Montenegro

In 1999-2000, a reported 31,817 students were enrolled in secondary schools covering 4 grades of general education in Montenegro (9,109 students in general education programs and 22,708 students taking 2-, 3-, or 4-year vocational programs, including part-time students). Art schools, apprentice schools, and teacher training institutes also exist at the secondary level in Montenegro. The balance of general versus vocational secondary education in the FRY as a whole has been somewhat different than in Montenegro. In 1996 nearly 56 percent of upper secondary students in FRY followed general courses of study while 44.3 percent were enrolled in vocational and technical programs. In the 1999-2000 academic year, secondary schools in Montenegro numbered 44 central schools and 1 branch school, all of them public. Twenty of the central schools provided general education and 24, plus the 1 branch school, offered vocational instruction at the secondary level in Montenegro. With 2,321 teachers providing secondary instruction, class sizes ranged from fewer than 10 students per class in some villages to an average of 30 to 40 students per class in towns. Vocational schools also had significantly smaller student to teacher ratios because of the fairly common practice in Montenegro of hiring a variety of teachers with special expertise in various vocational subjects, even when relatively few students sought training in particular vocational areas.

In the 1999-2000 academic year, 52.5 percent of secondary students in the FRY were female. Gender-related educational statistics for Montenegro were not readily available. Gross enrollment ratios at the secondary level in Montenegro were also rather difficult to estimate, as different information sources provide widely varying estimates. This is perhaps due to diverse methods of categorizing general and vocational secondary school programs.

At the general secondary level, curricular changes in Montenegro in the mid-1990s included new mathematics and philology gymnasium courses. The need to revise history textbooks was highlighted at the start of the new millennium by certain reform-minded individuals who found history instruction in Montenegro to be overly biased in a Serbian nationalist direction. Apparently history texts in use in Montenegro gave interpretations of historical events such as the war in Bosnia and the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with a decidedly Serbian ethnonationalist slant; thus, they stood in dire need of revision so as to promote a more accurate depiction of Balkan history. In 1999 a new art curriculum was adopted in Montenegro for vocational education at the secondary level, and curricular changes were introduced in the secondary communications school with new subjects added. Changes also were made in the content of computer courses.