EP Culture and Education Committee visits Sabor

Zagreb - Members of the European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education on Monday visited the Croatian Sabor where they held talks with Croatian lawmakers and government members on the implementation of the Bologna Process, life-long learning and communication between education and economy and also about Croatia's participation in the EP's fight against match-fixing.

Croatia and other countries in the region have a special responsibility to fight match fixing because this is something that disrupts sporting reputation and that is a worry for us all, Morten Lokkergaard said after meeting separately with Croatian Education Minister Željko Jovanović and members of the parliamentary committee for science and culture and the committee for family, youth and sports.

MEP Lokkergaard added that he had told Minister Jovanović that as a new member of the European Union, Croatia was expected to join the EP's efforts to stamp out match fixing.

The EP committee's Chairwoman Doris Pack told reporters that committee members and Croatian MP's had exchanged information about their experiences with the Bologna Process. When it comes to Bologna, we are encountering similar problems, she said. She recalled that the idea of the Process was to facilitate student mobility however, in some cases this is less now than previously and many students now have three years to learn what they used to have five years to do. She said that she was pleasantly surprised with a mere 2% dropout of school-age Croatian children while in the EU this is 15% and in Germany, for instance, 8%.

Ms. Pack stressed that it was urgent to improve communications between higher education and the economy, underscoring that university structures in region of the former Yugoslavia are relatively rigid and inflexible and that universities have to learn to cooperate with the economy.

Autor: Hina