Starting points and motivations

 

In the countries of former Yugoslavia, classes for students with special abilities have a long and successful tradition. Today three fundamental problems characterize the teaching at the schools in Serbia: obsolete equipment, (lack of of demonstration and exercise laboratories), obsolete education concepts (ex-catedra teaching lack of problem-solving competence), insufficient motivation of teachers (small payroll). One of the results of this situation is a very small number of students in the natural sciences and engineering sciences at the university. The goal of this project is to offer a high-quality education to give gifted pupils a perspective for continuing with qualitative education and to convey initiative and enthusiasm. This goal is to be reached by the following measures:
- Focus on the natural science, in particular on physics
- Provision of fundamental laboratory equipment and PCs (virtual experiments and Internet access)
- Close collaboration with the University (Host teaching by docents, assistants and project guests, mentors from the university)
- Close collaboration with similar projects in EU and Eastern Europe
- More intensive language teaching in English.

The improvement of the education system country-wide, especially in material intensive subjects such as natural sciences, is unforeseeable today. Many attempts have been during last year taken to provide financial support for the realization of this project.

The existent grammar school curriculum often burdened with too much information has usually been making earlier specialization in acquiring modern knowledge and skills more difficult. Insufficiently interesting and updated natural sciences materials including physics, especially the manner of their being presented, as well as badly equipped laboratories, makes studying them less and less popular. Such a trend, even though it is not only with local characteristics, could in the long run have very bad consequences to scientific, technological and economical development. Independently of the student’s future vocation choice, the neglecting the natural sciences through which a specific active and closer approach to natural phenomena, professional challenges and everyday life is developed, has impoverished the creativity of the young generations and their future potentials. What can be done?