In Belgrade, in an elementary school, a class teacher, whom we will call the teacher, wanted to organize a visit to the Pedagogical Museum next Saturday for her Thursdays, and informed her parents about it.
She explained to them how they would get from school to the museum with the children, told them which streets they would take and which lines of public transport they would use. In the middle of the board, she wrote the word "ROUTE" as a title, and then wrote down the names of the streets, crossings secured by traffic lights, and even the route of the city bus.
The parents were in favor, and apart from a few jokes about "they are not interested in the museum", and one question "is that the museum with Ratko Mladić written on it", there were no other reactions.
Two or three moms went to a nearby cafe to chat after the parents' day. Their main topic was, naturally, the teacher. They were not happy with the paleness of her face because "she would have to use powder", the choice of high school for her son, and they mostly focused on her vocabulary.
In particular, the word "route" bothered them. Except for the title of what she wrote on the board, the teacher, if the aforementioned mothers are to be believed, used that word at least ten more times in her presentation.
Moms agreed that the word can have a negative effect on their children.
Namely, route is a word that is often mentioned these days in the context of Europride, and they know that suggestion has a strange power, that it can initiate anything, including the sexual orientation of their children. One of them even knows that her best friend's sister became a lesbian only because her father treated her like a man.
The mothers concluded that they had to react immediately, in order not to remove the impending danger from their children.
First they analyzed the problem. Is the teacher a lesbian? No, she has a husband and a child. Is she an authority on their children? Yes, they love it, and they often quote it. Why does the teacher use a word from the Europride dictionary? Because it is subject to influences. Those influences are not positive, but on the contrary, they are negative for their children. And that in many ways: they come from the West, they are against the family, and therefore against society.
They decided to send an initiative to the director of the school and the Ministry of Education proposing that a commission be formed at the state level that will control the vocabulary and everything else that educators influence on the formation of the personality of their students.
Until then, he will first warn the other parents about the teacher, and then he will talk to her about it and warn her to be careful what she says in the future.
The protagonists of this story, there are four of them, are in their late thirties, university educated, and well off.
Read daily news, analysis, commentary and interviews at www.vreme.com
