Some worrying portrayals of the youth of the region emerged from participants in a panel discussion at the Sofia Forum on the Balkans on June 9 2012. At the same time, one key theme raised by panelists was the importance of educational reform.

The discussion was entitled “New Age? Youth and Europe’s future” and was intended to address a number of issues, including how the leaders of tomorrow could be engaged in today’s pressing debates on the future of Europe and the region.

Srđjan Bogosavljević, director of Ipsos Strategic Marketing in Serbia, showed the results of a survey done in October 2011 in Western Balkans countries, a region of 23 million people, 700 000 mixed marriages and seven nationalities. The survey measured attitudes on various issues among two categories of people, those who were aged 20 in 1991 and those aged 20 two decades later.

With the exception of young people in Croatia and Kosovo, most 20-year-olds believed that their parents lived better than they themselves did now.

There was lots of mistrust among the various ethnic groups. An extremely small number of people perceived the seven countries of the Western Balkans as a common cultural area, Bogosavljević said.

The younger generation was more eager to travel to the other countries in the formerYugoslavia.

On attitudes towards the EU, the survey found that those surveyed wanted to travel to all EU countries and most supported their countries joining the EU.

In just

two countries, Macedonia and Serbia, was there the view that there was still some potential for new conflict in the area.

Overall, the picture that emerged from the survey was that both generations idealized the Tito area, including the younger generation that had not lived through it.

Slobodan Đinović, co-founder of the Centre for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies and the chief executive of Orion Telekom (Serbia) said that on issues of education, the countries were lagging behind tremendously.

Jan Zlatan Kulenović, executive director of the Youth Information Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that many youth were disoriented and marginalized.

He expressed deep concern about the educational situation, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that country, Kulenović said, there was no link between education and the labour market.

“The education system is producing trash,” Kulenović said. Learning was by rote, which was no longer relevant in the age of Google Search. There was a lack of cultivation of critical and analytical thinking, which among people in the Balkans was “at a very low level”.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the school dropout rate was 25 per cent.

Education was not only producing trash but also “very large nationalists”, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Kulenović expressed concern that in 54 schools in that country, there was complete segregation between ethnic Serb and Bosniak children.

He suggested that low levels of education suited political elites, because this meant support for populist parties and politics.