Abstract :
[en] In the aftermaths of the Cold War, the International Community adopts the objective of Education for All. Indeed, Education appears as a tool of social and economical development worldwide and supports global development. Education allows individuals to take part effectively and actively in the collective life of the society they belong to. Soon after the adoption of this objective, the war is identified as the major obstacle in the fulfillment of this objective of Education for All. The international stakeholders takes their stand in favor of the continuation of the schooling during protracted crisis and wars, what lead to the education in emergency. This education has to spread values, behaviors and attitudes that attack the roots of the conflict. An objective of peace building and conflict prevention is since added to education.
In a same temporality, the Kosovo Albanians were submitted to a segregationist policy headed by the Government of Milosevic, the Republika Srpska. This Government aims to make the Kosovo an unmixed territory, inhabited only by Serbs. Kosovo Albanians are rejected from all the state positions and state-owned entreprises. Education appears as a convergent point of the communities antagonisms and a critical issue between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The freedom of being educated in their mother tongue is denied to the Kosovo Albanians through the policy of the Republika Srpska. The Kosovo Albanians react in setting up a parallel education system, in which virtually all the Albanian children intend school from 1992 to 1998. This parallel education system can be seen as a strong element of the pacific resistance of the Kosovo Albanians and a factor of social strength.
This parallel educational system collapsed in 1998 due to the war situation in Kosovo. During this internal armed conflict, violations of the Law of war and of the International humanitarian Law are so huge that Nato intervenes through a military air campaign. This military intervention is immediately followed by a civil administration mission, the Unmik, whose mandate is to normalize the life of the inhabitants of Kosovo. Unmik is a restorative model not dedicated to the war victims. The restorative aspects for victims can be seen in the reinstallation of the Kosovo Albanians as full-right citizens.
When arriving in Kosovo, Unmik faces two systems of education. Unmik’s first objective is to rebuild a unified education system in Kosovo. Along with objectives of democratization and modernization of a system inherited from a communist model. This intervention is an opportunity to promote and support peace education and conflict prevention through education, in echo with the latest international provisions on education. To achieve this objective of peace building and conflict prevention through education, the pedagogical methods, the contents of teaching and the structure of the education system has to be reformed and restructured.
My work aims to explore the reconstruction process of the education system in Kosovo and the operationalization of the provisions that turn education as a tool of peace and conflict prevention, in the primaries schools of Prishtina. My approach is qualitative, inspired by the systemic perspective. The aim of this research is not to evaluate the results of the new Kosovo education system. This work is designed to explore the process of this post-war reconstruction, and to understand how international provisions come within this process and are effectively implemented in the primaries schools.
The research question is on the present survival and effectiveness of these provisions in the primaries schools of Prishtina. This work was done first by a confrontation between a corpus of international normative texts on education and a legislative and normative corpus of local texts on education. This first step was dedicated to the selection of the special provisions relative to education as a tool of peace building. It appears that Civic Education and History are the two main teachings in the broadcasting of elements that helps to create a social cohesion. The tools for the data collection were based on the elements selected through this bibliographical research, as the analysis table of the empirical datas. Standardized questionnaires has been completed by teachers in History and Civic Education, and by Directors of the primaries school of Prishtina. Interviews with Kosovo people who were involved in the rebuilding process of the education system were carried out.
The results highlights that International Community massively imposed this new model of education, what is visible through the identical profiles of all the schools that participated to the research. It appears that such an intervention is limited by the specificities and the reality of the Kosovo, which were not taken into consideration enough to make this new education system fit well to the very specific aspects of Kosovo. The question of the adaptability of such a model, created out of the Kosovo and without sufficient rely on the local population, is raised through this study. Indeed, the actual education system in Prishtina faces huge challenges in terms of equipment, funding and space. These challenges were not met by the Unmik’s work and are still existing, when the legislative and normative frame is continually developed in respect of the international developments in the matter. Indeed, fundamental education has to be a way to get competencies leading to a democratic citizenship, instead of a way to acquire only school basic knowledge. The potential in peace building and conflict prevention of the present education system in Kosovo is not able to be fully developed. If all the international provisions are well translated into the local provisions and operationalized in the primaries schools, the system has reached its limits and is not able to overcome its numerous challenges. Moreover, there is still two independent systems of education in Kosovo, and the education dedicated to the peace building and conflict prevention reaches only children intended schools of the official system. Serbs children are still educated in the same perspective than during the war. In a long terme perspective, the Kosovo education system will not be able to produce the expected outcomes. This contains risks of resurgence of the conflict.
