“BALKAN” HISTORY WORKBOOKS OR HOW TO OVERBURDEN CROATIAN STUDENTS UNNECESSARILY
“BALKAN” HISTORY WORKBOOKS OR HOW TO OVERBURDEN CROATIAN STUDENTS UNNECESSARILY

Summary/Abstract: The author reviewed the so-called "Balkan" History Workbooks (their Croatian edition). They are collectivelly entitled Teaching Modern Southeast European History – Alternative Teaching (in Croatian: Nastava suvremene povijesti jugoistočne Europe – Dodatni nastavni materijal). The author concluded that all four workbooks would not provide a welcome supplement to the educational material for teaching history in Croatian schools but instead an unnecessary additional burden for already overburdened students. Furthermore, these workbooks show that the intention of creating an artificial “collective” history of an artificially conceived region can only yield dubious and inferior results, at least in the case of forcibly “shoving” the Croatian territories into such a framework. There is no doubt that Croatian history cannot be considered in isolation but it must be studied within the context of the historical development of the European region to which it actually belonged. This is primarily a Central European context, i.e. students should become better acquainted with the history of the countries and peoples with whom Croatia actually shared a collective fate.

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