Worrying and startling data for Serbia: 850.000

Worrying and startling data for Serbia: 850.000

At the same time, every fifth person in our country does not have a high school diploma, Blic writes.

The fact that 2.68 percent of the population in Serbia is without schooling, 11 percent with incomplete primary education, and 20.76 percent with primary education, while almost two percent are illiterate (1.96) is also devastating.

Professor of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade and andragogue Katarina Popović says for "Blic" that every year more and more people do not obtain primary education, and this is supported by the fact that we have a third of the population that has only primary school while they haven't even tried to enroll into high school.

"Those statistics improved a bit on the previous census. The total number of completely illiterate people even declined, but that is no consolation. The number of people who did not finish primary school is huge, but the number of those who finished only primary school, when you add up the data on the population that has only obtained primary school diploma is somewhere below 34 percent", she says.

According to her, andragogues classify such people as functionally illiterate leading to extremes, that is, to complete illiteracy.

"This means that in the group you have those who literally do not know how to write a single sentence, those who can read big headlines or follow a Turkish or Spanish series, to those who can cope with everyday life, but have not mastered the skill of literacy to help them improve their quality of life, because, for example, they can't read the instructions for the medicine, which I think is worrying", says prof. Popovic.

According to some research on the occasion of the International Literacy Day, Serbia entered the 20th century with almost 80 percent illiterates, and that number between the two world wars was reduced to 50 percent.

During the socialist regime, that percentage was further reduced, but even that socialist state did not pay attention to the part of the population that dropped out of primary school, and which consisted mainly of Roma and the rural population.

Also, the percentage of children with special needs was hidden and they were not sent to school, so in fact they remained, especially those who are not in the families of intellectuals, without any education.