecting cultural diversity by the Bulgarian educational system, except for giving the opportunity for some minority children to get a one school year preparatory training before the first grade – in order to improve their Bulgarian. The only people, who are officially entitled to deal with these issues on behalf of the state, are the experts in the respective languages (Turkish, Roma, Armenian, Jewish) at the Ministry of Education and Science, as well as in some of the regional governments. Some progress was made after the adoption by the Government (under NGO pressure) of a Framework Program for the Integration of the Roma in Bulgarian Society (April 1999), as a result of which an experimental Project was started for the replacement of the de facto segregated Roma schools by a system of distributing the Roma children among the mainstream schools. However, this initiative is being realized exclusively by NGOs, and is financed from international funds. The state educational administration remains passive as before with regard of the problems of minority students. Consequently, the problem that this policy paper addresses is the “conservationist” attitude of Bulgarian authorities towards the matters of minority education. The initiative, which will be recommended, will aim at opening a conceptual space before the educational administration by offering a more acceptable from an “etatist” point of view pattern of intercultural education, without sacrificing the latter’s effectiveness.

Initial assumption of this paper: the reluctance of the Bulgarian educational administration to commit itself to a more active intercultural education policy is due greatly to concerns related to the danger of making large scale mistakes. There is actually no experience in the country in specialized intercultural education. Besides, the political sensitivity of minority issues in general makes the educational authorities very cautious and unwilling to make radical steps in this direction.

OPTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION

1. To preserve the status quo, doing nothing special about the problems of minority education. This option has the advantage that no one will be personally responsible if the situation deteriorates substantially in some respect. The basic shortcoming is that in this way the educational system reproduces and increases the alienation between the minority ethnic and religious groups, on the one hand, and mainstream society, on the other. If we take into account the shifting of the demographical balance in favor of the minorities, this postponing of the state’s tackling of the problem increases the latter’s scope progressively, so that a future catastrophe is becoming more and more probable.
2. To introduce into the curricula elements of intercultural education on culture-general basis, i.e. working against ethnocentrism and prejudice; raising of culture-awareness; improving the competence about the Others’ cultural customs and traditions. The advantage is that the risk of achieving results, which jeopardize the peaceful relations between the ethnic and religious groups. The shortcoming is that in this way the most dramatic problems of the minority children at school (such as the unattractiveness, the “intransparency”, the irrelevance to their basic life-problems of school reality) will remain unresolved. The intercultural education, which is built solely on culture-general basis, would serve as an alibi for the educational authorities (that they are doing their best in this respect) and would mislead the general public that the problems of minority children have roots outside the educational system and a different agenda of resolving these problems is needed.
3. To supplement the culture-general methods by radical changes in the educational system in the direction of developing specialized methodologies to work with the different ethnic and religious categories of students (i.e. – to use different educational instruments in the education of Roma-Christian, Roma-Moslem, Bulgarian-Moslem and Turkish students). The advantage of such an approach is that the specific educational needs of these categories of students will be addressed. The danger is that this would lead to a segregationist system of working with minority children. The more distant history of minority education in Bulgaria can present precedents of special schools for Roma children, which had the task to prepare them for low skilled work places, giving them an education that was of second quality per definition. A segregationist approach would be also quite unacceptable in a political perspective.
4. To supplement the culture-general methods by an individualizing approach to the concrete groups of students, which takes into account their specific needs, without using large-scale categorization, i.e. without creating prerequisites for educational segregation. This option is being considered in more detail below as subject of the policy recommendations.
5. Regardless of the options of resolving the basic problems of minority education in Bulgaria, there is an unquestionable necessity of taking urgent measures for improving the education of Roma ghetto children. This is a matter of a separate category of recommendations further.

It would be helpful in this situation to work out an individualizing approach towards the concrete schools and even classes with minority representation (as an alternative for a generalizing approach, developing specialized methodologies for working with the different ethnic and religious categories of students). Such an individualizing approach should be applied both in identifying the educational needs and in using educational materials and training techniques, adequate to these needs.

This approach should by no means be oriented towards “dissolving” the cultural (ethnic, religious) identities of the minority students by treating their culturally specific educational needs as only a part of the complex needs of a culturally heterogeneous school or class. The individualizing methodology includes as its important component specialized working with children from one or another ethnic or religious category – e.g. on lessons in mother tongue, or out of the compulsory lessons, which is possible within a full-day training (the latter, unlike the predominant in Bulgaria half-day training, gives more opportunities to work out of the strictly programmed compulsory lessons). My specific methodological claim here is that this specialized training is “tuned” a posteriori to the actual needs of the children from the respective cultural community, which are determined in interaction with their concrete social environment.

The sociological survey has demonstrated that the response of the children from ethnically and religiously heterogeneous schools to questions, concerning their cultural attitudes, was determined more by the concrete configuration of their social environment, than by their belonging to the respective ethnic or religious community. (For more detail see the Research Paper.) This is an argument in favor of the following recommendations. (There are indications that the comparative documentary research in Greece and Macedonia that is planned as one of the further activities of the Project will support this position too.)
 
 

Level A (general):

• working out a questionnaire for identifying the specific educational needs of the concrete groups of sudents (classes) with ethnic/religious minority representation
• working out a resource package of educational materials for all the identified educational needs – the application of the appropriate part of the materials will depend on the concrete diagnostics of the educational needs of the concrete class.
• working out a strategy for building a social environment at school, which is culturally friendly for the minority students

• combating the striking communicative deficiencies among the ghetto Roma children:
• wider introduction of the preparatory (before the first grade) year for minority children, with emphasis on communication training.
• wider introduction of full-day training for minority children (additional work after the compulsory lessons)
• special measures for the motivation and qualification of the teachers, who work with minority children
• appointing of psychologists at the schools with problematic minority children

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES

The possible sources of resistance against the proposed policy changes are as follows:

• the deficiency of material resources. In the recent years an automatic response by the educational authorities to all initiatives for change is that the budget money available is barely enough to support the system such as it is. A possible counter-argumentation can be developed in the direction that saving money in the field of education now can bring about wasting much more money later, to repair damages, if a social catastrophe, conditioned by the inadequacy of the education of minority children, breaks out. Besides, a possible strategy to bypass the resistance of the educational authorities in this respect might be to provide non-government (private, international) funds for experimental small scale introduction of the proposed educational methods. If they demonstrate their effectiveness in a convincing way, this could be a decisive argument for the changes.
• The inertness of the teachers and the administration. Such as the human resources in the educational system are now, it is quite difficult to expect from them a positive reaction to the introduction of qualitatively new methods of work with minority children. A possible tool to overcome this obstacle might be to develop a system of stimuli – in the respect of increased pay, of attractive forms of post-graduate education, of improving the career opportunities – for teachers and administrators, who take active part in the changes.

A negative attitude of the general public. This is possible as a result of political concerns (e.g. that a too great attention to the education of minority children might trigger a “chain reaction” of escalating demands by the minorities for more rights and privileges not only in education, but in all fields of social life). A possible preemptive strategy against such a reaction might be a campaign to promote public awareness in this field, including also minority NGOs and political representations. More general methodological and world- view elements, such as the values of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue might be helpful in this respect.

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